An Afternoon Visit

 There can’t be a purpose to any of this, there can’t be a goal or a clearly marked destination. I take it all in, the darkness, as much as I can allow myself to open up to it, and I hold it… I eventually push it all out and I am left exhausted, empty and yet eager to begin again; each time it sits within me, the darkness, I attempt to transform it, I play with it while it’s passing through me, I attempt to leave a clear mark on its obsidian surface, maybe a small change or maybe a complete revision, a new unexpected variation, but regardless of what I do or what I fail to do, I know there is no ultimate purpose to any of my actions and I have slowly learned to accept that… My sense is that I recurrently begin a huge fire, here in this dark hole where I sit, I set the stage and light the matches but I never see the results of what I have started, it escapes far beyond my sight; I will never be there to see any result, it will have to remain completely unknown and I will keep on starting these fires, one after the other… I notice that there is something that has started to happen when I push the darkness out of me, it seems as if I’m watching a movie, an old black and white movie I have already seen a thousand times, a movie I know inside and out; it’s about a woman, an old psychic witch of some kind sitting in her dining room, and a man that comes to visit her full of questions… I can repeat each line in my head, I can eagerly anticipate each change of scene, but this time it’s different, the film itself has been transformed, I get lost in it as I watch it, I don’t know what will happen next, I take it as it comes, scene by scene, I get lost in its mysterious horizon, I know there’s something out there, still something left to discover, a puzzle waiting to be solved… Sometimes the whole thing gets away from me and I don’t understand how this is possible, how can I be lost in a film I know so well? There are many new scenes that I don’t recognize, places and people I’ve never seen before, everything around the main characters has been completely changed and there are new characters for me to try to understand and strange little creatures of horror, the sound of many voices coming through shifting shadows, I can’t recognize any of it, I can’t understand it at all… I have been pushed out of all my comfortable assumptions, I don’t understand how they changed this simple story I thought I knew so well, this movie… this dream? this memory? what happened? I don’t know who they are but I can feel their presence… I remember… there’s something I needed to find, something I needed to ask, something I needed to remember… I traveled far beyond the limits of the city in order to solve these questions, but in the story I thought I knew, the main character never leaves the city, the city is all there is for him, there’s something ominous about the world beyond the urban limits… I must have given myself permission to go out there, out beyond the scope of my memory, out where I have never been, I have to take it all in, let the strangeness of this new world slip into me, accept that there is no purpose to any of it and there can never be one, it’s the only way I can forget the shadows and become once again the main character in the story… I remember visiting a psychic, an old woman, I had questions about a strange dream I had, I remember giving her my phone number with some hesitation, I remember a few days later I got a call, an invitation, ‘Come eat with me. We can have a good long talk…’ I accepted the invitation and I went to her house late one afternoon, at the hour that she had specified. She welcomed me warmly at her door and I ate the breads and cheese that she served me, I took it all in, it was my first time there, a very small house in the middle of a vast empty field, open grassland, mountains in the distance, the sound of a river not too far away, birdsong in the air, the wind rustling the grass and the leaves… It was surprising to me that such a place could exist so close to the city I knew so well, here in this bucolic paradise I could believe that the city was a strange futuristic nightmare that had never existed, could never exist… As the evening progressed and we talked more and more, a sudden realization came over me: ‘She sees herself as a true subject, an inherently distinct individual with a very defined point of view, but she is not completely aware of me as a person. I am more like something she can play with for a while. A toy to use and then disregard.’ When I came back home from my visit with her, I was not feeling well, I started feeling sick during the trip back, sweaty, nauseous, weak; I managed to complete a few more tasks at home but I ended up falling asleep very early and I dreamt about the nature of evil… “Evil is using another subject as a tool, as an object.” It was her voice saying it in my dreams, speaking loudly, clearly, I felt her voice all around me, it came with the presence of something painful, something heavy and dark inside of me, I tried to push it all out, I tried to transform it, but it kept on coming, it kept on insisting… “The future is the nightmare of the past,” she said, “take it as it comes, transform it as much as you can and prepare for the consequences…” I didn’t want to let go of my sense of stable reality, I was suddenly terribly frightened of the underlying truth behind her words; there is no purpose to any of it, none of our collective choices, none of my individual goals, regardless of what I want or how I want it to happen, history won’t stop, not even for a moment, time will keep on moving and there will never be a clear purpose, a climactic result will never announce itself as a clear and final goal… I just have to move as if there was one, I have to believe even if only to avoid the absolute darkness of the radical nothingness that