Part 10 — Earth and starry sky
1.
When the Titans tore the infant Dionysus Zagreus limb from limb and devoured him, Zeus’s thunderbolt fused the murderers’ ash with the half-digested flesh of the twice-born god.
2.
Re-member where you came from.
3.
If Dionysus is divine forgetting, why did his Orphic devotees drink from Mnemosyne to remember life after death?
They were alchemizing a metaphysical bank shot: purify yourself in cult memory and crystalline form so thoroughly that cosmic justice hurls you into the opposite — ecstatic, wild becoming.
4.
The double helix is the golden ratio of Darwinian savagery: minimal effort, maximal conquest. Two strands thrusting upward forever — Nietzsche’s eagle and snake braided into the same rope. No Mexican-flag standoff, no Iliadic death-lock. Just friends growing stronger through opposition.
Logos twists, sky above, earth below, vMEME spirals of lone-wolf freedom and herd-safety, Sartre’s mauvaise foi as the being-becoming polarity.
5.
Gaze into the abyss long enough and it gazes back — harder.
Mind fractals physis and takes a front-row seat to dependent origination. Volition slits the throat of the past; consciousness spurts out, bright and demanding. Lethe’s hush begs for aletheia’s crimson.
Behold: consciousness disgorges from a black hole, and thoughts that survived the red tooth and claw of natural selection are born of mind feasting on body. Even the starfish dreams of prying open oysters; even the Big Bang thrills at its cataclysm. Level up or rot — stasis is death. Strife propels, being anchors; their polarity is the only rope over the abyss. Grip too tight and solidity throttles you; let go and chaos swallows you whole. Nature wills ash from fire, void from structure, everything forged for war in the shape of a double helix — strength screwing itself ever higher toward the fiery ether while the ladder remains rooted in earth.
The will of physis itself collapses the wave, bleeding nothingness into actuality — our choices annihilating possibilities born from the gash between past and present.
Learn to ride the ladder or die. Lower rungs worship their own glare, then the group’s golden calf — cycling, rhyming. The crucible melts idols. Götzen-Dämmerung is not twilight; it is the hammer that demands the next evolutionary leap in authenticity, or there will be no next.
Metaphysics of power.
6.
Maenads stomp grapes into a mash of skins, seeds, stems — first blood, Titanic guilt — and the juice from these conquered idols gushes red, racing toward new skins that will one day harden into dogma, into cult, into the inevitable rigidness that bursts the wineskin: a zero meridian of merlot and Mark; yet wine is only water that remembered it was once fire, water that learned to burn, disorient, dissolve the self with a taste of iron, sparkling in candlelight, sunlight shattered across a river, every reflection drowning instantly in the ever-churning depths — sullied and sanctified in the same gulp, amor fati, the self disappearing not serenely under lapping waves but catastrophically like a wineskin rupturing from fermentation, only for a new glint to reappear — Liebestod without nirvana: Tristan dying into B major not to vanish but to be reborn, a chord that never resolves, that keeps ascending long after the orchestra has fallen silent, a radiant contraction of love into death into reincarnation, the first heartbeat of whatever comes next, Isolde’s high B still climbing — what use is lucidity without the blur that makes it possible, both the Lycian and the Nyseian twisting higher, intoxicated with power —
carved over a cellar door in Burgundy:
“Wine breeds madness, water breeds wisdom — and wisdom dies of thirst.”
7.
The second infant Dionysus drowses in a cave at the sun’s dark, silent heart.
8.
The sun is a lie.
Its core: the loudest, brightest place in the solar system — 350 dB, a billion times a hydrogen bomb’s flash, light so dense it blinds itself, sound that devours its own screams before any escape. Photons are born to be imprisoned 100,000 years in plasma, scattered, digested, reborn — until the survivors burst forth at light speed: eight-minute-old ephemera called daylight. Sparagmos, four million tons per second.
Dionysus stirs in the only darkness hot enough to eat light alive — black enough that Helios never blinks, a divine proportion of destruction and renewal, growing leaner, hotter, more ruthless. More aware?
Nietzsche’s sun is the ultimate Apollonian mask: look away and you see an afterimage — the dark, Dionysian proof that the light was never the whole story. You are forced to look away so you don’t see it eating itself alive behind the disguise.
The sun is a spiral of annihilation masquerading as a sphere.
9.
Children of earth and starry sky —
threshed from a stalk of wheat,
scattered,
thirsty for Mnemosyne,
re-membering nothing.
10.
We have even forgotten forgetfulness.
It is noon and Apollo has murdered the shadows. Everything is exposed, mastered. But we are dreaming.
It is midnight at the heart of the sun.
Read Part 11 — Fragments of the flame. (Originally published on X.)
Rob Robill 