The Tyrant

The world is bigger than any mind, and mostly imagined.

You cannot make yourself death's confidante. He is only friend to those he animates.

"That's the way it is", she thinks, "whenever you deal with knowledge you always find yourself surrounded by death, preserved death. Specimens, dead wood, dust..."

The city is always most alive when it's most dead.

Certain South Sea islanders tether the oldest house in the village to the oldest grave by means of an artificial umbilical cord, thus relating a certain kind of original loss to a certain kind of original foundation or lasting form.

She pursues him, but her mind holds no image of him; rather she lives towards him, follows him because, where he is, she is able to breathe and feel fully alive. To talk about memory here would be like suggesting that the diver rushing back up to the surface for his next breath of air does so out of kind of nostalgia for breathing, remembering back to the good old days of his most recent breath.

Maybe somewhere ahead the future lies already written all in rank and file of words like soldiers in formation or graveyard plots pages ahead, words on ensuing pages, the time passes at the rate of a reader's eye.

Thoughts of death fraternize with the sunset... and with the trees reflected in stagnant ponds... and with the trees themselves and the breezes that brush them...

It may be that the angels have already passed through one, perhaps several, such periods; when they, and their songs of praise, were all that existed. In otherwise total nothingness they waited, still, singing for eons, until a Divine Light reappeared. And they, with terrible, calm faces, turned without joy without relief without expression to the new, but familiar, objects presented to them.

Hell is old, and, being built to the scale of foot and hoof traffic, is geographically concentrated.

The Tyrant is riding in the midst of his officers past enormous multiple gallows, flung up by his engineers in a matter of minutes on the sites of razed houses, each one can hang twenty-five men. He passes one of these after another, and the trapdoors to each all drop as he passes. The dancing bodies on those ropes will be cut down moments later and join newly forming battalions whose uniforms and muskets already stand by waiting for them. The dead are killed back into life, into active service.