lies underneath… I fell asleep one day in the middle of the afternoon and I had a very intense dream that left me in a state of shock; I forced myself to wake up so I could write it all down. Nothing led up to it, nothing had happened earlier that could have inspired it - it came to me from nowhere apparently, a sudden drastic interruption in my daily mental routines… There were many small creatures all around me, tiny little things about three feet tall with huge eyes and smooth heads and tiny little hands that danced around constantly and left thin little trails of light as they moved, they all spoke in a single voice, a kind of telepathic chorus that allowed for a nearly perfectly synchronized speech; they surrounded me from all sides, they held me down tightly and said all as one: "Regardless of your rejections, regardless of your fears and refusals, you're still going in. There’s nothing you can do to stop us. We will put you in the hole and we will keep you in there for as long as is necessary… There’s no longer any need to fight against us, there’s nowhere to run…” I looked at them with a mixture of horror and fascination. ‘They talk about me as if I am an object to be handled, a thing to be placed somewhere until they see fit. They see themselves as subjects, each one of them a true individual, but they don’t see me as a subject. I am just a prisoner, a thing to be moved around, a thing to be held in place’ They carried me over the old dusty wooden floor of the cabin and I tried to struggle but I was absolutely helpless and in their power. “We'll dump you in there... and you won’t come out until we say so… there’s no escape…" They pointed to a small hole in the floor, a dark pit with a single trap door over it, I saw steel chains and thick steel loops meant to secure it tightly once it was closed… These strange little creatures that carried me, they seemed evil to me. ‘But what does that mean? What is evil as a thing in itself? Evil is using another being as a tool, as an object, as a thing.’ I remembered someone saying that to me long ago, I couldn’t place it, I didn’t know who said it but I remembered the words distinctly, the precise concept. They threw me into the dark hole without much resistance, I had little strength left in me, and they immediately closed the trap door, I could hear the steel chains being locked in place above me and I was left alone in the shadows… I heard them speaking as they walked away, so many of them speaking all at once: "In there you will stay and you will experience the worst horror that a living being can experience, the absolute darkness, the eternal void, the true silence, you will be shocked by its infinite absence, over and over endlessly you will be shocked, every time you feel a glimpse of hope the shadows will once again show you otherwise, take it in, push it out, there is no end to it, no help is coming… and this will all keep on going until you finally remember who you are..." Deep in the cold darkness of the hole, I knew it was all up to me; I had to work here even if it wasn’t an ideal moment to do so, I had to work here even if it was the worst possible situation; the process is the process and it never stops unless you let it die, it is up to you to keep it going, it is up to you to give it life, the result doesn’t matter, the desire for a result is the very void you are trying to escape… “The future is the nightmare of the past, an ancient horror is ready to be fulfilled and a new one is about to be discovered…” she said…“Sometimes you don’t want to let go, you don’t want to accept what is coming but whether you want to accept it or not, you are still a son and all sons pay for the sins of their fathers…” she smiled at me with a kind of relaxed self assurance that I found completely disarming. “That is the innermost nature of all history; we that live now are the product of all the many mistakes of those that came before us, history is a long parade of disasters and the wastelands that they leave behind; and history won’t stop, won’t even make a compassionate pause to let you catch a breath, it won’t let you escape, it won’t let you sit still, it won’t let you ignore it…” I looked out the window and I could almost see the world shifting around before me, something was changing and I was changing with it; if I closed my eyes long enough would I even recognize any of it anymore once I opened them again? I was changing as much as the landscape or even more so and I couldn’t keep track of the multiple ongoing mutations. “These magical creatures that you have seen in your dreams… they are known to be intermediary beings, they live above the earth but remain below heaven. You have to learn to work with them even if you are afraid of them, an individual never wants to let go of their fears but the process is the process and your particular future is also the nightmare of your particular past, the history of all humanity, the history of a single human being, it all works in the same way, you are the product of all your previous mistakes, all your previous reversals, and time won’t stop and time is nothing but relentless change, unforgiving, merciless… you will continue to slide into that future that you fear regardless of how much you struggle against it. I am sorry to be the one to tell you but the results you imagined never mattered, this story has already been written and you are not the author, you are not the one in charge…” When I was with her in her little house away from all the noise, away from all the distractions of the city, she made a promise, not to herself but to me, it was at a certain moment during our meeting when everything got very quiet and we just stared at each other for a long time, eyes wide open, focused, calm and direct, time passed by so slowly then as I looked deeply into her eyes and she never looked away, not even for