Above fog rummaging through the tangled darkness of forested hills, the road of souls, the Milky Way, inclines. He sees it anew. The crazed incandescence of the sky is like him, a ghost, the phantom light of a cosmos that died being born.
All of Creation wanders aimlessly after the Fall, he thinks, then recalls Merlin’s conviction that Church stories are fabrications. The Fall from Eden is a fable. All Bible stories myths.
Anything with dimensions is an illusion, that old fright used to say. Only the One Mind in its tortured unknowing is real. The rest is dreaming.
Arthur remembers a deep hour after midnight in darkest winter sitting alone with Merlin before the great dragon hearth at Camelot. They shared a cushioned settle of figured elm and the naked warmth of the fire.
The wizard, a bent and narrow old man, almost disappeared under a white bearskin and its glittering net of ruby-eyed amulets and gold filaments thin as spider threads. He gazed with cryptic interest at the breathing embers.
The king, alleviating insomnia, sipped autumn-colored wine in a crystal goblet and queried his wizard, “Does your profundity fathom creation, old man?”
“Enough to know all is one,” the wizard spoke languidly, attention vested in the fire glow bedding the hearth. “One Mind dreams our drama, our tedium, all our luck, loss, and love.”
The king swirled the goblet, and veils of Falernian wine glazed the thin glass with cringing brilliance. “What fire then illumines the One Mind: The stars? The sun and moon?”
“The greater void,” Merlin mumbled, preoccupied with teeming landscapes in the cinders. “Strange symmetry binds emptiness and the fire of Heraclitus.”
The wraith of Arthur, gazing up at the night sky, where the knife-edge of the galaxy glints, recalls how, aglow with Falernian wine, he had put into words a glimmer of Merlin’s discernment: “We are but dreams burning in the void.”