The Marriage of the Living Dark

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Why was I so frightened in my dream that I awoke? Did not a child carrying a mirror come to me?

“O Zarathustra,” the child said to me, “look at yourself in the mirror!” But when I looked into the mirror I cried out and my heart was shaken: for I did not see myself, I saw the sneer and grimace of a devil.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1885 the father of lies

The bee climbed the outside of the flower’s bell, lifting and dropping in the air, its jointed legs grasping the rim, the flower swaying beneath its weight, its delicate, translucent wings half-raised in balance. Ben watched. Close by, only inches from his face, the flower gaped, blood red above the rich, dark green of its leaves. Its scent was sweet, intoxicating. It had drawn him as inexorably as the bee. His hand, outstretched to touch, had paused and now rested near the flower’s base, almost cupping the petals. Leaf shadow fell across his hand, moving gently with the wind’s movement through the branches of the tree above, forming a gauze upon the fair, hairless skin. He glanced up, hearing music. A haunting Dowland melody. Lute and voice. Sighing, he looked back. The lawn was damp. Moisture had soaked through the thin material of his trousers. He watched the bee pull itself up onto the flower’s rim, then tilt forward, down into the dark red mouth. Encased, the insect’s body seemed suddenly huge, the perspective of the bell abruptly changed, grown vast and yet filled by that presence at its heart. The insect moved, its antennae searching frantically, erratically, like a blind man in a strange house, yet at the centre of that great furred body there was a perfect stillness.

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