I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
—Stephen Crane
Sunlight skims the churn of foam on the ocean’s hazy frontier, the end of vision. That slim infinity where the sky kisses the sea can only really be seen in that single elusive burst of green light at sunset, the ocean burping color after it’s finally slurped down that solar yolk for the day.
An unseen forever. The unreachable, distant horizon. Hidden within that burst of seafoam green is a place.
Horizon is just old Greek for a boundary, a limit, whilst the Old English just called it something like an “eye-mark.” But the horizon isn’t a limit, it’s a location. Tolkien wrote of the Undying Lands, where the world makers and their supranatural children lived beyond the reach of the mortality they wrought upon the world.
On the floating island of Tir Na Nog, under the soft shadow of the Big Rock Candy Mountain and past the Fields of Elysian and Aaru, in the center of the Garden of Eden sits a Seafoam Palace ruled by the Emperor of Ice Cream. Made of air’s coupling with water and lit with rosy dawn and smoldering dusk, the light mingles as it dances through the palace walls into a perfectly faded and frothy cyan, deeper than aqua and brighter than ether. The hallways of always lead to great feasts where the warriors toast over and again, the grog poured by polar bears drips down forked beards and between armor-clad breasts, to bathing chambers made of marbled clouds where in pink bubbles frolic nymphs and naiads drunk on champagne singing a sweet psalm of hardship and forgiveness, to sprawling bedrooms dripping with silk and voile, angora and needlelace, batik and brocade, cashmere and chiffon, gauze and damask, merino and muslin, organza and qiviut, taffeta and tulle around piles of pillows on beds and chaises where bodies laze and fuck and dream and laugh and talk and smoke under a soft hazy light. The hallways lead to rooms of fire and rooms of ice, chambers for weeping and laughter, memory and forgetfulness, stairwells lead into arcades and rooms behind rooms.
Here in the Seafoam Palace, dreams are wetly born and softly sated. Here hide all the gods and phantasms, exquisite monsters and rarest beasts. Here your grandmother rides Neptune’s face and your grandfather fucks a mermaid. Here, jinns play poker with saints and Nirvana opens for Moksha. Indra plays the drums and the devatas sing backup and the Ghost Dancers twirl and stomp. Here, beyond the limits of what we can see, the invisible live freely; illuminated just so, ghosts take form, spirit finds flesh, and they drink dew stiffer than hundred proof whiskey and ambrosia so fresh it still wriggles; peyote buttons and fruit from the Tree of Knowledge are only the appetizers.
The unreachable reached, there is no beyond, this is the beyond, but even here there is further still, hallways beyond hallways, as deep as imagination can go, not onward but inward, spiralling like a seashell heartward, forever. The horizon is an illusion of perspective, a trick of gravity, and where we stand is always timeless infinity in all directions.
The beyond is both everywhere and here.