Panarmonia Obscura – Nick Weller

November 5, 2025

Blanched behind the eyes, world cut off from soul, cut off from dead matter inert. The mouths agape and the shoulders slack against the body, seeking gravity’s escape. A hoary chill just-thin blankets all the ground as an invisible and crepuscular fog. And there is of course a smell. One piece sits atop another. It sits patient and in slumber, and it wills nothing at all. Beetles crawl and maggots burrow looking to graze, with their mothers proud above. The corpse lies wet in the dirt floor. Seeping, seeping out, down and through. Into the dirt, into the soil seeping into the earth. Dead soul into empty world seeping.

A single atom of time flashes on its journey through the infinitesimally small all-encompassing void of space, occupying each possible point wholly and one-by-one, before it flashes on, replaced by the next. Where it goes may not be known, nor where it finds its source and home, and yet on it goes. Another moment of animation unexplained. Another impossible force traversing.

Everything is coming apart. Everything is coming apart and there is no force to hold it together. The dead are in the soil. These once were reproductive beings, still so. No one is looking for them. They were found once. They seep on. The fluid distillation of decaying viscera, blood, acid; the human tea full strength. It mixes down with clay, with silica, with stone and with the thousand’s years blended fusion of its father’s father’s fathers’. And it is only hot. Dead and hot, heating ever the more, digestion in the chasm’s maw. The corpse is dead on the floor. The corpse is dead on the floor and it continues to die. The corpse is dead on the floor and will die on forever. Life a pause, life a caesura from the business of the seeping ever on. Life a grand preparation, a building up for the greater height with which to give more distance to the splatter which will in its time bounce into the air. More time soaring, airborne. The corpse is dead on the floor, born. Born again. In the soil the root finds. Naked once more, the corpse is found.

The comedies of putrefaction play on to their audience, of mineral tang and of dissolution which loosens the acrid into the skies. And blue and vast and bright magnificent are the glorious lighted skies, and cold and black and only of lack are their skies beyond. The big skies unto which all lesser little skies turn their gazes upward with wonder, with awe at the alien and the more whole. With awe at the untouched. Etched onto the body of void which stretches arced over existence as it clashes and is moved. An arc of such vastness that the two ends meet only beyond space itself, where no skies lie.

Somewhere distant, the new child is born. Crying vital, smeared in fluid and followed by girthy placenta the auspicious sign. Fat and putrid for its fullness with thick nutrient. Out he comes wailing at existence its newest spawn irate and thrashing. There is anger and there is rage and there is the love germinating for coincidence and for annihilation. And the corpse lies in the mud made mud of its own seepings, and the babe flails and screams newly dry for his first and only time. And the mud splashes up through and mixed with placenta into his toothless squishing mouth which can only for now gum it down and swallow whole, and he will soon learn what it is to be sated once separate.

And he digests and he takes it in, and his body within it finds pieces to break asunder and to gnaw and rearrange and dissolve and link or test and throw away. He takes it for his own and from it he builds more of himself. And this the child calls life, and this the child calls good. And good it is. And well does he drink of its seepings so long seeping. And larger and stronger does he grow. He drinks down the juice digesting it all. And all is taken in. And the babe drinks from the bursting flesh of the corpse which lies on the earth. Popping his straw through the taught skin of the once-human meat-juicebox fit to burst from the stirring within, and sucking all out. To the very last drop, until the skin shrivels and collapses in on itself with popping noises as bones are broken out of joint and the vacuum overtakes all within. Until the corpse is taken by force.

Another atom of time passes through space, and again the world is changed in its form, finding difference in the moment of exchange and settling instantaneously in the pax temporis, pax evanescens, only for so long as it takes the next atom to arrive and pass once more. The absolute non-persistence of the zero, traversed by the infinite, sets the field for the hosts of that which can be, discerning what is, in what survives. Hermes travels quickly to every point that he can, filling the world with its wondrous illusions that come of slow, slow perceptions of within.

Apollo holds steady in appreciative and loving observation while Dionysus dances. With each step, with each fluorish, a moment of seepage. With each another drip of water down from the body into the earth. With each more succor and more flaccidity. And in them is succession and in that number and in that world. The dance all in the timing, in the movements by number and by sequence. And dance but a cheap metaphor. The child watching with widened eyes and mouth agape as it runs through all and him. The violation is constant, and the communion non-negotiable. One, persisting, point, accepted as the many, the multitudes, and even all.

In growth the child feels suspicion, a how can this be. For it is not growth but agglomeration and new construction. The newness is alien of sensation and requires learning. And yet, grow he does, and yet, he continues larger and stronger, a different himself, new and with new features and new identity. But new identity old and building, not fresh, never again fresh. And yet, fresh at each moment and new and unlearned of the newness. And the corpses are writhing within, scratching at the new earth and seeping more into this body. And again they are pierced and broken and reformed and pierced and broken again. And how they long ever the more for their mud again, and how they will find it in time as they search on. And the atom of time rolls through, and another single drop seeps.