Explorations of Beauty and Decay

There is a sound unheard of before, incomplete, a tone, a signal of sorts. Psychedelic atoms cavorting up and down… and down and up… up and up again… never moving in a synchrony, rhythm has lost all its meaning.

These colorful atoms leave behind a painting as they swirl forward. A painting that speaks no word, a painting that calls for silence and death, a painting made by Theos of the Old, the mathematician who formulated the snail and the butterfly, the sunflower and the galaxy.

Ghastly paleness surrounds the painting, a soporific stench of calmness encapsulating the anemic white world. Far at a distance, a limbless woman weeps relentlessly. The tears stream out her left eye and channels into her right one, a vicious eternal circle… at her feet there is a pool of black blood and bones, a hand reaches out from the debris time and time again never to be held… alas… a limbless women still weeps relentlessly…

There are hills as well, the hills of grey stone that sing the broken songs of the wind. The Godly hills, tapered at the bottom and immense at the top, endlessly transcending into the sky. And from deep within the sky falls grey flakes of snow which sing the hill’s serenades. The words they speak, the harmony they create turns to grime and grit when the flakes crash into the endless ivory landscape… alas… the hills of grey stone still sing the songs of the wind…

A deep blue fire burns cold like the northern wind. A freezing conflagration, if there ever was one. A girl recurrently crushes brimstone in her hands and swallows it, her mouth burns and bleeds with every gulp. She spits a mouthful of blood into the smoldering fire pit and the blue flame rises beyond the heavens. The biting chill from the cold fire provides her the mitigation she needs… alas… a girl still crushes brimstone in her hands…

A naked gray man holds a blighted claymore in his seasoned hands. An eclipse breeds where his eyes were supposed to be as he makes the blade kiss a colossal whetstone turning silently like time. The place shudders cold like Niflheimr, fog makes it impossible for the man to work but he is adamant.  The kiss makes the entire white world tremble. After the tremor, the claymore shines in a glaze and the man holds the blade close to his face with elation. A single drop of tear rolls out from that eyeless face and careens down the length of the sword, blighting it once more… alas… a naked gray man still holds a blighted claymore in his seasoned hands…

A raconteur brushes his quill against a quire. He sits alone on a wooden bench, aged and withered. He fills pages after pages with illegible griffonage and runs to a mob of deaf patrons gaping the ashen sky. He reads and laughs and sings and dances around before finally taking a nod of delayed and pointless applause. After the cheering and the acclaim dies, the raconteur rises to see the mob gaping again, endlessly, indifferently. The pages in his hand have turned pale again… alas… A raconteur still brushes his quill against a quire…

“Ónýttur heili settur á brjóst
Og mataður af svefn-g-englum”

[“A Ruined brain put to the breast,
and fed by the sleeping angels”]

-      Sigur Rós