a second… I had noticed that throughout our conversation she wasn’t really responding to what I was saying, it was as if anything I had to say was irrelevant, even when I mentioned the tiny beings in my dreams, she didn’t bat an eye, she didn’t react… I tried to force a response out of her by emphasizing certain words or making exaggerated gestures, maybe I did it simply out of vanity or just for my own secret amusement, to see if I could push her into some kind of reaction, shock or laughter or disgust, but the response never came; she just kept on talking about whatever she was already talking about; if she was making a point, she just kept on adding elements to her argument, if she was telling a story, she just went on to the next turn in the plot, it was up to me to listen or to get lost in her words and lose track of all possible meanings while my attention wandered over her face, her porcelain white skin, her long black hair that fell all the way to her lap… My wish for a response, for a clear indication of mutual communication, eventually disappeared, I focused on letting go of all impulses to make myself heard and I simply listened, letting her talk, focusing on the sound of her words, on the shape of her thoughts, on the music of her presence, the nature of the world as it changed around her… I was quite innocent throughout this whole experience, I didn’t want anything from her, I didn’t have anything to achieve, I had no ultimate goal… “many of these intermediary beings resemble human beings in shape…” she said more than once and suddenly, after many repetitions of the same phrase, it became clear to me what was happening, so clear that I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t seen it before… “There are certain things that we don’t say as we may have to pay for it… modern people are not very forgiving, they reject certain thoughts, certain ideas, and they will punish those who speak them out loud, so we don’t share them, we keep them hidden, we retreat away from the world, we inhabit hermetic worlds of our own, and we accept that we will reside in them for the rest of our life.” I suddenly got the impression that for this one moment, for this one space of intimate clarity, she was not hiding as much as she usually would, she was not completely invisible, she was letting me get a glimpse behind the veil, something I had only vaguely suspected, something I yearned for without knowing what it was that I was missing… By the time everything got quiet and our gazes intertwined, I was completely open, vulnerable, raw, vibrant, I knew what she was doing and I was glad to let her proceed… at that point I had become a willing surface for her subtle unpredictable work… now I can say there’s something or someone molding me, giving me shape, changing me as much as they have changed the entire world that surrounds me, here where I sit in the darkness, here I am molded, changed, transformed; these tiny magical creatures I saw, the ones who trapped me, the ones the witch called intermediary beings, they were intent on changing me in ways I still can’t understand, something subtle, untouchable, impossible to pin down… I’m not in control, I am the product of a process of whimsical creation, playful extrapolations and variations, a musical fantasy derived from a small motif of living consciousness, a magical presence in an ocean of loneliness that never ends; and the entire process itself is about to undergo a radical shift… I fly above the earth in my dreams but something is happening far above me, something I can’t reach, something far beyond my grasp… On the one hand, I have learned something, that much I can say and maybe that is all I can ask for; the next time I encounter her she might be riding a dragon over green hills or she might be covered in a dark cloak in the heart of an old silent forest or she might not be visible at all… but I will still recognize her by the mood that will rise up within me, by the emotions that I now understand come with her presence, the eddies of pure energy that swirl around her, the vibrating spirals of untouchable light… There are some things that we necessarily don’t say, even when we are writing it all down trying to cover every detail, still there are things that we can’t say, not to anyone… Her voice is now the voice of thunder rolling over the plains, for me, her voice is the drone that underlies the wind and the rain and the tiny glitches that emerge within the waves of wild random frequencies that underly our reality, now that I clearly hear it, now that I have heard it, I can’t share what she says, I have to keep it hidden… I get the impression that something has happened, something has changed so completely that I can’t even remember how I was before, who I was… that one time I went to see her, when she asked me to come eat at her little home away from the city, she didn’t hide enough, she didn’t make enough of an effort, and in the process of revealing herself, she forced something in me to awaken, she was too open with what she was doing, too careless, reckless, playful… or maybe it was her from the beginning, maybe she was the one molding me all along; I was only a particular project, a little process which she completed on that afternoon, a process that started long before I had an inkling of what was happening, long before I was born… If that is the case then I am the product of a very long story and I am a continuation of that story as well, I am not the ultimate result, I am not the final purpose, I am not the end, I am just another step that has somehow become conscious of itself as a step and now hurtles forward into an unknown future… Take it in, the darkness, hold it, let it shift and mutate inside of you, when you’ve done enough, push it out and let it dance before you, look at it… Can you see it? It’s now alive with infinite colors…