The importunate Eight

A wise man once said “let there be light”. But sadly, there was none. There followed an interregnum of darkness that bent our minds into twisted little pretzels of self doubt and dubious reckoning. But we decided to go through the tunnel of life anyway. We had no queries because the answers never mattered. We were the soldiers of misfortune caught in the stream of goodness that flowed around us but never passed between.

Life is a whip slashing through the air with a wicket bite that can be heard, felt and remembered. Decades go by but the mark of the flesh eaters remain. Every waking moment is interred among our memories with the brand of the curling screaming whiplash. Forget the dead of the night for it is a mere blemish compared to the agony of the punisher who seeks out every sensitive membrane in your soul.

Even the most frustrated man will marvel at the sheer symmetry of the path that he follows. Every tread of hope is callously mixed up with two trollops of misery that seemingly can be found on every garden shrub along the way. Any decent cook will know that the salt of hopelessness cakes the very shore from which we stand and marvel at the brilliant seas. The pearly waters and the gleaming gently ululating waves are framed on a wall that is slimy and opprobrious.

Everyone meets the specter of despair as they peer into the darkness surrounding them. You can feel the pursuit of inevitability as it clings to your very shadow. Hope is a lonely lotus that sparkles amidst the carcass of the expectations around it. If man’s spirit is indomitable then so is the ether of life. It is persistent, perennial and pervasive.

How does one move forward when every step is a dragging, drugging and dredging journey? The interminable path that we take skirts the very cosmos but never varies. The vistas are beautiful until you realize that perfection is nauseating.

The sun and the moon dance together to keep us fixated on a view that never alters. Night follows day until we are suitably convinced that change is irrevocable and cast in stone. Alas, what use is change when we cannot control it? Life is gently steering us through centuries of certainty in which we are mere specks that must be swept along or cast aside.

We are remnants of the past with grand assumptions of a future. But what use is an adventure when it can be written once and read forever? What of the past when it can never change to accommodate a new sparkling future? Circadian rhythms of the living enshroud the dead ceaselessly.

Does it really matter that the dead are yet alive? Or that the living have already died? What of babies that are born into this vengeful world every second of our lives? Do they know that every moment of their existence is already being penned by scribes who are adept at rewriting but not at creating. Imagine if you will an endless supply of stories to choose from and the weary arms that select one without even looking at it. Millstones are chosen at random to which are yoked the very soul that should be free from it.

Life is a chimera that beckons to every living thing in this universe and beyond. It begs and scrapes away at our will until we have none left. Relentlessly it continues until we are unable to distinguish ourselves from the very soot of our immolation. Once we are done, then we are part of the macadam that every other life travels upon. The road to perdition has no ending and no beginning. It just interminably vends its way into distant horizons that are beautiful in the distance and corpulent when near. The gleaming asphalt creates an illusion of affluent posterity which withers like old pages in a book. Each soul is a page in the cosmic continuum and once each page is written, a new one grows in its place. As the years flow by, the silt of millennia forms on each and every one of us. We bow down to the oppressive weight until we begin to disintegrate. We are finally dust.

Time passes on but we do not. We are now part of the very fabric that created us. We are the unchanging and the absolute. We can hear and see everything but expectantly we are incontrovertible. Emotions are now like bright stars that coat the galaxy while we are part of the very earth that we were born from. We are the food for the tallest trees in the arboretum and an alchemist hastening the sagging old ones into the under growth.

Once upon a time, there was nothing. We were then part of the vast nothingness that spanned axons. We rose into incandescence for a single moment and then were reduced again. We are back now where we belong and that is in the dark shadows of the universe. Unceasing and unmoving we form the bedrock of the cosmos. We have shed the fiery lights of the citadel to don the black mourning robes of the stygian gloom. Light does not pass us and for that we are eternally grateful. Our visage is best hidden from the pearly trembling eyes of the insouciant. Darkness that was for long a mortal enemy is now our constant friend. We are now part of the eternal secret of life as our anguish cannot be heard anymore.

Ageless and faceless, life has persevered for millions of years. It has marked the beginning of time and perhaps will bookend the cessation as well. The brightest of us will perhaps outshine the eternal for a cosmic second while the others perish prior to their journey into effervescence.

A savant once remarked that, “one makes two and two makes four but why does eight get left behind?” Perchance he knew that the absolute is merely the imposition of natural laws that are importunate.