I had long dreamed of the moment when that speck in the sky would enfold my own existence within it. What a mode of existence it was! What glorious self-indulgence! Could there be any more glittering insult to the stubbornly sedentary spirit? How splendidly it ripped the vast blue curtain, swift as a dagger-stroke! Who would not be that sharp knife of the heavens?
Yukio Mishima
Upward striving, upward rising, we trace a golden threaded arc from Satya Yuga to satellite. A tradition, from Tradition to takeoff, of towers and rockets and phallic resolve to penetrate the uppermost reaches.
You see a westerly man wading through a sea of grass, possessed of roiling solar fluid, gazing up at both the object of his desires and his home.
He is picking up pace, now running, now galloping, now leaping and vaulting over the cloud line, into the vault of the heavens. Oh to pierce this vaunted firmament!
His speed now tears a hole in the sky; mercurial gold streaks out like lightning toward every arcaded horizon. He is intoxicated on altitude itself.
He has Apollo’s lofty favor, and Jove’s, and Jehova’s too. He’ll ride on the backs of their winged gifts, at first with reverence and then with entitlement, and then surpass them if he can. He’ll use every tool at his disposal to buttress this flying ascent. He is monomania and vainglory and blinding splendor.
He is higher and higher now, surpassing earth’s dome in defiance of all that is terrestrial. In defiance of the gods to reach God. In defiance of God to reach his own Godhood, to reach this colonnaded temple to his highest aspirations, his towering ego, this arch of his ambitions and the keystone of his spirit.
Higher and higher still, reaching and breaching, he rips through the ribs of the atmosphere- to the apse where the air tenuously hangs together and his extremities dangle into an azure nothing.
It is at once a brilliant and daimonic striving, seeking that point of the summit of Self, seeking to grasp burning divinity for himself, seeking height and light and to be bathed in solar fire.
He is now leaving behind all dirt and grime, and what’s left of materiality. He crowns the spire of the heavens and in a great and roaring ejaculation sheds his sleeve once and for all. His essence furiously erupts outward, all milky white and gossamer and fluid across the aether. It fans out toward unseen destinations in space, expands and quietly diffuses its filaments throughout the entire macrocosm.
He is finally at rest now; force spent, instinct fulfilled, thought extinguished, insemination replete.
Thus Faustian man completes the cycle that was begun, long ago, under the endless blue sky of the wide open steppe.