Instead of following the ancient example of the sage who set out alone and travelled under the stars in a state of bliss towards the highest point of the white mountains, there to sit and contemplate the mortal aspects of eternity – I like a fool travelled with a band of fools in the womb of metal at the speed of thoughtlessness towards a reality that poets found it necessary to invent.
The homeless are all there, left behind in the streets and the effacing arches. The dying swell and heave in hospitals and alone in lonely rooms. Those ridden with excruciating diseases and terminal illnesses writhe in courage and terror in private places or in hospital wards or amongst friends and family who look at them with fear in their eyes as they slowly disappear from the world, limb by limb, devoured by an invisible realm that encroaches on this one. The mad swing still in the broken axis of their beings. The troubled in mind can’t find a way out of their troubles. Refugees anxiously pace black rooms praying with rosaries or beads for a new hope and a new freedom, while bureaucrats turn their files into endless corridors of cold facts. All over the world famines and wars are in great unholy feasts, gobbling up the bodies of men and women and children, with young babies left to starve, and young men wildly roaming the countryside full of hate, and death growing luxuriantly in fields and breeding in refugee camps. All over the world hatred kindles, death squads fly, dictators execute dissenters, terrorists generate havoc, serial killers buy drinks and chat up innocent women in bars. There are aeroplane disasters, earthquake victims entombed alive beneath indifferent rubble, ships that sink at night, hurricanes and tidal waves that crush the lives of thousands, buses with school children that overturn, and scientists without accountability playing the sinister Frankenstein game, meddling with the matchless mysteries of mortal life. All over the world, presidents are deaf, prime ministers are out of touch, the young stumble towards rude awakenings, the aged stumble towards the long dream of reckonings, those in between are weighed down with the apparent pointlessness of it all. And I, in my heart, where no poison or cynicism ever reaches, I seemingly with a band of fools, who might well be a band of seekers too, I am travelling in disguise towards the place where Hades is averted, turned away, transformed into something else: a hint of paradise lurking in this great universal wound of living.
We never make the journey that we think we are making.