Confessions of a Dark and Corrupt Heart

Ghosts haunt the age... they taunt us because we believe them to be nothing but the phantasms of brain chemistry. They haunt the temple of our pride and empty pleasures. Their hollow cries can be heard in the empty phrases we mouth so easily day after day. The ghosts are angry if only becasue we think we can forget them in our rush for satiety in the fruits of this world. They know that the vapors of this world are noxious and will eventually drive us insane with the empty sound of our voices. Were we to listen to them, they might indeed tell us that we can't cut the umbilical cord that ties us to the past--that burying the dead does not mean simply leaving them to rot in the cellars of our collective angst.

Raise the spectres of the neoPlatonists and the renaissance. A great age indeed--its attempt to dress up magic and mystery in xtian garb now struts our streets naked and painted like a deranged whore: she takes her drooping dugs and pouting labia as the founts of truth; she takes her spare and vacant stare, stripped bare and showing bone, as the height of freedom, liberty and brotherhood. She takes all comers and gives out for all seekers. Oh, Scientia, you have fallen into the gutters!

Characterize "the age" any way you wish--nihilist, reltivist, irrationalist, amoral, postmodern, secular, modernist. Why such negativity? Why such gloom? Certainly this mode does not provide a sufficiently heroic strain for the advent of the ubermensch. What human lurks beneath the mask of the beast? What new god sleeps in the deepest forest untrod by man? "Let the beast run wild, and I will shoot him," raved Witkacy--indeed, hunting season is now upon us.

You see all there are are these snatches of old tunes that clang around in my empty head. Is there anything new, you ask, anything new...? Nothing new, never new, there is only the old that gives way to the new for that is the way of the earth and that is the way we tread. But on the way to the new, which is an old song, the old must fester, rot, and be hollowed out. So we live in the time between, the interregnum, the terribly barren and hostile wilderness on whose sands we follow an unseen path to the land no return, seeking an herb whose scent evokes paradise.

Is the only hope to burrow into the emptiness, glory in the power to be seduced by our own self-delusions? There are no leaders to show us the way; all roadsigns are written in a language that no dictionary of the heart or the brain can decipher. There are the dustdevils on the horizon that harbinger order in their spiral down the sky, but they play out in an empty alleyways where the poor erect backetball hoops in the form of a crucifix.

And maybe it is there where I will find the voice that leads out of the wasteland... there in the eyes and snotty faces of the kids who come to think that respect comes at the end of a gun. There in the cries of those who crawl with cancer in their legs to the altar of the god who swears like a sailor and smokes cigars. There where they bring cakes and shiny pennies to invoke the names of lost ones so they can hear the voices one more time, speak in the maggoty ear those words of love that benver got said. There at the steps of the churches that have closed their doors on the dispossessed and lost and outcast--they who never heard the voice of God and who have recently visited the whore Scientia to court her favors.

Is it a voice of hope I hear? The poor know only hope--for they have no one but the wind and the rain to hear their suffering. And it is there perhaps that God lives, waiting to walk once again in the cool of the evening but this time to bring judgment upon all who heard the muffled voice at the roadside and passed by; all who set up the abomination of desolation in the churches and called it the son of God; who killed in God's name and secreted the torn limbs of children and charred bodies of mothers in the abyss of their celluloid fantasies.

And if there is hope, it is a hope born of suffering and trial; a hope torn from the nothingness of delusion and communal deception; a hope gleaned from the terror that educates the spirit in the wiles of certainty and doubt; a hope drunk from the spring whose water erases all feeling for hate and vengeance; a hope tried in the fire of a gift whose light reveals the most secret sin and the most hidden despair.

And the most glorious thing of all, the most beautiful wonder that I cherish with my inmost fiber is that I cannot and will never be able to deceive others with its truth; that I will never be able to betray its existence to the swine; that I who am the worst criminal may also one day find the face in a mirror whose scum has been cleansed free of my smut. Yes, the happiest trick of time is that this hope can never find its way into any book, into any databse, or into any algorithm.

For this hope harbors no sham and mocking pretense to be on the silver screen where all can wank away in secret harmony. It seeks no verification in the textbooks and glossaries of pinheads whose only idea of reality is unicellular and omni-dimensional. It finds rest in the heart of only a single one, finds words on the tongues of the simple and wise of soul. It finds peace in a love that is human and yet whose law defies conception.

So you see, dear Reader, there resides in this darkest and most corrupt heart, hopes and wishes that belie the derisive ghosts that stroll the margins of a gloomy and denuded age.