the circular ruins

[ rough-edged, in progress, bot-assisted. having trouble with personal pronouns, also couldn't use the word 'reality' ]

no-one saw him disembark in the inanimate night, no one saw the bamboo canoe [sumiendose] in the sacred mud, but within a few days no-one could ignore that the taciturn man had come from the south and that is motherland was one of the infinite villages in the high waters, on the violent flank of the mountain, where the zend language is uncontaminated by greek and leprosy is rare. It is certain that the grey man kissed the mud, [repecho] the shore without parting (probably without feeling) the [cortaderas] that dilated the meats and crawled, seawatered and bloody, up to the the circular enclosure that crowns a stone horse or tiger, once the colour of fire and now the colour of ash. this [redondel] is a temple that the ancient fires devoured, that the [paludica] forest has profaned and whose god receives no honour from humans. the stranger tended himself beneath the pedestal. the high sun woke him. he ascertained without astonishment that the injuries had healed; closed his pallid eyes and slept; not so much due to [flaqueza] of the meat as determination of the will. he knew this temple was the place that his invincible proposition needed; the knew that the incessant trees had not managed to strangle, river below, the ruins of another propitious temple, also of burned and dead gods; he knew that his immediate obligation wa to sleep. the inconsolable cry of a bird kept him awak until midnight. signs of unshod feet, some [higos] and a [cantaro] warned that the people of the region had respectfully spied on his sleep and solicited his shelter or feared his magic. he felt the cold of fear and sought a sepulchral niche in the dilapidated wall, covered himself with unknown leaves.

the proposition that guided him was not impossible, although it was supernatural. he wanted to dream a being; wanted to dream him with minute integrity and impose him on existence. this magical project had exhausted the whole space of his soul; if anyone had asked him his own name or any characteristic of his previous life, he couldnt have guessed how to respond. the broken and and inhabited temple agreed with him because it was a minima of the visible world; also the [cercania] of the farmers, because they were charged with overcoming frugal necessities. the rice and fruits of their tribute were sufficient for his body, consecrated to the single task of dreaming and sleeping.

at first the dreams were chaotic; shortly afterwards, they were of a dialectical nature. the stranger dreamed himself at the centre of a circular amphitheatre that was in some way the burned temple; clouds of taciturn students tired the terraced steps; the faces of the last hung many centuries distant and at a stellar altitude, but they were above all precise. the man gave them lessons in anatomy, cosmography, magic; the faces listened anxiously, and tried to answer with understanding, as if they understood the importance of this test, which would redeem one of them from the condition of futile appearance and interpolate them in the world of existence. the man, in the dream and the vigil, contemplated the responses of his ghosts, did not cease to [embaucar] for impostors, divined in perplexities a growing intelligence. he searched for a soul that deserved to participate in the universe.

after nine or ten nights he understood with some bitterness that he could hope for nothing from those students who passively accepted his doctrine, and something yes from those who risked, sometimes, a rational contradiction. the former, though worthy of love and good affection, could not ascend into individuals; the latter pre-existed a little more. one evening (now afternoons were also tributaries to sleep, now guarded but a few hours at dawn, he matriculated the vast illusory ocllege for ever, and remained with just one pupil. he was a taciturn, sallow, sometimes [discolo], with sharp features which repeated those of his dreamer. the brusue elimination of his codisciples did not disturb him for long; his progress, at the end of a few particular lessons, he could marvel the master. nevertheless, the catastrophe happened. one day the man emerged from the dream as from a viscous desert, looked out at the vain light of the afternoon which he had at first confused with the dawn, and realised that he had not dreamed. all that night and all that day, the intolerable lucidity of insomnia lowered itself onto him. he wanted to explore the forest, debilitate himself; he hardly reached in the [cicuta] a few moments of debilitated sleep; uesless. he wanted to recongregate the college but despite having articulated a few brief words of exhortation, that deformed itself, erased itself. in the almost perpetual vigil, tears or ire burned his old eyes.

he understood that the [empeno] of modelling the incoherent and vertiginous material of which his dreams were composed is the most arduous task that a [varon] can undertake, though he may penetrate all the enigmas of higher and lower orders; more arduous than weaving a cord from sand or coining the faceless wind. he understood that an initial fracas was inevitable. he swore to forget the enormous hallucination that had diverted him at first, and looked for another way of working. before exercising it, he dedicated a month to the repositioning of the forces that had squandered his delirium. he abandoned all premeditated dreaming and the almost continous action of sleeping for a reasonable stretch of the day. the few times that he slept during this period, he did not repair in the dreams. in order to resume the task, he waited til the disk of the moon had become perfect. later, in the afternoon, he purified himself in the river waters, worshipped the planetary gods, pronounced the bidden words of a powerful name, and slept.almost immediately, he dreamt with a barking heart.

