House Outside of Time

26 May 1988

Ten centuries have gone by. I have repeated and repeated the protocol of alchemical maneuvering, but still no neutrinos have come from the edge of the exploding universe to inform the base metal in my crucible of its new and true identity.  My sisters have lapsed into somnolesence as they wait for me to finish, and my brothers have all married women of different nations and taking up farming or trade. The world shifts inexorably from that which once I knew, and in the place of fragmented frames I am left with the pastel suppositions of what was never more than a tentative vegetable dye that gave color to the things around me.

And this house is old; so old, that I can no longer find the books I brought here as a young woman. The corridors grow in length each year, glacially, but now they are too long to traverse in a day.  New rooms have grown, too, and blossomed furnishings stolen from the hall of time and the temple of creativity, where billions of unrealized forms yearn for incarnation.

The garden inside the walls that surround this noble, self-creating house have turned inward upon themselves in the past 50 years and I can see now that they seek the silence of the desert.  The flowers of each spring for five decades have fragmented into sand, and each year the tan drifts rise higher against the cooking room windows, higher against the firmly mortared stone of my tower laboratory.  The trees have grown ever more spiny and terse, and their speeches to me as I gaze out upon them each evening at sunset scroll their meanings for leagues.

No visitors have come since the year of the aeon nine hundred and ninety six; but I have heard rumors of another woman who has come to live in one of the newly-grown rooms. Perhaps she dreamed herself there; or perhaps a new entrance had grown onto the house that she passed through, one I could not see from my tower’s oratory windows.  80 years ago, one of my sisters awoke from her sleep to take a short nap awake.  She heard a sound of singing or muttering or chanting and followed it to the room where she found the woman, marking her path with chalk so she could return to her couch.  The woman’s room was a prison cell and the door was locked, so my sister could only look through the viewing slit.

The woman sat on a high stool next to a high table and was carving heads from large nuts.  A bushel basket of uncarved nuts sat on the floor at her feet and another, partially filled with carved heads, a short distance away.  One of the carved heads hung from the ceiling on a wire, dangling near the woman’s head. The woman wore a loose jumper of sack cloth and had shoulder-length disheveled hair.

My sister spoke out to her, but the woman paid no notice.  She then left the newcomer, and retraced her steps from the cell, pausing to visit me in the cooking room to tell me of what she had found before returning to her couch in the darkened room.

But now visitors come. We who are here, we do our work and find the silence one of kindliness.  It has been said—I read it in a book since lost—that before this house stood here, there was a spring, a well, and a stream.  The well is perhaps the same as the one in the room below the cooking room from which I pump the water I need.  It was relined as recently as 300.  There is no sign of a surface spring or stream anywhere, although there is a portion of the garden, enclosed in its own separate wall that I have never been able to enter.  Perhaps it is in there.

When I am not watching my crucible in the tower, I have another mystical experiment I perform. My three sisters sleep in a large drawing room in the oldest part of the house whose windows are covered with heavy brocade sent by their husbands from the east.  Down the center of the room, I have constructed a channel for water to flow through.  It took me many years to bless and purify the water I needed to fill it.  Now the water rests there always, pure and undefiled. When I wish to do this ritual, I go down to that room where my sisters are sleeping on their couches.  I move the couches so that they straddle the water. My sisters then become bridges and the room opens out into a familiar landscape.  A narrow river flows between stone banks, crossed by bridges.  On one side of the river is a small city of ancient stone houses and shops; on the other lie farm lands and wooded hills, crisscrossed with a network of narrow lanes.

At the boundary of this city and its land, the river dips into a deep flume and enters the earth. A book I bought at a shop in the city that I have never been able to return to in this realm tells me that this river reemerges in the bottom of Scotland’s Loch Ness.  Perhaps it is so.  When I emerge into the dream of this city, I most often wander along the banks of the river, viewing the strange play of light on the land.  Sometimes I stop in a public house and listen to the farmers and business people discuss their affairs.

But this ritual is merely relaxation.  The first time I went to the city, in a dream, I spent a long time examining maps of my own realm that were kept in the City Library.  This was many years ago.  It was then that I discovered the power of this realm and caused the house to start growing.  I was gazing at an old map of this house and its grounds and the closer I looked, the more I could see.  Bent over in scrutiny, I did not notice the approach of a tall, solidly built man who came up from behind and tapped my shoulder.  As I felt the tap, I said “Yes”—a statement, not a question.  No reply came and I turned around.  I saw the man for a split second then awoke.

I was puzzled by this for many centuries until I finally noticed the growth of the house and its similarity in essence to the figure I had briefly seen.  The man was no man but the spirit of the house asking permission to grow and shape itself.  The map I had been looking at was not so much a map as a record of the essence of the structure.  By devoting my complete and increasingly engrossed attention to it, I had contributed enough energy to the whole to allow a manifestation of it in human form to appear.  This manifestation desired my recognition of its autonomy, which I unthinkingly gave it.

Ever since, the house has continued to grow in the direction it desires.  I cannot conjecture as to where it derives the energy and materials it needs to do this.  Perhaps it is taking it from the garden, which seems increasingly depleted and tired. I do not know.  Could I have made such a catastrophic mistake unthinkingly? By giving my ignorant permission as a resident of the house for the it to grow, have I robbed other aspects of the same creation that nurtures the house of their ability to sustain themselves? Or is this part of a larger plan, with myself as a pawn for its purpose?  I cannot know.

Monthly by the full moon I await in my tower chamber the flood of particles from beyond which will take the base metal which I have carefully nurtured all these years and transform it into a light-giving jewel, a precious stone of water.