I am here and in this sentence that is meant much more for you than for I and that, all by itself, whispers the unspoken solution ever untouched by the endless explanations greeting every last unasked question and that effortlessly carries me along – I, its rider – I, who departed into that night far off and alone – I, who am nothing but a shadow come back from that ancient house.
You are there – pure thoughts beyond that ever-veiled silence enchantingly echoing that ongoing nocturnal hidden struggle of I-do-not-know-what up in that secret room somewhere.
You and I. There and here. I have traveled this distance now between us toward uncertain solitudes and this report shall serve not only as the measure of this distance but as the very materials out of which that new house you now inhabit shall be constructed, a new house you and I are currently building together out of the songs of the earth;
from the dimming heartwoods and sapwoods,
to the valleys,
to the mountains,
to the sky-blue morning awaking the city,
to the rain drenched suburbs,
to the cardboard abode beneath the roaring interstate,
to the little village whose steady fountains still murmur
and whose evening bell beckons our breaking hearts.
I am here where a nightingale sings its lament directly upon the branches of a nearby tree. Someday someone is likely to turn this event into a pecuniary advantage.
The sweet song of darkness is everywhere though we are unable to recall even one note.
Yet, I am a rider. And my fugitive destiny seems still sweeter to me under the spell of distant illusions, a singsong whisper in my ear.
You are there – in that house in which you find yourself – in which you might even hope to discover something about yourself. Why not? It is at least an option. Though perhaps only once you have left it. On the other hand, how could you possibly leave when its construction depends so soundly upon you?
You are there – where you speak to me wordlessly always and only by way of words – and this unspeakable act – like the light of stars shining from that blackening unquiet, that infinity of the dead – reaches out to here from a there to which we may never return.
In truth, I have not traveled far. It feels as though I have only just left. But, for some reason, I cannot remember – I already forget, for instance, my journey here, how it is I arrived here. I only remember vaguely coming from there.
But now I am here, wherever here is. Walking alongside a street. Coming across no one at all. Sand and pebbles on the margin of the road. Wild, overgrown grasses slowly encroaching. Mostly silence, the nightingale having faded from my notice a little ways back. Should I have followed it instead? Searched for it?
Why am I here, precisely here, rather than anywhere else? Am I journeying toward a forgotten goal or in the hopes of discovering one?
Rounding a bend, this image now: a white building up ahead. I slowly approach, a rider plodding along.
The opening of a book: we were in a room, weren’t we? Some mystery: no outside. How could we have been so wrong? From one game into another game, that’s all. Everything in sequence, you might say. Has all that was written been lost, swept away like a dream replaced with a morning cup of coffee, gardens after the rain, traffic on the motorway?
A cow standing atop a general store, an old creamery. I seem to know this place. I don’t remember it, but it’s as though I expected it to be here. Still nobody in sight, no sign of life – just objects languishing in the abundance of their formerly certain meanings.
Dusty empty parking lot, quaint country-style signs, a heavy and very creaky screen door, manual cash register, coffee and donuts, whirring motors keeping spoiled milk nice and cold. It must surely have been a charming place.
“Hello…?”
The word echoes and floats over the rotting deli counter through the pointless kitchen and all the way back to the unwashed dishes stuck for who knows how long at this point in their limited life cycle. Just a normal moment in what could almost pass for a normal day – I am even tempted to place some money at the counter for the water I take from one of the coolers dutifully working away – such apparently is my obedience to even the ghostly appearance of normal life – a normal day in which normal people go about their normal tasks.
But there is nobody!
Not even hidden behind the images or ideas – they’re just not here. No, just me breathing into an ageless silence that I want to ride but whose continual and mesmerizing unveiling I can’t quite quit.
These were, after all, the places where we lived and worked – places we were happy to leave for a little while – but were even happier to return to once our rhetorical vacation had ended. The house of work and the house of home where meaning and purpose are so dictated that they needn’t be disturbed by thought at all. Oh but how different they now look!
Sipping my water on the creamery porch, watching the golden twilight slowly envelop the azure sea like a song. A profound calm in the infinite solitude of this infinite country. Even an airplane, visible evidence of humankind’s pioneering, domineering, conquering, master-of-earth spirit, seems to just gently float there at a noiseless standstill within nature’s moving painting.
Do meaning and purpose serve any function whatsoever here? Are they as inescapable here as ever? Words spilling endlessly from an unknowable but no less present flowing being described repeatedly with variations – some of them subtle and some profound – and at once being measured, examined, placed, categorized, compared, contrasted, shunned, booed, hoorayed, sloganed, mimicked and slept through.
Embroiled in the turbidity of these thoughts, I casually slide my water-free hand into my pants pocket and hope that gazing into that colorful, impossibly present distance will simply dissolve the difficulty. Instead, I notice that despite the changing palette and varicolored hues of that skyward sea, the manmade hunk of flying metal has changed neither in size nor in position – it just hangs there, an empyrean shipwreck frozen on a curved screen.
What cataclysm has befallen us? A room at the edge of the page slowly turning away . . . a depopulated world wherein the event may now be spoken by a true language as non-event . . . the infinite truths of the non-event and the non-events of that infinite truth. But whosoever hears this language? This language constantly gasping for its breath while being buried again and again by the willful and the ignorant.
Here a laugh escapes my throat which, despite the water, feels rather scratchy, like morphemic parchment.
The greatest and finest joke is upon all of us: the laughter that seems meant to dissuade us from acting like automatons is itself an automatic action. Still, the necessity of an alarm clock does not lie in awakening us to the existence of alarm clocks.
My hand pulls out the small folded piece of paper it has noticed in the pants pocket. It reads: Von Kriege
A cold, hollow echo – the beating of bewilderment in the head. Look off in a couple directions to see which one might be best to head in. Just across the street from this general store, I can see a modest building and some letters that suggest to my eyes that it is a library. Sounds like a good place to investigate this “Von Kriege”.
It seems clear now that I am a rider with a purpose. And having a purpose means something more, as well. It means that I am also a hunter.
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A place where something is torn, torn, torn
{ } VK Arkiv 