47094: 34 A Strange Agonised Interval
The march was an hour away and he stopped talking and quietly adjusted himself to being someone about to take his leave.
‘And will this be enough?’ she asked him about the convolution and its reach, doubtful that it would be enough to open a new avenue of advance because , frankly, it lacked any direction even though it moved around a deal.
‘You think anyone thinks it’s enough? You think anyone thinks this is anything more than what it is?’
‘What is it?’
‘A walk in solidarity. A way of saying to ourselves that we’re awake and hurting. That even if we’re powerless, we can register this much even if its practical account is minimum, so we can show to ourselves and everyone whose looking for it that the faint outlines of our frail, wounded feelings haven’t been ground to powder by the passage of forces beyond us, and that we haven’t ceased yet in our best parts, that there’s an interval we can still call for, between conquests we didn’t sanction and didn’t want and weren’t asked about, and this other creature, a deeper animal which feels primitive, ghostly and lovely fashioned out of a new spine.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes.’
He paused whilst he stretched and walked towards his bike like a lugubrious dancer flexing slow muscles to the heights of their own containment and she followed, looking at the ground as she did as if following a spore trail on the soaked ground. He balanced, one foot on the earth, the other in his pedal and gently smiled:
‘ This is the interval. This time. And maybe it’s all we’ll really understand. The interval between the vastness of the way before now and some future way which will be so different we’ll seem like a dream. We were around for 250,000 years before the short interval where we're Western, Orthodox-Byzantine, Orthodox-Russian, Iranic, Arabic Islamic, Hindu, Chinese, Korean-Japanese, Hellenic, Syriac, Indic, Shang, Sinic, Minoan, Indus, Sumeric, Hittite, Babylonic, Egyptiac, Andean, Mexic, Yucatec, Mayan and what happens next. It's not been long.
In the scale of time it makes sense to think of all these as our contemporaries. So I’m going to walk against all the bad guys. I don’t think there’s anarchronism and I don’t think you can ever convince me that I have to see things in a way that let’s bad guys off the hook, the most horrifying agonies and the most complicated tortures, the most cruel deaths and the most painful betrayals, all the lepers, all those burned alive or starved to death. Sure you can explain them, and find out the reason why, but I reek with my own prejudices and just want it marked, somehow, that terrible things have been done in the past, are being done now and that the future won’t redeem these things. And that I know. We know. We’re going to walk to the top of a hill like we’re going somewhere where suffering can be better seen, each of us beside each other, singing and holding hands or just gathering quiet thoughts, and at the top of this hill we’re going to be looking out, right out to faraway horizons and make everything absolute and say that we won’t betray this period which is our time. And maybe we’ll come up with a program. But no one’s coming back from the grave and that’s the harsh truth. ’
Well, she found it moving and inspired feelings, it had to be said, and she already missed him after he delicately pushed away and glided as if on threads towards the march which he believed would climb onwards towards a better history and a better present even knowing we’re just accidents alive in a strange agonised interval.
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.