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ever ebbing tide and sinking for our first and final time, are able to clutch
at a few more of those straw days, I could believe that we do so not so much
in the feeble expectation of saving ourselves, but more in the malicious hope
of taking them down with us.
And what of superstition? The castle had a chapel once; our father, who is in
the ground, had it excised. I stood, a young child, in the dim splendour of
its window's great rosette, the day before the workmen came, crying at the
thought of its removal, for purely sentimental reasons. Some days later, when
that stained, dogmatic stillness had been removed, released from its metal
sieve, I
stood with you on the altar, blinking out at the living lushness of the summer
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countryside revealed.
The very intuition there must be something else beyond this physical world
makes me guess it's wrong. We set ourselves UP too thoroughly in this, and if
we must indulge in such anthropopathism at all, why then I'd claim that
reality could hardly miss a chance so tempting, and must feel duty bound to
let us down. The way things happen, just how they operate, includes an all
embracing brusqueness, an encompassing lack of ceremony and respect against
which we can shore all our pious holdings and most cherished institutions and
which we may rail against and oppose for exactly as long as we live, but which
includes all our aspirations and degradations, all our promises and lies and
all we do and all we don't, and which sweeps us in the end aside with less
effort than metaphor can convey.
It takes more mistakes, more purely random chances, more chaos and irrelevance
to produce the epic than the sordid yarn, or the hero than the common man.
Romance, or our belief in it, is our genuine undoing.
Yet there is progress of a sort, I could admit; we once believed in happy
hunting grounds, houris, real palaces and places in the sky, and man shaped
gods. Nowadays, amongst those with the wit to realise their predicament, a
more sophisticated spirituality prevails; an infinite nonsensicalism replacing
and displacing all, so that, one day, when all we here are dust, particle and
waveform, those who follow us will see just that as a deal more continuity
than ever we deserved.
And within our little sphere, even mortality is mortal, and there is an end to
endings, and the days; not endless.
By an unholy power, by itself meaningless, as senseless as it is implacable
and irresistible coerced, we should know at last that all else but another
knowing to consciousness is inimical, and that our love dies with us, not the
reverse.
(So long lives nothing, so long live nothing, so long.)
On the other hand. maybe it's just as they say.
But I doubt it, and I'll take my chances, like all else, with me.
The night points me at the earth shadow cone's far point, as though to aim me
at its farthest mark. Ah, discomfort me all you will, idiot star and
accomplice rock. And, dark bird, do your most predictable, for what I've
joined and what
I've left, what I've done and what neglected, what I've felt and what
dismissed, what I've been and what not been, matters and means, signifies and
is less than one half thought in any one of us, and none the worse and
certainly none the better for that.
Let me die, let me go; I've said my piece, refused to make it, and now is
that the dawn? Is this some sleep, or do I dream, or can I now hear reveille
and the bugle's closing call? I face my future, turn my back on a lifetime's
desolation and on these dumb persecutors and am duly raised, brought up again,
elevated glorious and triumphant to skies the colour of blood and roses, sneer
at the dice that tumble (yes yes; die! die! Iacta est alea ' we who are about
to die despise you), laugh at cheers that rise, buoying me, and with that
salute my end.
The End
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