The Uncoiling of the Cosmic Egg

 by Shaun Lawton 

     The subconscious mind is a funny thing. Pareidolia plays curious tricks on the eye. As in this image I managed to render during the beta run of DALL*E's Outpainting feature. There's a sort of KONG like narcissus silhouette thing going on that I like.   But this is further outcropping generated randomly from the perimeters of the black and white pulp image taken directly out of a fall issue of Planet Stories, from 1946.  

   "With a soft padding of naked feet Sim's father ran across the cave."  

   Feeling very much like a creature doomed to be forgotten by time, I dig through the annals of legend and lore until I've uncovered the literary gems and poetic nuggets containing the core elements captured in a thriving interior world teeming with microscopic life in abundance. 

   Enough to satisfy my curiosity and hungry eye, the vivid illustration from the vintage Bradbury story The Creatures That Time Forgot afforded me the opportunity to fill in the missing upper left quadrant with an AI-assisted guesswork facsimile to fill in the space as best deemed fit by the parameters of the context. 

   I want to run the story as a nine part serialization in the Freezine, so the trick is generating nine (count 'em) images that could somehow justify stitching the whole thing together into a brand new presentation that more or less captures the spirit originally intended in the mid-forties. Just colorized and injected with a little post modern verve.  

   I can only imagine whatever little land-mines Ray dropped along the tributaries of his tale for those varied and sundry readers of today to tip toe around and hope not to get triggered by all that much in their carefree way.  I barely have the time left in the day while editing it all together into it's nine respective parts to read the damn thing.  This is the sort of thing I would say to Ray myself, were I to be placed in the envious spot of being his editor for some anthology or another, let's say. If I don't bust his chops whose chops can I bust, exactly?  He's the modern forefather of dreams, the minister of hysteria, the cleric of carnivals, the usher of unease and deacon of despair, the writer most near and dear to my heart since I discovered him by reading stories from the Bantam paperback edition of The Illustrated Man I'd pulled down off my parent's book shelf when I was eleven years old. 

   The blue lagoon eye portion of this rendering eerily mirrors the blues and eye-shaped outline captured on the cover of my first collection The Cosmic Egg & Other Hatchlings. It's like two eyes coming up in the slots, a third and you might cash out. These signs and sigils line up with startling ease. The whole thing's mapped out before me just as easy as you'd please. 

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Astral Menageries

 by Shaun Lawton  

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     In between portals that look like golden framed paintings (or gilded mirrors) a plethora of alternate dimensions lie in wait for those few brave and adventuresome souls lucky enough to have persisted in their respective quests that they are ineluctably led into the heart of one of these galleries spread throughout the labyrinth. 

      All manner of beings sharing a remarkable diversity of attributes assemble in these menageries among the stars, since travelers that breach these disparate domains always leave ghostly traces shed from the reverberations of their harmonic imprints, even the vaguest wisp of a memory can be sufficient to rekindle the fading flame of any lost spirit and bring it back from the dead, so to speak. 

    The very shapes of the legends themselves mimic the sigils and circumlocutions of the most eloquent scripts, casting shadows further stretched out of shape upon the screens of paranoia, known in local parlance as the human mind. Any remaining disclaimers have been rendered obsolete during the initial agreement to render a simulation as close to the real thing that could possibly be manufactured. Of course this detail so often goes forgotten. 

      The corporeal manifestation of similar attributes have been traced back to both analog and placebo root influences. In other words, every once in a while, random new species are borne through purely imaginary anatomical representation. The vectors of memory and desire coordinate in ever spiraling variations, resulting in the myriad expressions of bodily form inculcated throughout the cosmos. 

     The truth remains both congealed and concealed right out in the open, just as it always has for the treaders upon its myriad surfaces. And that's the little-thought-about phenomenon that these gilded frameworks which provide ingress and egress from polarities of alternating rivers of plasmic currents (heretofore unfathomable nor to be rendered fallible under present conditions) have a tendency to leak. 

   Considering the interlinking of systems throughout Laniakea archive under a constantly evolving set of absolute cosmic laws from the mortal perspective of incarnated beings strung through the echoing spectrum, each respective universal subset foregoes the necessity to "bail out" excess energy which results in that leakage to spill over into the subsequent linking harmonic subverse of the ever expanding system.  The circumlocutionary aria resulting becomes the song of that particular stellar season.  

    What the eye sees, the mind conjures of necessity.  From astral menageries to stellar parallaxes, the conjurations mind themselves. Deep inside the central chambers of the host of minds the grain of truth remains embedded as a long forgotten memory.  It's the knowledge that nothing is real and even the congregation of all the kingdoms of Animalia and concurrent life-enriching fauna together amount to a high-pitched fever dream relegated to the department of illusions in the bestiary of segregated fantasies. 

    Let reading this passage be a reminder that we're all wandering conjurers of phantom images lost together in an unfathomable labyrinth which serves as a gallery of paintings and mirrors we not only may step through and into the respective worlds they reflect but more to the point just by gazing into them we remain the dreaming specters of life itself manufacturing our world to explore so that we may get lost in our dreams repeatedly over time. 

     Simply differentiate the many little sleeps and excursions which spill over and seep into the bigger cat naps taken across an expansive life of adventure that keeps delivering us to the next level of this rising river running the course of time itself woven among the starry constellations that lie beyond not just our sleepless nights and restful days but wide open before us as an invitation to keep on exploring this endless gallery of treasures and opportunity for the rest of our lives.