dreamed active, warm, secret, of the grandeur of a closed [puno], garnet colour in the penumbra of a human body, but faceless, sexless; with meticulous love he dreamed it during fourteen lucid nights. each night, he perceived it with better evidence. he did not touch it, limited himself to testifying to it, observing it, occasionally correcting it with a glance. he perceived it, lived it, from many distances and many angles. the fourteenth night, he grazed the pulmonary artery with the index, and later the whole heart, from the inside and the outside. the test satisfied him. deliberately, he did not sleep for a night; later he took up the heart again, invoked the name of a planet and undertook the vision of the other principal organs. before a year he reached the skeleton, the [parpados]. the innumerable hairs were perhaps the most difficult task. he dreamed an integral man, a [mancebo], but who could not incorporate himself or speak or open his eyes. night after night, the man dreamt him asleep.

in the gnostic cosmogonies, the demiurges knead a red adam who cannot stand on his feet; just as [inhabil] and rude and elemental was that adam of sand, was this adam of dreams that the mage had made. one afternoon, the man nearly destoryed all his work, but he regretted it. (it had been worth more to him to destroy it). he exhausted the vot(iv)es of the [numenes] of the earth and the river, threw himself at the feet of the effigy that was perhaps a tiger and perhaps a colt, asked for its strange succour. that [crepusculo], dreamed with the statue. the dreamed it alive, tremulous; not an atrocious horse/tiger bastard, but at once both these vehement creatures and also a bull, a rose, a storm. it ordered him that, once instructed in the rights, it would send him to the other broken temple whose pyramids persist waters below, so that some voice would glorify him in that deserted edifice. in the dream of the man who dreamed, the dreamed one woke up.

the mage followed these orders. he consecrated a place (which finally included two years) to discover the arcanes of the universe and of the cult of fire. intimately, it hurt him to leave it. on the pretext of pedagocical necessity he dilated, each day, the hours dedicated to dreaming. he also remade the right shoulder, perhaps deficient. sometimes he was troubled by the impression that this had already occurred... in general, his days were cheerful; on closing his eyes he thought, "now i will be with my child." or, more rarely: "the child that i have created waits for me and will not exist unless i go.".

gradually, he was accustomating him to existence. once he commanded him to flag up a distant peak. another day, the flag flamed on the peak. he tried analogous experiments, each more audacious than the last. he understood with that certain bitterness that his child was ready to be born - and perhaps impatient. that night he kissed him for the first time, sent him to the other temple whose whitened despoilation river below, many leagues of inextricable wood and [cienaga] away. before (so that it would never know it was a ghost, so it would believe itself a person like the others), he instilled the total forgetting of hisyears of apprecnticeship.

his victory and his peace would stay [empanadas de hastio]. in the [crepusculos] of the afternoon and the night, he prostrated himself before the stone figure. perhaps imagining that his irreal child was performing identical rituals, in other circular ruins, waters below; at night he did not dream, or dreamed as all people do. he perceived the sounds and forms of the universe with a certain pallor: the absent child was nutrified with these diminuitions of his soul. the proposition of his life was overwhelmed; the man persisted in a luck of ecstasy. at the end of a time that some tellers of his ihstory prefer to count in years, others in lustrums, two rowers woke him up at midnight; he could not see their faces, but they spoke to him of a magical man in a temple in the North, able to walk on fire without being burned. the mage brusquely recalled the words of the god. he remembered that, of all the creatures that compose the globe, fire was the only one that knew his child was a phantasm. this memory, pacifying at first, came to torment him. he feared that his child would meditate on this anormal privilege and would discover in some way his condition of mere simulacrumness. not to be a person, to be a projection of the dream of a person, what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo! all parents find the children they have procreated, or allowed to be, interesting in mere confusion or cheerfulness; it is natural that the mage would fear for the becomming of his child, thought up [entrana] by [entrana] and characteristic by characteristic, in a thousand and one secret nights.

the end of his ponderings was brusque, but promised him some signs. at the end of a long [sequia], a remote cloud on the hill, light like a bird; later, from the South, the sky with the rose colour of the [encia] of leopards; later the [humareads] that rusted the metal of the nights; later the panic fugue of the beasts. because this occurred repeated for many centuries. the ruins of the sanctuary of the god of fire were destroyed by fire. in a birdless dawn the mage saw the concentric fire sift itself through the walls. for an instant, he thought of hiding in the waters, but then understood that death was coming to crown his age and absolve him of his work. he walked against the shreds of fire. they did not bite his meat, they caressed and inundated him without heat, without combustion.with lightening, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he was also an apparition, that someone else was dreaming him.