There Is No Title Here

-- I settle on the bench. There is nothing to cast my eyes upon. Everything is white. There never was a thing. The dark and gray remains of the burnt papers, which cover the floor up to my ankles, are the most consistent things I can bring into conception. "Is this paradise?" I think. "Everything is intact still," A close voice answers. "Am I close?" I ask. "The ruby is not shining yet." It answers vaguely. "When will it be over?" My voice is at a pitch. "When the world crumbles down to your feet like burnt paper."--

And there the fraction begins to take hold like black goo and with the least bit of flexibility and even before there is time to sift through the cracks of the old planks unto the world down under, it dries into tar. The world down under is another world, sprinkled with dark patterns and mottled with wild conceits and away from sunshine, yet fresh. What stood above might have been discolored and decomposed while beams of uninhabited sunshine marched in on the crestfallen terminates of the upper world; shedding light on the matter of their blindness--this takes me nowhere, I shall stop! --they too read the book that, while having prattled on like a fabulous wisecrack, stated flatly and obtusely in the end: "We should never have left to begin with."

Up there, there is a dog and a cat that caresses it; of course, the cat is a native of down here. A shiny clam holds the ball of fur. The cat, moody as she might be and held down forever by the sanctions of expectations that each newcomer adds to the heaps upon heaps of maladies that she might bear, of whom she might be, and what she might do, purrs often in silence; streaming off towards the current that is expected of her. The untouched nothingness of the place sees in the consuming darkness of the underworld her bright and greedy eyes, parched for a break to undo the shackles of her being--how shall I take this to matter? -- The love is lost. The matter almost in combustion; self-destruction.

On a funny couch up there rests the laying remains of a figure who used to be of some matter; now mere compost of a brain, a heart, and maybe an overworked bladder. There only remains a ring with a luminous red ruby among the decomposition. Of course, a pair of useless arms and feet all within the confines of the couch are held close and shrunken as if on a stretcher; closer yet, maybe a coffin. There are no books close by, still, traces of dust can be made out where some books used to lay. Still further but within range, a long sword and a small pistol sit, gathering dust--I shall go, but all meaning is dead! --the trace of blood from the couch to the pistol had been there, for a long time set.

Down here, nothingness is strong, thick, and nurturing. It is where people come to exist; where liberty is wreathed from shattered shells of ambition, democracy from oblivion, madness from experience. And who puts it all together? The worms of the underworld, of course! A crusader in the stark nothingness announced that the worms have wings. The dog and the cat accepted, the decomposed figure fought to the end. The crusader's sword is still up there and no one has word of where he went. The withered begonia in her clay pot on the mantelpiece claims that it is the Excalibur itself lying lifelessly in the middle but no one is crazy enough to listen to her yet.
On the wall of the upper-world an enormous clock with frame of mahogany is hung with a heavy pendulum that swings. The loud and muffled tick...tick...tick of it is the only sound that is heard, save for the scarce whimpers of the cat or the dog. There is a letter in the plate on the desk by the door. The desk is made out of a simple larch. The larch is a strong tree. It makes good for the consistency that is needed to hold the plate that holds the letter. The letter is unopened but the fabric is strong and firm and the seal bears the shape of a triangle. No one has touched it yet.

There doesn't seem to exist a force driving the pendulum. Yet, the free swing of it from side to side ushers the thought that perhaps there are people on each side that push it. The swing of this metal ball from side to side has been more than ever a mere rite of passage by which people gained mirth at the cost of raining platitude and spilling life in vain. No one had ever seen the springs and molds of the clock. With the Santa boots flanking the wall under the clock, the dog half expected a turban to fly in the window any moment. It requires a miracle worker of a detective to deduce that the toilet was clogged the whole time the owner of the boots rummaged the house of the Goldsteins. The cat purred senselessly all the while. It was that kind of a day--enough of this nonsense! No one is going to hear! --structure has been broken, matter in disarray. What is the point of a perfectly-put-together book anyway?

The clam holds a half-open eye expectant of the cat to come for the ball of fur, yet the cat is absorbed in the harmonious swings of the pendulum up there. She holds still but her tail moves rhythmically. She is either in reverie or revelry; what is the difference anyway? The begonia in her clay pot entreats her to snap out of it with misshapen words of counsel but the cat's ears are rigid towards the clock, not hearing anything else. The tick...tick...tick is morbid. The dog is at his wit's end. Tail between his legs, ears held down, he can only await her break. The clam emits a wave of passion to undo the incantation to no effect. A second wave goes out, a third, and a fourth; it finally breaks. She bolts for the door in a weird cry and leaves through the little door.

The boy is fifty-two, his mother seventy. The coils and recoils of her soft brunette hair, now cut to the very base, rests on a silver mannequin head on a desk beside a horde of toiletries and cosmetics. The dust is set on the tiny bottles of lipstick and eyeshadow and mascara and blusher, and the eyelash-curler has not been squeezed for a long time. The dark frame of her picture ignorantly laughing, standing next to her son, has been lying face down on the desk since forever. Her son was probably the one who had brought in the letter in the plate on the desk next to the door. It almost killed her too, all those blessed meals her son brought her but one day, finally there was enough sediment congealed in her aorta to set her free. It was a good thing she had decided to cut her hair and make a wig out of it before going through chemo. That was smart.

