CHAPTER 4: A CAGE OF REACH AND ECHO
A meditation, scattered among the old man’s neglected paraphernalia; among one cage… and an echo.
People often talk about the small voice in their head guiding their conscience. Mine's probably more like some protagonist in a great Greek fiction, to whom I am the god of. I don’t know how he got there, nor do I pay him much attention. He might be a passionate artist trying to transcend himself through his work. He turns to the world, and he has the courage to say "look at me." To declare:
"these are my hands."
"this is how I smell flowers."
"this is what I think it means to laugh."
A poet, I think. I don't very much identify. But he isn't the kind to write fictions of his own.
Alas, every compelling Greek has his own flaw. So I wait for him to try and defy me. (He believes in me, as he must, and one would think the mortals would hold a deep disgust against us, these indulgent deities, I certainly would; this one, however, seems to take no offense to us whatsoever. Peculiar. I ought to talk to him one day. He might even write about it.)
Like all gods, I'm not particularly religious. That's probably why they're so irritable. There is no god 'transcending himself through his work.' And so it might take thousands of years, or a great war for me to die, but we will both be gone very soon enough. And when my conscience dies before me, he will have ensured that the parts he shared of himself live on for much longer than he was here. By then no one will remember him, but they will all love him. Vicariously they take what he has created: 'good art' and he is immortal. A question is begged from then on, from all of the cynics and deities alike:
Could these people really love someone that they never knew?
And the answer of course, is that they knew exactly who they were loving. It is him. These people who long for the past; it's as simple as becoming human.
That’s the thing about the conscience. It doesn't tell you why. But as I watch him live and die, I have my first religious experience. A dream.
I open my eyes. It's twilight. I'm someone's son. My mother is reading to me. An intense haze of bittersweet nostalgia has enveloped us. Time is fleeting. But the moment:
"these are my hands," she says.
"this is how I have heard the birds."
"this is where I have been."
I blink and she is gone. "Look at me," she says. I am suddenly by a fire, a little bit older now. A ring of students are gathered around to commemorate the greatest dead poets of our history. In my hands, a paper. I read it aloud:
"these are my hands."
"this is the feeling of old friends."
"this is my belonging."
"look at me."
I pause and stare deeply into the fire. Hypnotic. Entrancing. Horrible. A hundred years pass by in a moment. I'm the only one here. My mother's voice echos:
“look at me."
I wake up in a cold sweat. My chest feels like the ground, buckled and laden. This is what I amount to. A forgotten god, vicarious through nothing. My inner voice has defied me long ago, and my great reverence does nothing to refute any of it.
I understand now. That peculiar attitude. He pitied me. For the misfortune of being kept from my humanity. For the arrogance to boast about divinity without room for beauty, and beauty without entropy. In the moments I was asleep I believed I was human, and as I sit up in my bed, I too shall have to come to terms with not being one any longer.
But for now all I can do is pray. That in the next life I am at least the conscience of some mere god. That in the next life, when I die, I become the nostalgia of people whom I have never met.
Joshua Mariano