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imprisons her eyes.
 How can you read the inclination of your scales? I ask her, pointing at the scales which she carries in
her left hand, though it is useless to point, because she cannot see.
 I cannot read, she tells me.  I am blind."
 Then how can you judge? I ask her.
She laughs and laughs and laughs, her mouth gaping wide with the rushing mirth, her stone bandage
stirring not a fraction of an inch, though her loose dress flaps like a storm-pressed sail.
She makes no answer, but she waves aloft the sword which she holds in her other hand.
One by one, she beheads the children.
I know my enemies.
They bear marks upon their foreheads, and the signs label them with stupidity, blindness, intolerance,
and avarice. Their bodies are fueled by the hungry engines of their vanity. They are not remorseful, they
make no apologies.
Their errors are obstinate in their insistence on a counterfeit reality. It is cowardice which makes them
oblivious to the humiliating truth. They make certain that their meager concessions and their pitiful
overtures to honesty do them no harm, rob them of no illusions, and help to prop up their tattered
self-confidence. With armor of happiness and weapons of faith they tread their downward path to a
meaningless fate. They cry and they crow and they make false images to mirror their imaginary affections,
as if the effluent of their tiny minds could alter the course of aeonic destiny.
I, in my pretty disguise as cloven-hoofed Satan, choose to offer solace to their prisoned minds by selling
them vice in the absurd commerce of evil, but my sense of humor will not permit them to have any real
joy of it. They are seeking the cheap fabric of a synthetic existence, and willingly pay the price, which is
their own humanity.
There are puppet strings tied to my fingers, and I can make the world dance to an idiot's tune. I pour filth
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upon their heads, and they pay no more heed to it than if it were the gentle rain which falls from heaven.
Each day they are further dissipated upon the great rack of my ever-present hell, but they are forbidden
to feel horror or disgust, by virtue of the fact that the gloom of the pit is the covenant which they
themselves have sought and signed and sealed and thought themselves the winners of a bargain.
They cannot even suspect the poverty which they crave and the pain which they court, for they will not
gamble what they have, and they use it all to buy the anesthetic of furtive pleasure and the meager
squeezing of bloodless stones.
The opaque eyes in their powdered clown masks will not see the emptiness of their minds, but prefer to
adhere with wormlike tenacity to the thin curtain of matter which is set in the floor of the cage where I
keep them for amusement. They live in a Lilliput of the soul, yet imagine themselves gods and Titans.
Among the jackals and the rats and the scorpions and the spiders and the bloodsucking bats they make
their home. They are my guests. And yet they imagine themselves the Lords of Creation. And with what
fervor do they point to one or another among them whom they imagine to be uglier or filthier or more
riddled with the plague than the rest. Their minds permit an infinite quantity of self-pity and the denigration
of one another.
I love them all, my wonderful enemies, in the way that they love one another. I laugh at their miseries and
their hypocrisies, and most of all at their feeble, futile castles in the stagnant air.
And the path of my journey lies clear before me across the sky. I can see it now, where it was hazy
before.
I will pass through the earthly depths where devil-drums will sing my praises and set out a rhythm for my
feet to follow, and I will need no rest, not even in the heights where the mountains meet the sky above the
clouds.
I will search the caverns where every shape is gray, and return to the gentle light of a kindly sun, and
roam the pitfalled pages of my youth.
I will fight with every army that ever went to war, and learn to savor in the utmost the agonies of death
and wounding.
I will leap to catch the starlight and the comet's tresses. I will tramp the mighty skies, along the avenue of
the zodiac, and saturate my tiny self with every pain and pleasure known to the frivolities of flesh.
I will aim for heaven, and leave my heart in hell. And descend via misspent time and ill-spilled blood, by
the lost, forgotten years, tasting the wounds and the tears, looking for lust and ecstasy, and experimenting
with eternity.
I will grope in passing fancy for the empty womb, but pass on and through to the luxuries of unknown,
unsought dooms. The sands of time will run through my shriveling fingers. Ape and bird I will be, and fly [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]