What good is it and why do you want it? Don’t you feel that? The sensation powerful enough to drown out all of your feelings, to crush the knotted heartstrings until all substance is gone? That is the weight of voices uncountable. Their breaths are short, gasping for but a handful of decades, if they are lucky, before they are able to speak. How easy is seems to listen to their voices.
How simple we think it is. But they are the mirror and we spend too long gazing at the reflection, at the face that is ours rather than the hands about to grasp us by the throat. Everybody is a mirror, isn’t that the case? They are sculptures, glass, perfect, they sing if struck, gently or with violence.
Would that you could draw them close to you, that you could hold their faces in front of yours and see your own face in their eyes. Know thyself. The great commandment, the catechism of wisdom. Know thyself. But all you want is to be known by whoever is on your mind at the time.
You? Know yourself? There’s nothing to know. So you instead wait, palming your knees as you draw the air into yourself slowly. Surely they will be here soon, to tell you who you are. Through the eyes of the other, they say, through them, know what you are. Look at yourself through them.
Step outside, don’t look in. But these faces, they are but gasps on the wind and you are no better than a momentary lapse of judgement, some vast plan’s minor blip. But things never go according to plan, even for the great way of things, for that which drives us all.
Gods make mistakes, and here you sit, one of them, trying to grasp at the frayed edges of meaning, trying to make it all make sense. They stand there, faces marked in disinterest. Not even the Owl will watch you, it doesn’t care. All that wisdom, all that want you have that constricts you until you can feel the malformed mass of flesh in your chest heave and heave and heave and you wish to desperately that it would just stop trying, that it would accept what everything has been telling it.
Rest, rest. Falling, your trapped beneath it and you refuse to escape. You must lift it. You must be strong enough to hold up the rubble of noble destiny. You are part of something so much bigger. Small, you’re a speck, drifting, waiting, you know nothing of what is to come. You are not part of the plan. Stand back, be obscured, allow the real cast to take to the stage.
They know their lines, though they know not where they take them. Oh, you hurt yourself? Did you feel a tear form? Let it spill, the ground needs watering. At least then something might grow out of your weakness. Know thyself. The eyes of the other. But nobody is watching, you’re not seen.
You see yourself but you know not what you see, because you have not been constituted and yet you wait for him to come along and tell you who you are but he is not coming because you are not someone, not even the nobody which can be found, you are so overcast by the ignorance of all things that you cannot realise yourself. Worse, nothing you can do.
Just go and fade somewhere quietly, now, we don’t want to make a scene. Light a cigarette, maybe? You’re burning yourself from the inside out regardless, might as well capitalise on the style. You’ve spent so long staring into mirrors that you’ve crossed into one. Now all you can do is wait for the glass to shatter, but when it does, oh when it does, you’re going to break up into infinite pieces.
Dust on the breath of those who have been given the role you wish you had. Come now, green doesn’t look good on you. But you know that, all you can see is your own, distorted face. To be, to be, to be is to be, to be is to be perceived and you are blind, invisible. Gone? No. Still here, but you could have fooled anyone, maybe even yourself. Not that you possess the alacrity to notice. Go on, bite at it. Let it run. Demand that the world bow to your wishes like the God you wish you were. Just remember that to be a God is to have an eternity with which to lose.
