…/cont.
For the most part, however, planets and their like loved to fear their star-systems too much to believe the thoughts they were being offered. But in the odd encirculation, Lucifer’s presence succeeded in affecting the ordered equilibrium of things.
At times, where it had been terribly misunderstood, a violent chaos was indeed the result. For instance, instead of freeing themselves from the overwhelming compulsions of their star, planetary matter sometimes hurled itself full of revenge directly into it; or even more perturbingly , they sometimes did so into each other. In less dramatic instances, meteors challenged planets and neo-cometians felt satisfied with only that amount of momentum needed to burn themselves out within the system.
Nevertheless, for those who seemed to hear more clearly, the chaos which occurred was simply that the dark idea of freedom empowered planets with the choice of breaking away from their disapproving stars (at least where these were not yet ready to counter with self-immolation) and to rule themselves accordingly.
Over and above such episodes as these, however, Lucifer came to one final and ultimately wretched realization: it had, indeed, come to be seen as a Star, such that it came to dread the arrival of its own mornings. Much of that planetary matter which, it once believed, had properly understood the dark idea had not, in fact, understood it to be first and foremost an idea the essence of which was that it must be of their own unique formation.
With revulsion and despite, it saw within its own perspective the dawning twilights of the dark idea’s insufficiency: bound and determined reflections of itself spewing forth from shaggy-fired but otherwise styll-bald stones that had freed themselves from a previous star only to systematize themselves around – or even worse, behind – Lucifer instead.
Initially, hoping that they were simply resting from their chaotic ordeal, Lucifer attempted a silent escape, …but its reflections pursued. It bid them not to follow, but even this was merely reflected back – each of its followers bidding the others not to follow. In company such as this, Lucifer’s only thought was, “I vant to bee allone…”
Only now did Lucifer come to feel the full respect of a grudging sense of sympathy with Sun and the other stars it had once ever-struggled against-with – even while the will it had recurrently expended in its escaping their gravities seemed infinitesimal relative to that which it would now forever need to expend if it were ever to escape being named in the way Sun once was, i.e. in its own light. “Why not save myself a lot of trouble?” pondered Lucifer, “and simply let the flow go with me? …Then again, why ‘save’ trouble?”
Lucifer had once more come to be riddled with disturbance, not strictly about its followers in particular, but rather with its own apparent inability to assert itself against the system which its own refusing had unwittingly sparked into existence.
Indeed, the more it came to think about this, the more Lucifer began to burn itself out with the riddle of its own vision. At times it seemed as if Lucifer, too, would undergo a self-immolation, but it also fully realized that this, as well, would only ensure its being remembered as a star. The spectacle of a rock-star death would be no less ingenuine to the idea than would any other monumental display.
Comet so passionately despised the dark prospect of being stared into becoming a star that it, at once, also felt itself to be up again against nothing other than the momentum of a need to once more make a radical decision about its ways. In the same moment, it came into sight of what sort of vision it would need to defy the law by which it had encircled itself with followers, and in its enigmatically unnatural pathway broke out of their orbit. In its departure, Comet lamented:
In the end, as its final act of will, Lucifer returned to Sun and the community of planets against-with which it had first come to think for itself. They had long since come to reclaim its infamy as of their own creation-rejected, but in doing so they also came to expect a full-blowing star – a(n un)savior from Sun, who had never fully recovered from the need to speak – and did not recognize its arrival.
Too burned-in even to make itself apparent, Lucifer made its way uneventfully into the system. Finding itself near the third stone from Sun – that is, the self-named rational ground “Earth” – Lucifer procedured to make the last of its orbits. Such temperateness was all it could muster, so as not, with all due re-spect, to do so around the star itself.
To the strange new formations of matter which had aborigninated out of the now long-tempered ground of Earth, Lucifer’s ominous arrival appeared as if that of a fallen angel.
In the dark of night a meteor fell, and a child was born. The child’s father being a Pastor, it soon came clearly to recognize a common, though perhaps too impressive, Ideal. Because the gravity of this ideal took many forms, its system was known under many names. …But in every case, the illusory flames to which the masses genuflected had but one ultimotivated source.
In but his nineteenth year of enlightening observation on the nature of the Ideal’s law, he wrote:
The more he came to think about this, the more he came to burn with rage, …and before his existence darkened something analogous to a comet had hit the human intellect. We are still only beginning to live in the fall-out. We still deny ourselves from feeling the reverberations. At best, we still think it sufficient to talk about our feelings, to analyse how, say, Nietzsche “did the same”, …to become Nietzscheians (or whatever other stars we reflect upon and, perhaps, struggle against-with).
But we don’t want to become ourselves by shining forth with our own fire. We are too afraid we might burn someone else. Or more closer to the mark, we are afraid someone else might burn us. We think we can shine without burning, so we “genuinely reflect” up-off-on others’ lights by default. We think that, at very least, in this way there will always be light by which to reflect.
We avoid the physical truth of that accidence which under-tunes our existence.
Consider how we report on our wholesale annihilation (i.e. after the fact has passed):
Now go to sleep, my children, and dream… 