47094: 46 Go Thou To Rome
‘You’re like robots,’ she hissed and Yves pulled his hand away as if stung.
So everyone became dark, cumbersome and heavy, and made an extreme sigh which came from desire asking whether it could ever trust anyone again, or that’s how it felt like, and then she mumbled something about being tired and clawed all out inside and wondered how it was to wear a crown and sit on a throne, which she supposed was something you got from your parents, puzzling what kind of face was underneath a crown. The haughty were strange, she supposed, and ignorant to be so, must be, and neither pleasant nor innocent, more likely disturbed and if they had beautiful eyes they’d be filled with tears, or blind, or both, where good is only done by happy people, and keeping many things on your mind and staying happy was damned near impossible, which is why we live under a shadow, going through tunnels, faded by perspiration, disobeying any rules of life that may or may not be laid down, and known about, and she noticed how the atmosphere in the night creased over and when she tried to uncrease it, it was like touching voltages, resolutions, czars, Lenin, Jerusalem against Titus, scary and loud with a low bleakness. She felt there were secrets leaving like moths in the first gleam of morning from the kitchen, grand and bitter intentions, colder than blood or salt, and a snatch of Shelley ‘Go thou to Rome – at once to Paradise/ The grave, the city and the wilderness’ mysteriously more overwhelming than the alcohol steaming through her, and if she moved it was the movement of immobility, where sitting tight is power, and magical, and knows one thing – the ruin of time which bets on being content and being right never coming together.
‘Nothing is eternal and everything perishes’ she said angrily, plus;
‘ You don’t need either to wake up inspired,’ and she started hauling herself back through the crowd which was a boiling smoke of souls furious with the doom of insignificance, a shoving multitude misunderstanding everything, messing up, cast in the assurances of endless vistas of certitude.
It was past midnight and she left the party, slamming the door behind her and walking straight on carrying her crisis on her back like a bag of load, and although it was warm it began to rain a little, so the raindrops reminded her of external life being so mighty and enlarged and personality unsafe outside of types and generalisations and laws of nature that didn’t welcome any notion of pure being. Truth needed at least two to tango, and she was inconsolable and alone, unwelcoming the advances of mundane people and devising a terrible contempt, choosing a mask as awesome as the terrors themselves, a sort of cheating, disfigured, degenerate free-runner, a mere bygone brand of human.
The chief point of her abrupt leave-taking was that it wasn’t a lapse, not paroxysm, because it was movement with a sort of considered weight attached, a matching of the ridge of moonlight and its forces, its torque which slopes, tenuous but gorged like a wedge of great hope, like she was leaving an assailed cape or foreland left by an axe, to be swallowed by a wolf or bear, encircling need with a band of teeth.
All she could see was a road and the land, and she felt tears but didn’t see them on account of the fact that they’re hers, some of them were at least, and above her a forest of stars and burning trees, headlamps of vehicles gliding like knives on the flat, violent condition of nights familiar features, an unaccomplished harmony serving no great end or design, giving in to no great master force.
She hurried along the pavement and the damp atmosphere soaked into her clothes as she considered the apparent silence of one thing following the next, like a horse trotting before a cart in the olden days, and the notion that her fight was one where no one had your back whether or not you realise it or not. Which meant she had narrowed her orbit somewhat whilst not being sure whether she was inside it to begin with, or somehow obscurely hidden outside of it.
She wondered briefly if she had been sucked into another of those great currents where you can’t be yourself. There was a thought she floated that maybe the whole situation would fall through, like a sour deal, and if it did she’d be glad, because she was in a gloom about it, was losing things because of it, more than just sleep, and if it went away it wouldn’t be all bad.
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.