Wednesday, May 9

Chapter One - Decay


Chapter one.

There was no year as it was a time when time really was of no importance, in fact very little was of importance, apart from being alive, although most of the living were totally unaware that they were so, their madness such a menace. One thing you didn’t see was folk scurrying hither and thither, pillar to post in a flurry of rush and must do must do. Meetings, deadlines, gant charts and that whole raft of elevated self-importance simply didn’t exist any more – not even in memory.

Why, I hear you solemnly ask?

Well to make my allusion complete, so few still had there marbles and those that did were in a malaise, left on the cusp of it all, fighting the snarling dog of madness forever, like it was trying to claw away at their soul one claw mark at a time – I call them the half mad. In addition to this, there were so few people left around that organized industry of any kind was a bitter memory, something that gurgled up through the madness from time to time, something oiled and dark, meaningless amongst the litany of incoherency.

How is it I manage to recite such knowledge without the touch of madness, without the scent of a disconnected mind? Beyond my narratives there really is no cohesiveness, but this is not only me, it is the world, it’s like all semblance of oneness in the world has fallen away and left rise to some tortured medieval future, a kind of cruel simplicity.

-But maybe I have taken my revelation too far, as it is still common to find crude community within the half mad, tiny villages popped up here and there, often by waterfalls for more than just the intrigue – the remnant of the logic of survival bubbles even in the insane I mean how simple a concept for the mind to grasp is it?  Water is a good thing – water is needed – water near me is good. I wouldn’t call it the peak of human reasoning, but even a nutter in full swing abides by those small feats of logic to sustain itself.
So yes villages, more like bands of people flocking together a buzzing collective remnant – something good, usually, but they’re all different. Most cities now are nothing more than a vanquished history, they choked under the weight of population crisis. It’s a simple theory really. The more people living together in one centralized area, the higher the concentration of toxins above and beyond those that were spread by the devilry of the world’s leader - and therefore the more likely for full-scale madness in any given area and all the subsequent un-pleasantries that go with it. They lie now as sprawling green and grey ghost towns, concrete and steel, fallen and empty, rubble amongst the voice of nature now firmly strangling the charge of bustle and traffic and sedulity. I once ran into a man through the hanging vines, the maze of nature, he sat upon a log and giggled incoherently whilst feasting on grubs from his palm – the necessity to remove the head not lost to him – that survival instinct kicking and rearing its head again. Now, on occasion when confronted with the mad it is possible to glean a past through the murk and haze of madness, the stories can and do bubble up from the rubble and decay of the mind; fragments of truth among the absolute mayhem. From this old tortured soul though, with his near black tatty clothing, zenith knows what colour they were when first donned, raged a vision, an account true and stark. He spoke of the things he saw in the cities downfall, crystallized slivers of the horror of a civilization eating itself one atrocity at a time, you could have listened to him for days had you the mind for it (literally). It seems much like the remnants of survival that bubble in the mad, so too the remnants of perversion, and also like the clamming together of the half mad so do the numbers of the, shall I say, evil. From what I gleaned they gathered as monstrous brute-squads terrorizing all they came across and laying waste to any semblance of coherent thought. I could not say whether this man took part or simply witnessed it but by his accounts it sounded like a self-destructive sexual blood bath transpired. Another thing is clear though the collaboration of such rap shod evil on any large scale was doomed for failure, almost like ouroboros, the kindly snake eating its own tail – they ate each other alive until that remnant of evil dogs broke and spread, disassembled and again that survival instinct kicked in – to be evil in such a manner will not keep me – keep your head down – keep on walking; speaks the unconscious to the void.  This wandering yet trappist like nature become that of many folk though – not only the wicked, to what other purpose could the mad ever serve though? What fulfillment would they ever exceed despite the feat of one foot after the other, scrounging food day to day – an accidental wash, the misunderstanding of agony; the mad wandered aimlessly, the half mad meandered in vexation.

