The Towers Collapse

"La Torre" issue 1, article 1, by "Zero", aka Guido De Giorgio

The Old Man of the Mountain¹ awoke: he gazed at the plain and the fever of the plain, scanned with his eyes towers and pinnacles, traced upon the dry tower a strange sign, and thus he spoke in the night:

As in a false night a false truce, so in this long secular agony the builders of towers make nests in the wind of their foolishness: but at every breath of a new storm the towers collapse. O builders of towers, the towers collapse.

For centuries you weave the deception, your deception, o builders of towers; and the centuries devour you; at the bottom of the centuries truly, in the invisible desert that runs parallel to your corrupted and faltering path, stands eternity, builders of towers, o builders of towers.

Every tower is a worm and all worms are militia of the Great Worm who, between the meshes of your dark fable, darts death and decay. You liked to ignore that everything here is nothing there if the century on its knees does not sing the praise of Appearance in brightness of laughter and in perpetuity of sign. You liked to act as in a circus where the goal is a finger that traces the dust, and the reward a clapping of hands, and thus you have created the forest of wooden idols, of dusky brambles, of trees without marrow. And in the midst of so much abomination, in the midst of so much emptiness, you shake your chains in jubilation of freedom, you, slaves by birth and slaves by choice, creators of ephemeral throbs: you, builders of towers, do not behold the smile of the Great Worm who, crouched on the threshold of the cavern, guides your game and ruffles your fury. You were given, men, the upright stance so that your eye might perceive, among the whirlwinds of earthly dust, the flight of the overworld which runs like an ocean of fixity around your motionless planet, o builders of towers: but on your knees you went, to look at yourselves, and instead of the Great Light you, o builders of towers, raged upon your own shadow to revive the mazes of a petty world, a world to be reeled off among the leaps of a light that arose when you willed it, o builders of towers.

You had within you the seed of other worlds and let it mold, and in the parasitic bloom, you picked new garments for old corpses, o builders of towers: for you are corpses in wormy luxuriance, and all your resurrections are wrought by them, your holy masters, the holy worms: pray to them on your knees amid your catastrophes, your abysses, your paradises, your summits: but pray to them, pray to them:

“Holy Worms, we men, we builders of towers, we want to surpass ourselves remaining what we are, we want to create an overworld in ourselves with our hands, with faces buried in our shadow closed within the arch of our hands that make the heavens and the earth move; for the earth moves, O Holy Worms, the earth moves: we see it move by moving ourselves, everything moves when we move and what man wants God wants, our holy masters, blessed Worms. We want our likeness stamped everywhere. We are that which is, o Holy Worms: we are worms: here there are no men: here there are worms. Every mirror of water reflects a worm, every expanse of sky a worm. Worms we are, o Holy Worms, all worms and nothing more.”

Thus pray in the parasitic swarming that jolts your torpor, corpses aligned in the posture of life, you builders of towers, already dead for centuries. For, builders of towers, man has ceased to exist for centuries: the world in which so much roaring roars is nothing but a cemetery where the Holy Worms sing the song of anaerobia. Builders of towers, your heads that no longer gaze upward are already stretched upon the block of the great guillotine and a single blow, a very brief blow, will sever from so vast a body so small a head. O builders of towers, there is one who plays for you: the Great Worm lights your torches with his forked tongue, the rousing of all human dawns: it is the Great Worm who gave you the water so that you might sink your eyes in vertigo of conquest, it is the Great Worm who gave you a mirror brimming with lands and gulfs, oases and oceans where your eyes seek new labyrinths, ever denser labyrinths.

This I say to you, o builders of towers, now that the sun illuminates another land that is no longer yours, for your land moves, o builders of towers, and the sun illuminates only immobile lands, lands emerged from the waters that flow in a bed that contains and halts them, summit lands. Your land moves since you moved yourselves, since the Great Worm suggested to you that the heavens are sought along the way of the earth and by the light of worldly lights carried by profane hands: and, masters of this petty game, you bent your foreheads to the swarming and they studded the paths of the earth with temples: the ancient ways were populated with shrines wherein the worm of thought aligned its theories of fetishes. Artists were born alongside, and they pecked the roads of the earth with calluses, and said to man: “Admire yourself, man: for what is more than man?” Scientists came, and they ground the dust, probed the mirrors, and upon the mirrors they cast little flames. Politicians came and welded kingdoms and empires to the wings of vespertine flying rats; in twilight they ended what in twilight they had begun. Thus from mirage to mirage you have arrived at the final leap, ever richer in ephemeral dawns, lending your insatiable ear to the voices of all the barbarians who sacrificed the last seer, Dante, on the brothel’s altar of aesthetics, of history, and of philosophy. For six centuries, o builders of towers, you have crucified the last seer: but, worms, the hoof is too high for your petty parasitic voracity. There are many things, o builders of towers, that your hands will never touch, you seekers of phantoms: and Dante you shall not touch despite the innumerable tabernacles erected along a way that many centuries have baptized with their inquisitive imbecility. Imbecile men, I tell you that you are capable of everything except being men and that, outside the Temple, the Temple remains intact because it eludes your gropings, o imbecile men. You no longer have hands for the sword: your kings, builders of towers, are political remnants, crumbs left over from the tables of the plebeians, for it is the plebeians who rule the world, the plebeians who make the laws, they, chiefs of worms, to the worms.

You no longer have hands for the scepter, the priests have abandoned the temple and clash jubilantly with the rams of the square: in the light of the earth they sing the glimmers of the Great Gem that is now no more than the Great Stone. The roads of your world swarm, o builders of towers, with multicolored plebes: the plebe of thought, the plebe of art, the plebe of political rule, the plebe of industry. Your freedom, o slaves, knows no more limits: Science weaves mirages and peddles laws and plays at the collapse of bridges: Philosophy rummages among old wise droppings, fornicating with History in stellar concubinage: Art fills all voids, girding all the stripped crowns: and Politics follows in the stables, applauding the chants of the drunken plebe, cobbling together democracies in the garb of republics and empires. The Worm-nest is thus reaching the acme of its swarming: ideologies, idolatries, poetries, laws, republics, empires, revelations; everything is attempted: every flatulence is a paean and every defecation an acropolis. In a world where there is no longer Shepherd nor Caesar, ephemeral shepherds arise, screaming, and caesars, screaming. Scream, o builders of towers, for the Great Worm lengthens your chain to more whirlfully reach the final crookedness. The plebe triumphs in mechanical trinkets, blowing dust upon grass, upon rivers and rocks: the plebe triumphs in public papers enucleating tumors in swollen diarrheas of pus: the plebe finally triumphs in temples and upon thrones. They screm to overpower the vertigo of the void glimpsed in such fever of slender bridges: they screm to hide their fear and the shame, for, o builders of towers, you are afraid and ashamed, afraid of being nothing and ashamed of believing yourselves everything.

But your end is near, builders of towers, the gallop of your idols does not hide from you the great silence that opens florally, like beautiful chasms, at the collapse of the dark centuries, of the new centuries, of the final centuries. You will end shortly, o builders of towers, and all your towers will crash down like a dry heart, a withered heart, a clay heart from which life has taken away both blood and pulse. The Great Worm watches over your end and when the verminous swarming is extinguished, then, in the Great Balance, the Last Day shall rise again, builders of towers, o builders of towers.

1. A reference to a title of the Grand Master of the Assassins, a military-religious Isma’ili sect which was in certain respects an Islamic equivalent to the Christian Knights Templar. (translator’s note)