Joseph Voelbel

They all had a strange look on their faces. He'd been told it was human. It seemed to carry a deliberate sense of artifice like the packaging on a child’s toy, protecting the illusions within. His feet moved. His fingers wiggled. His eyes carried that same strangeness he saw upon the fronts of those that slunked about and amidst the shadows of the metropolis (an odd term of endearment used by early 21st century humans to refer to what Plato allegorized in The Republic as The Cave,). They lived in a day’s dream of rest. They were the sleeping tired. He, burdened by the profound realization of selecting this journey, had only his consciousness and the solace of a breeze as his companions. Those that were close felt peculiarly distant. Many that were dead, profoundly near.

How to make something of himself when one's life was their canvas, their decisions brushstrokes in an unrelenting Garden of Forking Paths.^[1] To live boldly, a fiction. To live meekly, an act of courage. He felt himself to be like the dust upon the floor of a great house, since carcassed, on some inconspicuous hillside overlooking a village which once held communion with the sky. These ideas were not his. The notion of property to him, absurd. Even in so far as we say ourselves.

Flesh cuts smoothly as if in water. Spirit calls for peace in a temple of the profane. What is good, what is true, what is noble, encapsulated in the heights of bodies entwined, fates woven into fates, the tapestry of a comedy, a joke one's only serenity. What is evil, what is false, what is ignoble, the distance between the trough and the wave, the receding tide from the shoring of capitalism, the notion of nations, of boundaries, and even of names, perhaps all a perpetuation of disillusionment. He carried wisdom sheepishly, bereaved by the capacity to perceive. He sought a monk’s removal. A hermit’s concealment. And yet to him, these were a coward’s seclusion. His defense - a sense of humor against the onslaught of animation - his only path to peace of mind. A path less traveled, a path forgotten, a path with its tracks dusted over, buried in the depths, locked into a trunk where secrets ferment, in a society of amnesiacs quoting other's false memories, feeling truth to be the letter and fact to be the word.

He, a mime, amidst a cacophony, like the impartiality of the color white within a blizzard. His dearest friends, Rilke, Keats, Kafka, dead men with living ideas. Life an auction, where many spirits lie defenseless to the inculcation of commands. Buy. Sleep. Die. Repeat.

Wherefore dost your flower bloom? Of what can be said the fragrance of a flower? Paradox a precursor to that clarity that teases him. And they order coffee. And they discuss people. What is he if not they? How can he not be they? Why would he not be they? For then he is no more. If he does not perceive the piety of a vacuum, the chamber of a sound, the birth of a star, the omen of a great nation, a great lover, a terrible war, a fantastic thought, then with whom is he fighting if not himself? For those who have crest the wave, who have lifted their heads over the breakwater, who have wrought, tore, heaved and wound their way to view a partially occluded glimpse, who have stepped from the shadow and called forth their name, demanded its number be spoken, for those whom that opportunity even exists, are like prime integers - only divisible by themselves and God. (There is no limit to the number of prime numbers. There is no pattern to primes, as if they were a sort of unending imagination.)

Now they watch news. Now they take opinion as density. Now they succumb to believe the estrangement of man from the divine as the path of Reason, whom stood naked in a windowless room with a compass and a microscope. Now they are enfeebled with diminuendo, lemmings quoting medical scripture lining the well padded white pockets of doctor’s coats amidst diagnostical psychoses de pharmacology, whilst kids point toy guns and say, “pow”, a pattern, we split atoms. Why? For bigger toys? To wrap bodies in plastic, artifice and dust?

An awakened age forgiven by blood let. Now there’s skin in the game. Words like Matrix and Maya behave like bubble gum. You chew on them, poignantly, acceptingly, forgivingly, pursuant to the ascent, the return, the instantiation of novelty as an acceleration of gaiaic mana, wherefrom whence pendulum’s cross. His words become our words. Our words become his thoughts become our thoughts becoming his words. His miracles become our miracles. He, who lined a darkened street with well lit oil lanterns, which made wide and clear the road ready for those returning, from the chasm and the ache, from the gnawing implausibility, from the headstrung reductivism...

He, who peers in store windows watching widows purchase chachkies, and thinks, what has come of the bridegrooms? Have they died in battle? Are they lost in some smokey parlor tippling beverage and chasing cards for Lady Luck’s indifferent advice? Is this not also, me? He who wonders how to keep the gait, whilst his pockets become empty, whom demands, trumpets for his people, his culture, his planet, his family. Those learned fools, holy fools, sacred fools, he

felt them. Unknown wise-ones unknowing. To toe the line as taught? To make a spiral line skyward? To draw a circle?

To feel what is wondrous about the quotes of great thinkers?

A glass of water. A ray of light upon thy brow. The Countenance of Forgiveness.