Palimpsest: a Secular Sermon
by Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker
You are the palimpsest of history.
Ancient, ancestral forms swim like deep fish beneath your skin, silverlucent whispers of genius, still young, still vital, still wise.
You are a dense collage of these stubborn forms, which were torn from nature, forged in pain, goaded by fear, and "soaked in blood thoroughly, and for a long time."
How many generations fell in fury and ignorance so that you might speak with that tongue? Time's enormous pressures hide in the rhythms of your walking, in the way your forehead ages.
Your eyes have seen ten thousand decades; these eyes that dream the algorithms back into sturdy hands. And nothing fits those hands like this world, where death bends your life's bow to make it useful.
Your face may be your father's mother's face, but your person is yours alone to make, because you've set all the categories on fire. Those are no mild Platonic forms inside you, my sister, my brother; you're not some little gnostic spark -- oh no . . .
Deep inside you'll find that the heart of your heart is a whirling fire of furious refusal to hurl against the Abyss, against the Void, against the Nothing.
You are an unrepeatable creature, an unbelievable boon barging in from the great beyond. Refusing to rest in mere potential, which was your nearly-certain fate, you bucked the incredible odds by a hair, and cashed in your imaginary number for flesh.
Nothing could predict you galumphing through from the drop edge of yonder.
Nobody could measure the power of the unstoppable Now surging through your veins.
And not even you knew what to make of that infinity machine between your ears.
Look at you! integrated convolutions of pied beauty, blooming and booming in the winding banyan branchings of the actual Tree of Life.
You are much more than virtual machines, you are the most luxurious limousines Life has used since Life Itself rose up above Nature like the golden dream of a sleeping panther -- and took off, after more Life, and even better Life, into olam l'chaim -- time without boundaries.
Mark my words, Life will dance on all Its graves.
And now you may be ready to stand up --
to be stand-up --
no longer crouching under the arched eyebrow of irony,
you may come forth to fear only no difference --
to seek your Actual Size --
to embody delight --
and to mark with honor the History that made us all.