Two

 Foreboding. I cry out and I scream to you. “It is foreboding” was your reply. An enigma.

Buried. Lost. I had forsworn an oath as youth left me. One written in my own captivated silence, drawn by wonders, sharpened by diamonds, hidden and protected by a cave, a fortress (only he knew where he could make demons obey and return).

Where are we going? It had seemed to us, for long now, that we undertook a journey. The map was burned, the territory declared uninteresting. We pressed on, through a wilderness no bible of ours had mentioned. A new wilderness—already having given up on deserts, thick forests, or tundra. Solitude promised wilderness, but this was to become the banality of our days, the mundane work of foreknown passages, quoted at length to allow the tedium to dissipate (only the sun was greeted by a grand ruse as the moon shone brighter one singular night, which all the galaxy paused to witness).

Then, a page turned, and dust replied. We could no longer stand in the shade, so we took to the sunlight, the rays awaited our skin, bronze with anticipation. Our tunnel awaited us, too. But we had turned our backs, and upon the mouth of our cave we found a lonely wisp of an apparition which, in days long gone and quickly forgotten, would have been cause for scripture. Now it was gone. What was that? We stood and wondered. We quoted our respective ignorance. And we returned the favor to the schools, now imploding under a weight of techniques for self-preserving stupidity (a word, we agreed, that was so far under-served by our great literary canon, so much so that we planned a ceremony so that it could be blasted with a single cannon-shot back into cultural infamy—this, our petty idealism).

Remotely (by which we meant by remote-control operations whose actual details eluded all but the most foolish of our numbers), we took up our arms, and fancied ourselves what we in fact actually were: warriors of the age, the Crusaders walking blindly into the Night of our failed empire, greeting our hapless fellow non-persons with the disturbed smile of the forlorn—that is, the vacant husks foraging for the scraps of their notional triumphs. It was all a sad double-illusion.

Could you not see this, dear ones, during those long-winded hours atop fragrant pine planks, setting your texts aflame with grave voices, ears alive with the music of pure will? Oh, yes, He (our only true ‘he’—beyond rest) knew this well, and as he drifted in naive affection over those triumphal pages and was inspired and glorified; no—transfigured was he into a man with innards that would not yield to simple medicament when wounded; he found a final repose and an uncertain future among us.

Friends, you know my voice languishes—in too many paragraphs the fire begins but I lose myself in a tedium of thoughts. When shall the imagery cease? When shall we all yield to the metaphysic of singing spirals, the laugh of one husk to another blank hole?

‘We are a simple people’—oh this was their epigram, scrawled into soft rock, ennobling their documents, sealing their currency. Why the simple, after all the time that had gone by? Once their warriors stoked the flames of fear throughout the land … and now a quiet and somber tomb.

At this point, when we paused to consider our descriptions, our work suddenly seemed elevated. A noble pursuit—of the simple. The mundane. The banal … perhaps, but we demurred (much, much later). No, the simplicity was a lie.

It happened that once round was the farce; with no repetition, time and the stories we tell to keep the wind underneath its campfire, falls to its knees and confesses to being a total sham. But with a second round, a second—that is, a return—well … there was a real tragedy. And it befell us. More than twice. Perhaps for a third, fourth, an nth time … we could not tell. In fact, we could never tell, and soon enough the buffoon someone had put in charge of our department discerned the distinct signs of our failure, which is to say, his own failure to realize that time never disclosed its secret. But he thought himself clever, nonetheless, for his chastisements and his admonitions.

The one minor difference that escaped repetition was that this buffoon ultimately failed to catch us before we found his weakness, or rather, his penchant for dimwitted dissimulation. He was easily eliminated in favor of one given over to radical banality covering profound uncertainty of character. And we said to ourselves, inside the tunnel, deep into our cave: welcome home my dear; where have you been all this time? We've been waiting for you….

Nothing could have prepared us for this sort of finale. We even found a new philosophy of ends without means hidden inside this mystical work. The end never was so mundane. After these many tens of thousands of millenniums (as we speculated in our short-lived but exuberant digest) what waited to be disclosed was the simplicity of ends, the unceremonious finitude that escaped every previous philosophical attempt to break through to this singular place of the one total experience of the one thing needful—and they called it wesen in one of their languages. A verbal form, implying the most ordinary of ordinaries. (Though many generations later, in several journals and yearbooks turned yellow and disintegrating, this would be judged pure claptrap. The word had to be coined, or rather resurrected anew, the these later times judged themselves far simpler a people than any prior civilization could have possibly been. Truth—and nature—loves to hide, we supposed.)

The end fell to the earth; the moon slipped into a coma, and the sun gasped for air—and finally died. A dewdrop dropped to the ground, and soil soaked one last worm who bored into one final shoot that lifted to heaven one last curled leaf. And the stars leaped, and broke their spiral formation. And the cosmos finally wailed, and the dust with which we were formed at last cried into the very last wilderness anyone had known.

And we fled.