This column title says it all, and several of us, including my editor have awaited Emil to speak it life again. Long ago written, his novel still sings.
In conversation over a series of paintings it all came out! This was the last of the fabulous cryptic paintings to come along, so I broke down:
Byron Montgomery:
Lay odds ye shuddering P & N (Peasantry & Nobles)! I ask for ye! What is USNORM. Hexagons and USNOM…???? Honeycomb??? Its all so close to seeing what we see, power is shooting but can’t pass through. My guess it’s a grimoire ye are studying.
Emil Agayev:
Byron, it’s about Usnorm, from book of Daniel Andrews, Rose of World-
I’m not even sure about the name of the first one—it sounds like Usnorm, but I can’t hear it more accurately. The rotation of the planet around the axis manifests itself here, and, apparently, it was night there then, because I vaguely remember a luminous nebula filled with stunning splendor, as if the creative bosom of our universe was revealed to me for the first time for the first time. It was Astrafire, the great center of our Galaxy, hidden from us in Enrof by dark clouds of cosmic matter.
I also saw a scattering of countless stars, but not like ours: they were not stars, but bramfatures. Not brilliant dots, but systems of concentric spheres shining through each other; when the eye stopped on any of them, it became huge and distinct, as if approaching; it seems to me now that they all slowly rotated, sounding harmoniously and echoing with many-voiced voices. But maybe it seems to me now, and this is the influence of ideas about the harmony of the spheres that came to me not from within, but from human tradition. In any case, these harmonies only emerged through the waves of an unimaginable chorus that sounded here, around me, and rose from such depths and to such heights that I could neither understand nor measure with my eyes. This is a memory of the layer, which is a comprehensive temple, intended for the eternal worship of mankind.
Oh, not just humanity! There seemed to be millions of beings present here, and—I don’t know how many—probably more than half of them had never been human and should not have become them. There were enlightened souls of elementals and enlightened souls of animals, there were wonderful daimons and angels of different circles. When we read in the Apocalypse a prophecy about highly intelligent animals surrounding the altar of another world and performing a service, it may be a symbol, but it is also a hint of reality — the reality that did not exist at the time of the author of the Apocalypse. Because the Usnorm, as a universal temple, is the realization of the plan of precisely that great human spirit, who in his last incarnation on earth was the Apostle John the Theologian.
And if there were millions of worshippers there, then those coming to the altar of the Temple numbered in the thousands, because everyone who has reached the sakwala of “High Duty” is made one of the upcoming ones in the Usnorm, being then replaced by the next.
The most exalted, most benevolent services in the temples of the supreme religions are only faint reflections, echoes of the eternal liturgy of the Usnorm. Yes, the word participates in this liturgy, but it is the language of the Synclite of the World, which we cannot reproduce, where words are not just individual sounds, but as if semantic chords, and some of them are at the same time flashes and iridescences of light. Movement, the heavenly prototype of the sacred dance, participates in this liturgy as an element, but in the Usnorm there are five dimensions, and movement is performed not on a horizontal plane, as with us, but on all five dimensions of space. Both light and color participate in the liturgy, but there is no way to give an idea of colors beyond the seven colors that we perceive. What can we say about those light symphonies, in front of which even the illumination of the Fire-fighting seems monotonous and poor? What can be said about spiritual fragrances? About the incense of the Usnorm, which ascend from giant, floating and swinging censers to ascend to the Astrafire itself?.. This is the first world where the ascendant perceives not material, but purely spiritual radiations: they come from the highest transcosmic spheres, which could be called empyrean, if by this ancient word we mean not a fantastic “world of fixed stars”, but the abode of pure Spirit, that is, the Most Holy Trinity, encompassing the cosmos.
So we have a great beginning to all the philosophical, linguistic, magic there is in our art Baron, he’s quite the writing noble and scholar I say, this novel (excerpt) proof.
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