Sublunar by Harald Voetmann

Author:Harald Voetmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811229791
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Part twenty-three

Of the soul’s fiber and the vitrifying flame, continued.

Anyone who is interested in the transfigurations of the Earth’s materia, and — through laboratorial work or the perusing of restricted texts on the matter — seeks to grasp the principle of how gold matures in rock and embryo in womb, should know, indeed as any searching mind of our sæculum should know, that any order of earthly mass will turn to glass if applied to a flame burning hot enough. Some parts of Creation already contain the qualities of glass to some extent and may be transfigured at a lower heat than others; after all, making glass from sand is simpler than making it from a flower or a river.

I had never taken the notion to its extreme: how the flames of Judgment would inexorably turn the Earth and everything under the moon’s sphere into glass — not until I heard the wail of glass in my ear as the peasants on either side of me drank to the fire.

It seemed quite obvious all of a sudden. Could the flames of Judgment be anything other than perfect, and would a perfect flame not generate the perfect vitrificatio, or glassification, whatever it burned, and thus not burn but rather freeze its prey?

I saw them before me in the shape they would take once transfigured in the fire of Judgment. Colorless, melted glass figures, eyes and mouths sealed shut, their final motion fixed in Eternity of Eternities, raising their tankards and crocks. Since the glass was clear I could sense the souls within. Their souls like mist sequestered in the glass, fruitlessly attempting to escape but finding no opening that would allow the passage of their stocky, hefty souls’ fiber.

Meanwhile, the soul emanated from the bold Erik Lange (appropriately captured striking the desirable pose of the rhetor, with his forehead high and his right arm stretched out before him). He who by steady, lifelong prayer and scholarship had strived to refine his soul and assist its arduous transformation into ethereal matter like that which shines onto mortals from the stars.

There was a starry glow, ineffably beautiful, transpiring from every part of his being, soon to ascend to its heavenly home (praise be the Lord! I thought) while infernal suffering would remain on Earth, within each irredeemable sinner, within each burly-souled peasant at the inn near Krabbesholm. For this, I realized, was Hell: the suffering of the petrified, the pain of the weighty soul forever trapped in its glass body.

The wail of the glass was no longer only in my left ear canal. It sounded from each unbending sinner now, a wall-to-wall reverberation of souls struggling aimlessly against smooth, impenetrable surfaces, and everywhere the soul of Earth itself could be heard, joining the choir of the doomed, seeking to crush the crystal sphere to which the moon is tethered. Thus Creation hung suspended, a glassy dome of forsaken echoes, at the center of God’s timeless eternity. In Heaven the distant wailing can be

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