Three

 

c

We designed a return. ‘Synthesis’—this was in the air again, after a long slumberous meandering itinerary of uncertainty. We, on the other hand, as warriors leading the first New Crusade, designed for ourselves a war to agonize the synthesis, to reach up and grasp the falling ends, and to guide their crash-landing atop the broken runways left behind from the last futile attempt to secure for us our imperial triumph (by which we meant, a tinkers’ triumph, a maze of mechanic intricacy that, when followed in any one direction, led you only to our collective torpor, a ceaseless sleep from which we had, collectively, refused to awaken). Therefore, we undertook to become architects of this new challenge, even as we lay dying.

 

Everywhere we looked for our materials, we were forced to look underneath of what lay dying atop the dry ground. Our work was the work of reversals, rehearsing for the common judgment that which would not be issued by the third One but rather from the world whose path had become blurred by our very own splendors of sapience.

 

We stood forth upon this mount, and commanded them to recuse themselves from the case pending, and they wondered aloud as we exhorted, is this a cosmic pressure that befalls us from the lips of these fools? Their response was in fact scriptural. But each word was like poisonous manna, and only when we managed to take hold of a flake here or there would it be saved from worms. We took their manna, and were nourished, and in our stomachs and through our mouths was born an ignorance profounder than we could have known then.

 

We forsook our plans and found the architecture of the end just in the indifference resounding across this mount where stood we together, giving praise and making exhortations. But our task seemed accomplished, a reversal was set along the path down into the valley. And we followed it, a trace of what would no longer be accomplished so easily—the future.

 

This was always an easy reward for the plainness of our days and our works. But now, as ruination could everywhere been seen, this was no longer a gift to us. Works and days no longer assured the future, for we in truth had none.

 

Work was to be done in the days ahead of us—and this we knew well. But our work took us to a place beneath the mount, to caverns and tunnels of our own building. There we found the real sermons which, as the tunnels were dug in patient searching, found the air they needed in order to be rekindled—and the blaze overtook us, consumed us, left us as embers burning the way through the wilderness which our stars had sold to us in moments of time. Now we populated that desert; it was we who supplied the many grains like so many mustard seeds that would never find soil enough to germinate. We, my friends—could you not see this with your verdant sermons in those languid summers of desperate hope?—we could not find the soil because the soil was the gains themselves. The wilderness was the wilderness of our own searching, a wilderness built from heaping, one atop another, fragments and elements and systems and parts and labors. All of this supplied not soil but mere grains.

 

And so, a new sermon had to be conceived. This time, however, no prophet arose to explain the good news. What good news was there in this heap of banality, in this mass of dried husks packed tightly as the wind drew across its apparently smooth surface (now and then giving forth a loose one that merely redoubled its tragic position)?

 

When we looked into the tunnel, we always found their works compiled into chains of urgency, heavy duties and the insistence of the futile, endlessly compounding their labor with the drone of the ordinary. Even so, their spirit leapt with such (to us) startling exuberance. This alone called for our commentary. And this alone we brought with us as the New Crusade began. But who would preach it? None came from their ranks, their numbers thinned in the misery and in the joyous prospect of yet another sunrise to behold through the wreckage. When in the scriptures buried low in their pain showed us the image of a people seeking the light, we compared this to later stages in their works, and found itineraries that led only to a luminous darkness. This, then, was contradicted much later—but resurfaced. We had, therefore, neither light nor darkness to reply upon. What would be our formula? In desperation, we began with the wilderness, for the wilderness began with us.

 

We had been in no way properly prepared. We stared blankly out into the horizon. We sang and we drank. And even so, from among our small numbers one arose in our midst. He pointed to a star, and we undertook our first journey, the Crusade, into the direction indicated by this star. We turned our backs on its galaxy, and we could no longer see with cosmic eyes. Our eyes were filled with granules of simple hope that occluded these fanciful perceptions. But the hope spilled out for us a scripture across this wilderness, and with this, our journey was set.

 

There (though we could never have foreknown this fact) in the breeze a subtle hum murmured. Wolves began their song. They were searching. They were scavenging, hungry for what we could no longer supply—this because we gave up on time and they, these lupine dogs of the earth, picked at the bones of our justice and our virtue, the things lay dying behind us.

 

 

Those same hands, giving up on their experiments in monadic, private languages for the expression of but one phenomenon, turned to exuberant praising once, as mere epiphenomenon, their work gained new significance amidst the absolute futility of their labors. Their hands finally rejoiced across the page, and the ink made and spilled, and the words woven into a texture of singular, unique wesen: all this they gave to later generations, song, dance, play. Ah, dear ones, yes: we have found the formula…

 

What you left lingering in the atmosphere of that hopeful work of transcendence was the monotony of days, the return, and therefore the bliss. Your transcendence required our ruinous wilderness of travel, searching, of blindness, ignorance, desperation … no longer fear or trembling in the Face of Him who would be our judge, but, rather, the ridiculous insistence of not so much a future bearing down upon us ceaselessly, but the return that would bring the dance, the song, even the ludicrous.

 

You gave to him its secret, but the acid of this will took many centuries to worm through its scriptural pages, disintegrating eventually into nourishing soil to be, later, the stuff of new life. What was this new life? They were (and eventually this was our discovery) correct in the fundamentals: annihilation, decay … and the ‘beyond’ that was spoken of was an overcoming of this new thing that found a secure position in the world of their ceaseless and tireless intricacy, this new thing of the “end”. Thus, we witnessed a cataclysm, the crash of a meteor to the earth. Ends without means. This was the epigram, the new foundation stone.

 

Though perhaps the order was the reverse: first the means annihilated, and by this ends were cut loose and collapsed simply for the plain fact that their mundane moorings, being severed, could no longer keep them aloft. End were always lofty, if only because they needed to come. Thus, the earth would quake and shudder. But no longer would we have to endure this trembling. It was simply our ground that trembled and, because of it, no longer did we fear.

 

Yes, indeed, dear ones, we have found the formula….