Clockwork Phoenix: Tales of Beauty and Strangeness

INTRODUCTION by Mike Allen

We begin with fire.

A furnace that burns so hot it seems not even time could survive its temperatures, but yet inside this crucible something is wrestling time backward, condensing matter into a molten pool still too bright to look at as it gathers itself up and white hot parts within start to move.

Ticks and clicks. Springs and gears. Sprockets and chains. Wheels and crowns. Pinions are the small gears in a drive train. Pinions are the outermost feathers on a bird’s great wing. A rack and pinion convert circular motion to linear motion, like a wheel squealing on a train track.

The raptor stretches its wings until the razor sharp edges of its pinions score and scar the furnace walls. The curved knife of its beak flashes as it tilts its head, as it returns our gaze; hour and minute hands move within its iron-black eyes.

It draws up the needles of its talons and rises from the burnings coals, floats for a moment in the fire. Then it throws itself against the firebox hatch, once, twice, thrice, with thunderous force. A fourth time, and the hatch flies off, and the great bird is birthed from the furnace—

Into the cabin of a roaring locomotive. Where is it bound, and where is its Engineer? The cabin is empty, and outside the windows shadows flicker in a greater darkness. The door to the next car is open, and through it a watery trickle of voices underscores the boiler’s screams. The phoenix clacks its wings once and glides across the gap.

Borne on its wings, we see what it sees as it soars through the oddly long chamber, a space opulent despite the way it narrows, like the inside of an elegant throat.

The car is paneled in ivory and white marble, every squared frame carved with pale faces, some sleeping, some blind; some appear to roll their gilded eyes to follow our flight. Window slats stabbed into the walls reveal more darkness outside, but openings that iris in the ceiling breathe in merciless light, drawn in from some unseen source or unreal place.

Three pillars at the car’s far end reveal themselves as we approach to be three identical men, each wearing three-piece suits tailored in midnight black, each with the same shirts pleated harsh white, the same blood red bow ties clasped with a grinning death’s head, their bearded faces sculpted into circus masks. The only differences between these pundits are their words.

One says: Form need not be the end. Function need not be the end. Take my breath away both with the tale and how it’s told. The beautiful must slave for a purpose. The purpose must serve to feed the beautiful.

One says: To admit boundaries is to admit defeat. To admit boundaries is to admit defeat. To admit boundaries is to admit defeat. To admit boundaries is to admit defeat.

One says: The law is mad. The law is madness, but madness is not the predicate of law. There is no madness in absence of the law. Before its opposition to the law became flesh, madness could never be conceived.

The raptor’s gaze reads noon. Let us not suffer these fools to live.

Wings stretched to full length fan feathers sharp as razor blades. Their blood is ink, this long shaft of carved white a blank page.

When the pundits have succumbed, the phoenix shakes its wetted feathers and plummets on, through the next car, and the next, and the next. They are all linked, but not in a row; some cars connect through hoops of time; some nestle beside each other, sharing membranes of possibility; some are intertwined like clusters of hearts filled by the same arteries; some are stitched together like quilts, or grafts.

And what of the chambers we rush past within this train’s strange body, our wings beating against the air in hopes we won’t be ash before the end? What marvels do we see as we leap from gear to spinning gear, hustling daredevil to the precarious edge just for the views? Shadows growing across wallpaper ripples as other forms rustle within the walls; upholstery grown in future times, where arms stretch from the floor and lifeblood warms the ceiling; a train at least as mad as the bird that bears us.

To say nothing of its freight; or its passengers; or its stowaways; or the crazed hobos beneath that ride the rails.