You walk in the sands, the landscape you know by heart, the windswept dunes granular as sugar and almost as white. The screeching seagulls declare, "Water is somewhere, but where?" People say, "The sky's the limit." What kind of limit is that? The sands, the horizon, they're the limit. One echoes the other. You have no GPS, no bearings. One direction is the same as any other.
Legend has it we are on the planet Harm, meaning that is what we are taught from the earliest age. We are told that our world is round, not flat. We are taught that Harm is spherical but not circular. We are taught that Harm is the name of our planet.
Who came up with that, and when?
Who can say?
As a citizen, a resident, of planet Harm, your pain is nothing special, nor is your grief. All of us are in harm's way. It's our birthright. If everyone is in harm's way, who has a right to complain? Sure, differences of degree and scale exist. But they don't stand out. Harm is in the air, in our history, in our vocabulary, our line of sight.
When someone (Anonymous, for our purposes and safety) entertained the idea of escaping the circle of pain, it made no sense. What circle? We see no markings, no signposts. How could there be a circle of harm when harm is all we know? How can we imagine an atmosphere other than our own?
No passports, no tickets, no travel vouchers.
But no one has ever expressed a desire to leave. Nobody has ever voiced a need to flee. And to where would we go? What would we find there?
We perform our daily chores: melting the sand into glass, sculpting the glass into art, selling the art to the Harmageddonite who bids the highest.
The sharp bristly-minty tang of a dark pine forest. The shock of the chlorine choir of the salty sea, its ripples blinding you. The roar of a river halting you. A blanket of emerald meadow lulling you to sleep.
We hear rumors, murmurs. We dream, or fantasize. Our poets sang sagas.
Talk of escape, revolution, refuge. The elders memorized the chants and passed them on to our children's children.
We hear the secret and dangerous whispers about "charms." The unwritten subversive scriptures etched into our blood.
Charms: the coded hints of talismans, trinkets, fetishes, amulets, totems, periapts, tokens, incantations, chants, litanies, phylacteries, scapulas, beads.
The inscription on the desert rock quotes Empedocles: “God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. ”
3 comments:
That is a heavy, thought provoking penscript!
There is a Lake that I visit in solitude to reflect, unclutter the clutter, leave all the tribulations in the tranquil setting.
While gazing at the mesmerizing reflections of the shoreline and skyline in the lake's stillness, I've arrived at a summation.
As my eyes glance upward at the skyline over the timber of evergreens and saplings, it appears that we exist in a 'Globe'. A Globe, one that as a child would shake at Christmas to watch the snow circulate and fall over the seasonal objects within.
We live within a celestial Globe as the Galactic Forces shake earth, testing our resolve, watching as we tumble around before a landing in a soft thud.
And over the decades, we have been shaken, good, bad, indifferent to a soft and sometimes a raucous thump, KABOOM! Subtly perpetuating that the world is round after all!
Maybe you should be Chief Content Officer here.
Chief Content Officer! Car 54 where are you? Or maybe, cuisine archimagirus!
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