2024-06-24
I owe myself absolutely nothing. I am destitute; I am a prophet. A prophet of dread. I remember when I could live passively, how miserable that was. I had five-thousand dollars to my name and yet, of it, I had no concept. I lived but I did not live well. I spent not on luxuries but on perpetuating my misery just a little bit longer. I sat idle, in the lap of my filthy god. I thought of nothing; everything I did was irreverent and irrelevant. I was bound by a constant, unchanging festival of words. The longer it went on, the more I grew bored. Little by little my life came to resemble the shevirah. My self, my primordial vessel, shattered and engendered a thousand more. My constrained light filled the darkness of the world and I could see everything. I found myself to be a litany of selves—selves who were excluded from life itself. The silence of my life was killed off by a party of assassins. Now the noise is inescapable.
The screams are at once beautiful and terrible, but they are me. My fugue has broken into the tyranny of song. In this moment I have realized that I have nobody but my selves. I am the wandering jew, bound to roam the earth’s crust until the last body drops. I am a scavenger, prohibited from the labor of dust. The kingdom walls have no gates and I find myself outside their reach. I have been everywhere and I have seen nothing. I am blind to all except the world inside. My tomb awaits my resignation in the old city uruk, but I would rather die in the flood so that, after the deluge, only my effigy remains.
The sun comes to me in peace, but it leaves me in ashes. I have nothing to escape. I am unburdened by walls, and so I must hallucinate their existence. I am the cruel lord of my fief. I have killed every one of my servants so that I may be completely alone. I sit in my tower, dead to the world. The saints look down at me with pity and fear. I am one among none. I walk the world of the dead. I rot and starve as the days go by, wishing for a sickly funeral. I will die without speaking so that I have no last words. My obituary will be one sentence long. I will be buried under my church of solitude. I will fade into obscurity. And I do hope that no one grieves. I hope my passing is so quiet that even God forgets to judge my soul.
I am killing myself by silence. Farewell to language; to writing. I am better off purged of these demons. They bring me nothing but pain. Last night I was visited by angels. I did not speak to them, nor did they speak to me. There was no need. They could read my wordless desires. I could read their stillborn mercy. From that moment I decided that I would abandon my secular interests and solely commune with the messengers of God.
My dreadful condition renders me essentially mute. It is impossible to verbalize my savage thoughts. They are pre-linguistic; subhuman. Participating in language is a game of desperation. Articulating nothing at all demands a trained tongue that I do not have.
Following the angels in their departure, I have decided to run away. I have decided to abandon everything I know. I run a knife through heavenly Sophia’s chest and leave her to the archons. Wisdom has no place in my Holy Land. I prepare to trek through the heavens, hiring a caravan of monks. But as we leave my ancient city and enter into the ocean of aching sand, they rob me of my halo. And so I am abandoned in the desert of God. I wander into its drunk eternity without a shred of hope. I am His only rival.