Lightning Rods 'Midst the Snow-fields

[Note: I just picked up part 1 of Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, so if this sounds like faux 17th-century alchemy-speak, blame Neal.]

Storms rage 'bove our heads eternally, some visible and some not. They destroy, they plunder, but above all, they zap the tallest among us with a direct micro-second connection to the heavens, an experience which all but kills. Man is not meant to stand on a golf course with a nine-iron raised skyward into the electrical abyss, and the gods ablige him this indiscretion with a taste of their potent Blood. Man is not made to taste things not of his making, and the purpling clouds of numero-chaos shift-mountains whipping across the aeons do horrendous violence to all but the most grounded.

Enter the lightning-rod. It is He who stands planted in a single location, held steady by a spine made of Steel, reaching above the local rooftops and dimunitive provincials in a selfless effort to wrestle the danger-daggers down and into the ground where they will hurt no one. His pain is but a singe of discomfort as the holy rail rides its way from clouds to clods (and where it lands it doth fuse the earth into its own image before it dissappears in the very next instant).

It is not everyday, however, that lightning strikes a snow field. White, frigid, like a waning empire making war on the world, fields of snow exist in near-opposition to the thunderous activity of the summer months, freezing all cessation into a featureless expanse of dull uniformity, a blankness which precludes the Great as it fills all open mouths with the fascist fluff-water of doublethink. Those who deign to speak through the frost are cursed to merely replicate the lying snowflakes of the Officium, and George W. Bush's clever criminal manques hold sway over the global dance floor.

Yet it is the rare wall flower that dares to pierce a slender Franklin rod up through the fridge-crust in his optimistic expectation of impossible winter lightning. In Typical Times, this of course would be sheer folly -- lightning only weaves its way through falling snow during Biblical disasters, and none other. But in these days of cripple-'canes (Katrina being only a minor point guard on the five-man mega-squad we dread to experience in coming years), thunder + lightning + snowdrifts does not an impossible weather-happening make. The climate is getting fucked up in the '05.

But the typical snowfield-dweller knows nothing of this, shivering as s/he does under the substantial blankets of sub-zero ignorance which strikes the post-Enlightenment Puritan empire sliding backwards into Dominionism. The Glacier Ascendent is invisible to this willfully deluded fellow/lass, rendering the lightning rod's role all the more crucial, for at least in educated summer months folks know enough not to hang out in open spaces when the thunderheads start appearing.

I'm speaking, of course, of Inspiration, of the Muse, of the internal Vision which cannot be denied and -- painfully -- renders the capable human its Creation-Slave. Most folks, upon receiving this call (read: the call to create something far and behind themselves) balk, or worse yet, fuck it up or divert it for selfish purposes. In return, the Bolt kills them. Lightning rods, the true mages and saints, are those fortunate few with solid footing and willing constitutions who take on the electro-bombs raining down upon us all, rendering their terrifying demands harmless and palpable, dazzling all nearby viewers in the process.

In especially dark/cold times, when even the Jedi retreat into hiding, Inspiration falls on dead tundra, scorching the frigid earth with such thermal juxtaposition that its pain hurts a thousand times more. The suffering of slaves becomes even more intolerable when they are shown a more creative mode of existence they cannot attain. That lightning rods pop up through the icebergs, then, is verily a blessing, for these are those few slaves fortunate to exist in the minuscule heated cracks of Circumstance, who are able to beat Odds Impossible in order to take the pain of frustrated divine-desire on so that those with less mobility may breathe a surly breathe.

And where their lightning touches down, the snow around it melts, and grass appears.

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