The black goo remains poignant and morose on the piece of plank that he has inhabited. He has now no memory of what it was like to be mobile, soft, and uncontaminated. He sits there casting a condescending eye as does a king to check his subjects. He is always expecting things to go his way. The blackness of his nature and the graceful nothingness of the darkness down below look nothing alike. Nevertheless, the begonia in the clay pot claims that she has word of a wayward bee, who had sprung from the shades of nothingness of the underworld, that the black goo had once been a customary voyager of that strangely inhabited inexistence. The dog seems to think that she is far off with that, but termites blindly accept it. These termites are always on the move, taking and bringing, making and breaking, unseen souls that travel between the worlds. They simply accept and leave without further ado; on their way to devour yet another main shaft of the wooden house way out in the suburbs.

A group of red-eyed mice have been circling around the pistol, deciding on what to do with it. previously they had eaten away at the couch, the desks, the clothes, and even the Santa boots that flanked the wall. The black and brown leather boots had now holes in them in various designs and sizes and a wild plant had grown in them. It was no more beautiful than the begonia in the clay pot on the mantelpiece, yet she, from her position up there, cast envious looks at the lifeless-ornamental bouquet of jasmines on the desk. Such dream of eternal youth and jovial countenance was all she could think of and it was only because every time she opened her eyes and rubbed the dust off, the lifeless jasmines were there. They always looked fresh and with such a distance between them she couldn't tell if they smelled fine as well or not, and in poor times where water was a mirage and she withered up there, they still looked splendid and convivial.

The TV was filled with smudgy black and white dots. And every time the power went out and came back on again, it came up smudgy and black and white again--what is this shit? A piece for the generals? Or are you dreaming again of writing for the politically deluded, culturally illuminated like fucking maggots on a corpse, rotten-minded hipsters of everyday life? Do they think this is poetry? Well fuck'em. They need some philandering horsefucker to write up a shitty excuse of a story, a travesty of a poetry so that they can follow like baby ducks into the expectantly open mouth of the politically fixed alligator their newly weened "artist" of a mother--the dog used to sit and watch the anxiously checkered box for a few minutes at first and then the cat did it out of her lazy disposition, the curtains also peeked from the other room from time to time, but then it became boring and repetitive and they all lost interest. It would have been on still if it were not for one of the mice who chewed at the cable and shut it off; of course, the black mouse with red eyes got roasted in the process, which the cat enjoyed devouring later.

A black crow with vauntful beaks stretched his black feet on the sill and held his head high towards the inhabitants of the house; including the wig, the old cosmetics, and the rubbles of the decomposed figure and the ring with the luminous red ruby. His long-dark feathers were outgrown and even covered his feet. A gold necklace, worn out and rusty, hung from his neck and the casual evening sun cast a long and grave shadow of its figure of the cross onto the middle of the living room floor; there was no telling where he had stolen it from. He spoke with vehement tone and rigor of the things to come and the collective premonition of his belief system towards the future and then, after pecking at the leftover rice on the sill a few times, flew away.

Dante never let his ring with the red ruby out of sight. He slept wearing it. His pistol was always in the drawer of the nightstand. The day Andrea found him on the porch, pneumonic and almost frozen not much older than ten years of age, he could not remember who his parents were or what had he been doing for the past ten years of his life; only that he had been wandering around for what seemed like ages. She gave him a hot bath and a clean towel. Andrea with the bushy beard gave him the pistol to protect himself as a child in a dangerous neighborhood. He had then remembered; bushy Andrea, clean Andrea.

The curtains were drawn open and a vicious beam of clean and stark white light pierced through the window and onto the room and the bed where he lay. He crumpled like paper and shivered with the grave and demonic zinging noise being emitted from the walls and from the apathetic gaze of the portrait of Emile in the wooden frame on the desk. It always pleased him how the accentuated pronunciation of the word Emile sat in his ears. The room was now exceptionally lit and the sheets looked like snow and he covered his face with his hands and shivered like a mental patient. The zinging sound grew louder and louder until everything was white and he sat in a vast loneliness of whiteness on a bench, which seemed as if the whole world had gone under with ether and that bench was the only thing left, and felt the smooth planks with soft strokes of his hands. He had had a dream like that before. In it, he had sat there for a long time and feeling bored, had thought, "Is this paradise?" and then the whiteness had taken the form of a floating specter and announced in answer; "Yes!" then again he had thought, "Is there somewhere else we should go?" the specter had announced; "No!" and then he had thought, "But this is so boring." Then the specter had simply announced again; "Well, this is what you get for being good."

