“When we cease to impose an order born of learned expectation, all becomes beauty and wonder.”
But he could feel the cold placidity setting in and so he wrapped her up in his arms and hugged her like a life-sized rag doll, rocking back and forth on his knees and squeezing her as if to extract every remaining flicker of life that he might carry them forth the rest of his days until arriving to that altar where salvaged embers simmered in perpetuity. A faint radiance to keep the darkness from enclosing irrevocably.
But the maneuver was just another superfluous performance within a greater ritual which was really just a way of being reminded that nothing was necessary.
“But I don’t care, because I’ve finally seen the end. The end of desire. Of knowledge. Finally, I am empty, which is the closest thing, I think, to being complete.”
“In their unbridled appetite for self-enrichment, they have brought us the age of rampant industrialization and the cult of obsessive growth. And if that sounds suspiciously like cancer that’s because it’s essentially what it is.”
All of them wore the same baggy camo pants with the tucked-in black t-shirts which featured some of the fun and diverse ways an American flag could be incorporated into a human skull.
“The violence is owned by him who presses his boot onto the neck of the person struggling for air beneath it. The person he knocked to the ground to begin with. To remove the boot from one’s own neck is simply an act of self-preservation.”
There are some objects that have passed through the magic of those mysterious events that have shaped our world and perhaps its very meaning. And in doing so, carrying a trace of this magic into the unsuspecting future.
“The next revolution won’t be all these hipsters wearing t-shirts of Che Guevara or Sitting Bull or some other aesthetically striking revolutionary, while in their actual lives siding with the same forces that had each of them killed. It won’t be the establishment of holidays in their name as an Orwellian salute while undermining the very principles for which they fought and died, as with Dr. Martin Luther King or Jesus of Nazareth.”
But even as the imagery of warhorses and castles and canons faded after the manner of the empire that issued the coin in service of an insatiable drive for domination, it was the minute symbol of rebellion stamped at the upper edge which had prevailed the rigors of time. A penny-sized key to a million-dollar mystery.
After sharing a meditative silence to contemplate the implications of all things—of limits inescapable and horizons never-ending, of soaring joys and suffocating sorrows, and of the forces both malevolent and virtuous that worked in concert to bring together and break apart the playthings of creation—Orun finally asked his brother the question that portended an answer he was not prepared to accept or understand.
“We are on a collision course with tragedy on an absolute harrowing scale. It is already too late to chart a manageable course out of this mess. There are no good options remaining. Only those which are least terrible. And of these, there is only one that is remotely compassionate. Utopia.”
“It certainly does seem that existence itself is teetering on that knife’s edge between being a worthwhile phenomenon and an inherently malignant one.”
“Think about it. Imagine simulations where every possible course of action over time can be explored and analyzed in a matter of seconds. Imagine being able to identify the previously unknown patterns and connections hidden throughout the fabric of existence. Imagine all you could learn, and how much you could improve decision-making and automated processes.”
“So we’re going to play god.”
“If god were a logician.”
“This is so perfect, thank you so much. I am not afraid, I promise you, I am not the least bit afraid. And when your time comes, you won’t be either because it’s such a beautiful thing. It’s just a reorganization of energy exploring the infinite potentiality of arrangements where each is its own exquisite work of art. It’s the zenith of creative expression, dynamic and fluid—never static. But also, never forgetting.”
“In other words, the robin, just like every other migratory bird, can actually ‘see’ the earth’s magnetic field. Therefore, seeing its destiny. The pull of which is subtle, and yet inescapable.”
At the end of the portico, she hastened to a skip as she hit the steps, beginning her descent back into a world that refused to end.
“There is no ‘who’ and there is no ‘what’. There is no cause. There is only the appearance of these things. And behind that, an undifferentiated, timeless and dimensionless anima which made the synchrony possible to begin with. And only that which willed it into being can bring about its dissolution.”
He might have fallen in love with her all over again if not for his suspicion that she had drifted beyond him somehow.
The excitement was palpable. Every minute and every mile brought them that much closer to the hidden vault in the earth which had summoned them from halfway around the world where history and destiny converged as one.
The old 70’s model Ford that came rolling up on them was an eyesore with its calico spots of rust and cracked windshield and the front bumper which was held in place by mechanic’s wire. But to their young rescuer, running toward it with his arms waving, it was the mothership for teenage dirtbags.
“You’re not a cliché, you’re an archetype. In a cliché you’re helpless. But in an archetype there’s destiny and power. And if there’s one thing that can be said for sure about you, Beth Galloway, it’s that you’re not the helpless type.”
All that cutting wit, that philosophic grappling, that torsional waist and the smirky smile that would spread deviously beneath that ski jump nose—the whole quirky and extraordinary package—hurrying off to some new rabbit hole without him.
“But whether it’s a hundred years or a billion it doesn’t even matter because time is only relative to the delusion of your momentary attachment and either way everything is destined to disintegrate to nothing and there’s not a goddamn thing we can do about it.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Karen, her face contorting under the strain of arduous thought. “Let’s see, there was my contact at the publishing agency, who never did shit.”
“Anyone else?”
“There was also my mom, my sister, my best friend who turned out to be a fake-ass ‘ho, and my ex-fiancé who fingered Ms. Fake-Ass-Ho on my couch which I loved but then had to get rid of which was the worst part about the whole thing …”
In one blink wondering what the fuck hit him.
In the next blink wondering how an entire life could whisk away in a breath.
And then utter emptiness from those eyes that would never blink again.
“But the more we go along, the more things seem to backslide toward the same old bullshit. It’s like, if not even the apocalypse can change old patterns, then what the fuck ever could.”
And every morning when she stirred awake there would be the hint of a smile on her lips and the tracks of dried tears streaking her face along with the lingering vision which she believed to be revelatory of her craft catching a favorable riffle before vanishing around the bend downstream. For while the individual currents were volatile the totality of them were omniscient and the intrinsic flow knew only the way of destiny. And in this she took solace.
“You would say that, Jarvis. Seeing how your nose was so far up his ass you knew what was for dinner even before his stomach did!”
This time the boys didn’t stop moving until every last bag was stuffed into the car and they didn’t stop talking until finally zipping closed the skylight in the roof of their tent, bidding goodnight to the diamond-studded sky which carried over into each of their dreams as they sailed ceaselessly across the cosmic ocean where worlds on end cascaded in the infinite ripple that expanded always and everywhere.
This was where time went into abeyance. Sometimes minutes compressed into seconds and sometimes it was the seconds that stretched into minutes but it didn’t matter because he had unchained himself from that tyrannical gearwork of things moving too fast or too slow and always changing but rarely for the better. And that was the beauty of it.
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