The I an animal:
For so long have I been dominated by fear, placed in there, in the marrow ,by systemic poisons.
Poured cup to cup, through the leaking vaults of years.
Formed from the offal of violence, into this writhing, pained and wrathful thing...
it is still living.
Its name was my mothers religion, my fathers laws.
There in the churches was I offered up to this virus light.
My young animal heart wanted nothing of it, but it was given my blood.
Through my lips, for many a year came its voice and in time the thoughts of my very heart could not be distinguished from the voice of this god.
I was lost in the buzzing, itching glory, blind and wet.
Fear ruled, judgement, hate, violence, but above all fear.
That fear, that virus still dully aches and burns in my animal blood, even now, it aches tonight.
But at its zenith, a small rat came sneaking in through my own souls shadow, rather, the soul of souls, refined and compressed called itself rat.
Rat called himself then out of that light.
I fled as rat then through the maze, the labyrinth we all run.
And run I do, towards wolfs open jaws.
The further I run, I can better make out the shape of my own paws, my own tail becomes more familiar.
I can feel the air in my fur and smell the paths, my own body too has its smells.
I can hear my breathing and our heartbeat.
I stop from time to time and ask the rat "How ever did we escape?"
At times I can see his mouth moving, but cannot hear him over the great buzz of that light called by so many names, society and religion and law and expectation and self limitation and fear! Oh for fear so often can I not hear him!
When I did hear him at length, this is what he said to himself in the shadows:
"There is assurance, there is comfort, there is ease and meaning and systems in "knowing": Blessed Assurance, curse of slumbering and eater-consumer of this world. "knowing" is the nothing and so I have given you this black circlet, dark nimbus. Here your very name be etched, for this is your Creed:
No knowing has ever been. No knowing is there. No knowing will there ever be.
We live by this darkness, only in its concealment may we move free of that blinding light. Of that light is born all confusion and disagreement and malice and stopping. Come now over into lunar night, silence immaculate. They have said "If it were not so, I would have told you" " I tell you here above all else, we do not know how we escaped, we do not know where we go to, nor do we know why or truly from where. In the concerning or obsession of such things lies fear and the stopping. Now "marveling" and 'the wonder" are of the sacred night, but the desire for truth as power and correctness as authority and knowing as absolutism are of the harming light. If a man says "I know nothing" he says he knows that he knows nothing and it falls again to falsehood. There is no grasping this thing that I have given you, you will never know it. As we write this, there are languages that fail, for they pertain to a "knowing", this I can only muster: "Take you a rosary from some strange, tiresome and overwhelming place, imbue in it all confusion and confounding and unknowing and letting go, give it no prayer, attribute to it no structures or steps, only hold it as an object in you hand. Let all thoughts and worries and fears and places you so firmly stand and answers you desperately desire and all that you think you know and all manner of thinking and emotion pass into it and dissolve there before you, no matter how precious or horrifying, let them dissolve there and pass into darkness, and sigh. Do not stop to think on them, pass them by. Bring your great questions to this trinket and let them pass as though some unremarkable thing seen out the peripheral. The rosary of the unknowing, at my altar you may find it and through it, the only glimpse of this halo of unknowing. This is adaptation, this is running a maze on instinct, this is walking and walking still. This is not to learn, for is there any learning it? can the mind be put to such a task? No, only the body and soul may manifest such a mystery, it is either the deepest pit, full of wailing and no light and panicked falling. Or, it is the lightest thing, easily taken unceremoniously from here to there, yet stepping through it brings a new path to walk."
Exploration without taxonomy. Rats heard but not seen.
Squeak.