Survival now has never been so raw – no – not raw – something else… New, survival has never been so new. And I doubt anywhere in 4 billion years of evolution has survival of the fittest been truly abstracted to where a wandering pilgrim’s evolutionary success is dependent on whether a human has the cognitive capacity to see and comprehend a 60 foot cliff in front of it. I’ve seen both outcomes before in the same specimen. First time, it sees the cliff, logic prevails and it climbs down the craggy rock face safely safely. Later in the same situation it fails to take in its depth and surmises it to be a step like any other not the step of death it becomes as it walks onward because he thought it was a step like any other. The resulting blood splattered rocks below stand as a testimony to man’s convivial fall from the top of the animal rung.

Oh yes evolutionary theory groans quite loudly in the wake of it all. Survival of the fittest? Not quite, but perhaps circumstance is on the side of the mad as if you look where the remnant are found it is an island chain – namely two large islands a northern and a southern. But dwelling upon these islands there are no dangerous animals to speak of, no bears, crocodiles, no snakes or lions, not even a poisonous spider numerous enough to have killed more than one in the last ten years or so. In fact ,prior to man’s indelible footmark on this land it was a paradise for another pedigree; birds. It was in fact such a safe and hospitable paradise for the avian lineage that they gave up use of their wings – though there is some conjecture that they barely had them to begin with - and with a shortening of pinion took up the preference of traversing the ground through the shade of thick trees along the moss covered ground never to see the lay of the land from the clouds above again. So when it comes to the mad and half mad wandering aimlessly around the earth, there really is no safer place as these islands. Like a hefty talon on the damp ground and fallen foliage, so is the so-called indelible footmark of man.

There is, if someone were to dig beyond the anecdotal evidence, some evidence that the further north we go in this land of frail birds and even frailer minds the madder people get. Imagine with your faculty, a graph, from left to right equals south to north. The left axis is that of madness. At the northern point of the axis we find the kind of chemical castration of mental faculty that of which would leave a homosapien not only gibbering with incoherence, but also unable to control its motor skills. A lack of control at which point walking would become not only impossible, but mythological to even think that the creature writhing on the floor before you could ever walk with a gracious liquidic bi-pedal gait. And sadly, on the ground in such a way those in the northern most areas suffered greatly, a slow slow death as the body slowly ran out of elixir and starvation overcame them as did the flies. Down the bottom of the axis we find ah the half mad those with faculty enough to communicate if not in a rudimentary but sustainable fashion – gone though are the cognitively halcyonic days of the previous era, no more Einstein-ious folk walking the earth amongst this chemical haze, this chemical fix.  Gone are the days indeed. Anyway, on the graph the line grows from bottom left to top right with an alacrity that would suggest that those in the northern hemisphere, beyond our green islands, have laid down fair and true to this mental death and that beyond our cozy land there breathes no living human with capacity to walk let alone craft and fuse. No more glasses perched upon nose and ears, networks of ceaseless underground trains, gelatinous candies, all manner of tools and equipment for hitting balls to and fro for a lost end – entertainment, no more controlling water in any state you should find it in. 

The sea, rivers, snow and lakes now live free of fear of human contrivance.  No more exams, cars a lost dream, religion too is gone because so few have the essence to ask simply - Why? And so maybe you could say the devils masterstroke was not the fruit and the cynical postulations and deeds of trickery of old – no but maybe the final victory of his came with a liquefaction of the mind – that is if your view the world is so composed this way.  Although maybe the relative peace in which pervades the earth would strike that claim from the list, as why would the devil rule and defy so that an invocation of peace would pronounce itself. Them maybe swing the pendulum the other way – divine judgement? His sentient beings, so full of empty deeds and formidability that his misgivings gave over to a cleaning of the slate, retrieval of the innocence, the peace finally attained.

Oh but which ever way you look at it –and trust me, none do - There really is no fathoming. The fact is humans now meander through the twisted land and plains with an innocent madness, those with any semblance of cognition left live simply, rustically and demurely, men and women alike, riding the human nadir like a jester rides a tank, headlong towards extinction.


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