Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Uries at Heshens - "The Antique Country"

An eon has past since I walked the borderlands, where sun meets sky and water, land.

Even now it melts and sinks into tepid waters, like the great aurel crack and float, ever southward, until what magic they held, the frozen air of the north, the tyrant touch of their homes, the very detritus they have preserved, is vanished. What displaces this wonder is not known to me, but I will take it into myself if that is what is taken; I will bring it low with my own weakness, let that terrible grievance rest itself in my heart, burn itself shallow in my own hunger.  And when it seeks it to escape, I swallow it back again, back into the cloud that is my heart, the mist that I have eaten.  The mist I stole.

And as I know this, as I seek the truth of the place from which I came, I see that we are a people obsessed with time and place.  That there is nothing new, no clear beginnings, that all these things the result of but a tiny question that lays itself in my mouth, underneath our tongues, laying forth with full fury when its time is come.

It says, "Why?"

It says, "What is this?"

It says, "From whence it came?"

It says, "Take me to the source." 

And we comply, ill-fated and woebegone creatures spring from our paths and we go past them.  That is the source of all comfort, all beginnings, all sources.  In some fashion, all hope.  What then, if we obliterate この事?  What is left then, but emptiness?  To fill our hearts with, emptiness.  When we seek out the tyrant touch of language, drape its airy vestment 'round our rise, raise its tale in our windy courtyards.  We will not leave, nor it leave us.  Alone. We will not leave.  alone.