Duke University - Chanticleer Yearbook (Durham, NC)

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THE MISSION OF ENTITY 1 12-36-2848 by Jon Rogers 1. OUT OF THE GRAVE: The ship folded the huge wings it used for sailing on the solar wind and dropped into the sun like a falcon stooping to its prey. The white, purposeful air swirled and eddied and formed into shapes imaging the history of all it had known, until it transformed the ship into itself. This is the death that gives new life. The entity had shown itself an industrious and competent transducer, trapping and imbibing the light and expelling it as the superlife on which the universes feed and grow. Now it had been decided to take the Risk; Entity 112-36-2848 would become a human, born of water and of blood, pulled down by gravity yet with a dim rememberance of that white wind in the sun. The planet Earth was a rock, yet it was a living rock, waters churning across its surface in ever-changing patterns. It had produced creatures which knew nothing but the heaviest of these waters, others which lived in the shifting mantle of the clouds, and others which moved horizontally over the dryer areas of the rock. Between them all was a chimaerical creature which struggled to remain vertical, to balance the earth and the sun in its chest, neither to hate nor to love exclusively. Comically, it had a habit of stumbling over its own feet. Tragically, it would kill for pleasure and it would love so fiercely as to consume its beloved. But occasionally, accidentally, it would fine-tune itself to the vertical and in a certain movement of unconscious grace, a certain centering of the mind, it would become weightless and realise for a moment that it stood at the pivot of the Transformation, that if it wobbled the energy of the universes would be blocked. But most of the time, it wobbled, and thought it was O.K. The energy must pass through a point where it has definite kinship neither with its origin nor its goal, and this is the point of greatest danger. It must find that precise place where the parabola turns on itself. If it turns too soon, it breaks with its past, despises its earthly mission, and fills with pride. If it does not turn, it sinks into oblivion and is lost. When it turns exactly, the stars sing a richer chord. For this task, the Entity was said to be prepared. It arose from the stones of the dead and entered the city. 16