Here I stand convinced again, sure of what’s not necessarily so. Soul turned outsides in for the diamond glint. And he contains none of it himself. Not a beam or freckled flint does he radiate. No, he’s possessed by his passers by. Each gazing the Narcissus glow upon his naked walls to see their own light fractured and bent by some foreign law –a microcosm of life in light and stone. To see the mundane for its profanities, vivisected and strewn out before us is too much a temptation for the eye, and thus that banal colony, the finger. Take it and put down in ink it’s flaws! Now! each and every! It must be done for we can not bear it otherwise.
The months and I transpire the vapor of hot days and cold, fearing only consciousness –the devil that he is– shuttering a stare at the staff. Prefer we, the vapor and leaves and I, the Moment Himself ‘stead his inclination for leaning and tipping into that longer shadow he boasts. Consciousness as the devil, sure, but who be the Moment? The unburdened beast. Perhaps the Ox can bear any weight but that of knowing the number of his days. Give our necks the yoke, return the lash and lasher, stampede us our innocent suspicions!
We were all innocent once. Cursed not with labor but with Knowing, the bitten cry for return to mother’s belly, to the ashes and dust from whence we came; any god damned thing to forget! To enjoy the days with fickle folly and the candle by night and even that we dane to romance (nay, we demand it) –these are the fodder of all story, all myth, all foundation for the stories that make our consciousness; but why a story at all? What of that can we explain? And if we wake up in such a tale, we’re surely not the author! And if shepherds can be slain, surely it’s not they who slay themselves.
Does he boast -this shadow- after all? Does he enjoy his role, this taker of innocence? Why he must have his own good days, and thereby harder ones too. Is he darkness itself? Surely he is not the light itself; we’re taught quite the opposite. Light casting a shadow, what irony! To be so, WE must be between, and if those two unnerved directors, then also we must be of crucial import; for what is the character of man without one being crucified, the slaughtering of an Ox? Without the tree twixt those soothsayers, liars and try-hards both, they have no game between them, no object to blame, no shadow to entertain their revolutions with its bending and gaining and dying and reemergence. And how numb a place to be cursed with; wandering around aimless. No, they cast the great irreversible curse, the very curse we bear, we and all the oxen however dim or clever. The buck passers, they, light and dark. But the makers of games know not all their pieces. They shouted “dance, dance!” and dance we did, for our bread, but our numbers were never meant this high, and that thief (WHO IS THIS, GOD?), he stole not the water, but the curve and shine of Pisces’ pleasure. And thus: If the pieces make war, well then Eve, Adam and the Early One will have a table shaking good time and order the next round. Perhaps this is their repeated reunion after a long drought. But what of this finger trap for the maker, that oldest circle and serpent? May those two managers vacate? I think not. I think that shadow grows long and dark and heavy. Something perverts it’s edges; the players–perhaps they make a little light and dark themselves. With what other qualities might they be endowed? Did the managers know they’d become diluted in this venture? In all the days of history, did perhaps a sudden gale ever whip round’ the house, and loose a single sheet of capital stock from the kitchen table and scissor it’s way ‘neath the door, all whispy like? Does that certificate have written on its face -or in fine print on its back, more likely- “I am.” Does he issue himself? Does he call forth that very wind, self-endowed, self storming? And if so did he not storm the beaches at Normandy and ride the steel beast down to the very point of impact upon our yellow brothers? Did he not crash every wave that sank every titan? Was he not in the tooth of every lion that just the same, sank our grandfathers’ flesh?
No, these two fickle managers are just as subject as we. Whether pawn or rook or knight or knighted queen, all gale force winds blow across our board with whispered hints that like waking dreams are forgotten upon rousing. Perhaps such dreams are dreamt for the forgetting.
And so are We.
Perhaps the spirit who signed that certificate, who spins the light and dark around, and who animated the wind and the doing of deeds, all; perhaps he is the myth inside that mysterious and preciously reflective rock that charred the cheek of Moses. Perhaps he signs his name not “I am,” but “I am You.”
We must hide if not our face from god, then god from our face.