Whenever the crow came the sprinklers went off. The appearance of the crow, the tick...tick...tick of the sprinklers gushing water in the garden, and the growth of the abundance of weeds were coincident. And so, the garden was lush with useless weed and the sprinklers wasted water and the crow made rigorous speeches. The ears of the dog almost always bended when the crow spoke and with time, the weeds stood taller and taller behind his black feathers. There was no more air to come in the room and vent the pollution anymore, and the begonia in the clay pot was depressed more than ever, what with the weeds blocking the view she had nothing to watch but that damned bouquet of jasmines. And of course, at some point in time, whether past or future, present or never, the moody cat of the underworld died. No one knows why or how.

The world of the underworld is an interesting world. Who knew so much nothingness could be the birthplace of everything there ever was. "Indeed! The worms have wings and they can fly!" the crusader had announced. "So does their mother!" the bee and the cat, alive then and listening, were amazed by this. They had never thought of nothingness as a mother. They had never seen it, but felt its mere inexistence. "The permeation of that feeling my little friends is more generous than a mother. It is a creature in itself. It is a mother and a father and a brother and a sister." Then in the darkness he extended his hands and continued; "Nothing is everything and only I know what that everythingness of the nothingness want. Nothingness along with everythingness is the definition of wholesomeness and that, we all know, is the best kind of 'ness' to have." And he went on in this manner until the light had gone from the eyes of the cat and the bee had learned to produce nothingness-flavored honey.

It was almost around then that the horde of black mice entered through the southern fences of the yard and started gnawing at everything. The books they ate, and so the cheese and then the furniture and even the soap. They stood at every door and beneath every window discharging strident shrieks and looking wild and grim watching everyone through their red eyes. Even to the conception of the mice, there must have been some notion or halo of an idea that challenged their natural disposition to be lazy and forced them to be like this. Nothing moves without such a challenge yet, theirs, the dog thought, must have been the sheer incurable ignorance that made them like this even since their incarnation within the dark womb of nothingness. "Ignorance stands contrary to knowledge," a passerby glowworm explained to the dog one night, "in that, ignorance is darkness and knowledge is light. Knowledge lights up matters of all kind and light is always painful." Right then, she lit up her tail in the darkness and he squinted and frowned. "Hence, ignorant people are usually happy and the knowledgeable ones filled with sorrow." At this point the dog asked, puzzled; "What is knowledgeable? Am I one?" the glowworm fluttered in the powdered remains of the chewed up books and answered; "What kind of knowledge do you mean? Knowledge is the basic foundation of a two pronged weapon. It is a pair of scissors that cuts and injures, but never heals. Knowledge, if taken to mean 'to know', is a simple information of events as they occur. However, taken to the other meaning of the word, it is 'to understand and apprehend'. Such knowledge is superior. It is arbitrary to have the knowledge of things as they occur as it merely needs a consciousness in working order but, few people own understanding." -...--Then, as she had risen into the air with much difficulty, continued; "These mice know of events as they occur, but I doubt they understand them." Then she flew away.

No one had seen the discolored ornamental swans in the garden since the outgrowth of the weeds. They used to read and they used to write. Years ago Andrea had brought them here, even before she had her son sent to a school where people with somber pointed hats often frequented. For a while the dog used to chase the cat and she would find relief from the pursuit on the plastic wings of these swans. The begonia too enjoyed caressing their pink wings with her eyes from up there. They would teach enlightening lessons to the fresh grass underneath and the jovial yet lazy ladybug; but their lessons were too stationary even for the ladybug. Yet soon, that stationary position was covered with the crow's droppings and stifled by the weeds.

It is within the dead molecules of the cat's rotten brain that the conception of the world lies; A mere shadow of what was, its possible projections, and the clear image of what is. The only nuisance that deeply bothered the cat was that she could not run to the end of the line and complete this cerebral circle. She had thought that if we come from nothingness, drawn in its image and molded in its scent, why then can we not go back to its vacuum. In the beginning, someone had produced that terribly somber voice that imbued: "Let there be light!... Let there be land!" Something had wreathed all this together. --this begonia is crazy! --belief in what, and how is futile and in the end fruitless. -- (white noise)--there both is a how and is not. Someone held the needles that wreathed it all, that someone was nothingness (however one imagines it; as winged or robed) and all the while, nothingness is inexistence. That, is a viciously closed circle.

--the soft palms of my hands run idle on the smooth surface of the planks of the bench. The uncontaminated knowledge of my being, as a creature who occupies the space on that bench, is a vague mist without beginning or end, as one experiences in a dream. I cannot tell pandemonium from the garden of Eden anymore. I press hard in search of my name; I think of Homer and Virgil, recite divine comedy and inferno by heart, but it always manages to escape me in the end. Andrea and Andrea, the pistol and the sword, and the streak of blood are phantoms I can never picture in their entirety. My animals, my plants, my house; all must have fallen to decay by now as would my body, if this is not it. All of this and so much more escapes me by the moment and joins the eternal whiteness and blankness of this panorama. Every moment there is less until I know nothing anymore. I only know the light that surrounds me and the land that is under my feet. A wind has brushed away the mess of the burnt papers. Now, it reveals itself as to why it is called nothingness. If only time existed to be it. If only words were a concept to say it. Not even thought...--