Tossing his wide-brimmed hat on his back, a young man ducked out of the rain under a tall evergreen

The Signifying Silent Winds

Tossing his wide-brimmed hat on his back, a young man ducked out of the sleet under a tall evergreen. Shivering in his forest-green coat, the young man sometimes called the Wanderer focused his abrasive eyes on the looming moon. Had it been so long? Had he come so far? There in the distance, ominously present, lay a graveyard and fresh graves. It was a sign, though the signified meaning was something detached. There were no memories of death for him. He had long ago fell vastly far from a sense of mortality. No, the Wanderer said to himself, he was mortal, but this was a matter of semantics, an open-ended contract with looming ramifications.

The precipitation shifted to a light snowfall, quickly accumulating on the frozen ground. The moon hid somewhere behind docile clouds. Somewhere in the slow night, hurried noises rushed to cover. The wind, after it had accomplished several vapid bursts, nestled in for the night.

The Wanderer shivered, pulling his coat tighter about his wet frame. Reaching into his pocket, he found a pre-packed pipe of tobacco. While lighting it, the full story of its acquisition (the pipe’s, the tobacco, the matches) burst in one great moment of light in his mind, and faded into inconsequence to be recalled unintentionally later. He inhaled deeply, careful not to pull the smoke into his lungs, and enjoyed the brief warmth. Hedonistically, he embraced the carcinogens; then he somnambulistically made his way to the Graveyard. Each surreal step resonated a puff of stale tobacco, each jostle causing him to lumber forward with an awkward, narcoleptic falter. Like a great, anachronistic train in primordial waste, his kinetics powered him through accumulating snow and over slippery ice until he finally breached the confines of the dead.

Despites the numbing of his corporeal form, the Wanderer sought to pondered the nature of the Graveyard. In a way, they were both alike. He was a monolith of past times, a forgotten spirit forsaken to stagnant winds. He had no justification for this thought; yet, how true it rang in his unuttered thoughts. There was more to the connection, he felt, that should not be spoken, even to himself. Then, as if to defy the thought, he wondered on the reifications of the distant grounds: were they religious? Impossible, for what was their before the void? Certainly, Death was nothing but the return to the startling abyss. As if to celebrate the awful nature of Oblivion, the winds shivered the trees and the very stone groaned aloud. Was the mourning of the dead innately human? Who can tell what those first men did to the first dead. Was it shocking fate which caused them to bury the corpse, or compassionate nostalgia urging its burial. The Wanderer shook his head as the moot nature of these thoughts. What mattered, he felt, was that Civilization promenaded the natural decomposition to separate itself from bestial deaths’ insatiable hunger. Like a great carrion feast, the ground swallowed the universal; its byproduct not but secular dust. These obsequies separated civilization from barbarism? No, he thought, for even barbaric man pile his dead within the mass tombs. In a way, spatial respect for the living spoke well of the Necropolis Mounds, or those dead societies joined in decomposition. Did human burial then offer a statement on the natural world, a world filled with ravenous eaters of the dead? Hardly, for had he not heard the canine choir sing their sorrows in harrowing harmony? He thought that perhaps the great wolf Fenrir had finally swallowed their lunar deity in one great bite, that they then sung the woe of his tragic hubris. Their notes were the notes of his entropic reality…

The Wanderer awoke bruised. He had fallen unconsciously onto the deck of a gothic mausoleum. He had never seen such an ostentatious celebration of the universal end of man. In a surprising burst of rage, he leapt to his feet and struck a horror stricken gargoyle with a large, handy rock. Moments past before he could again regain the shock of his actions.

“What are you doing here!” cried a shrieking, melodramatic voice behind him. Turning quickly around, the Wanderer gasped to see a lucid Invisible wafting before his eyes. “Why did you hit that creature!” Dumbfounded, he stammered idiotically, foaming slightly at the corner of the mouths. “Answer!” it rather comically floated towards him.

“I don’t know!” he eventually ejaculated.

“I’ll tell you why,” a gravelly voice answered from his right side. “You’re a Narcissist! You worship only your own observations and perceptions!” a deep color of saphrone whimsically spoke from his right. “How dare you enter and defile the sanctity of this idle rest!”

“It was never my intention!” he professed, waving his hands hysterically.

“Intention!” the ethereal form rose its ethereal hands, “fallacy in practice! Intention is a myth! It’s a judgment! It’s,” the formless spirit shaded a slight crimson, “unforgiveable!”

The Will’o’Wisp flew into the Wanderer’s face, “The living respects only itself. Their concern for the dead is feigned, an egotistical reassertion of their own glorious achievements.” It flew near the mosleum, “This? This is a monetary mansion for the materialistic memories of vainglorious humanity!”

The Wanderer laughed heartedly at the Will’o’Wisps pulsing exclamations. “Where am I?” A stranger to the Surreal world, he had no previous experience with the jovial nature of disembodied arguments. Oddly enough, he found the graveyard a less threatening place with the speaking dead.

The threatening shade floated to the sepulcher. The Wanderer swore it sat on the stone stair. “I was a poet in life,” it spoke sullenly. “An unsuccessful voice amongst manacled minds.”

The Will’o’Wisp disagreed, “By unsuccessful, he means unpublished.”

“Unpublished during a lifetime of hardships!”

“He was a plumber.” The Wanderer, who was uncertain was a ‘plumber’ was, nodded compassionately.

“Furiously I expanded my encounters, traveled the city and rural streets, strove to experience and live. Like anengulfing maw, I swallowed every aspect of my brief mortality with the knowledge that someday I would die. Each day, with the innate prose granted to me by some accident of nature, I wrote and wrote and wrote. No written form or topic escaped both my reading and writing!”

The Will’o’Wisp comfortably lighted upon a misplaced bust. “Try talking to your plumber about Cartesian philosophy: I plumb, ergo sum!” With a furious swipe, the spirit failed to unnest the floating light, who simply pulsed what might have been laughter.

“What happen?” The Wanderer, always a fan of intriguing stories, urged.

“I died. After my death, they” he did not clarify who ‘they’were, “published my work and purchased me this immortal anchor!” he through both his translucent arms in an all-encompassing gesture. “Rest comfortably in a material realm in which I cannot interact? The fools…” he rested his head in his spread fingers. Had the Wanderer been more attentive, he might have noticed the ghostly tears sliding perpetually down the spirit’s face.

The Will’o’Wisp coolly pulsed. “Don’t mistake his protection of the building. It isn’t the wealth but the symbol that he protects. It is his symbol of success, the only testament to his posthumous achievements. In a way, it’s a worth that exceeds the legacy left by those dead tycoons littering the cities. He’s a rather confused poet: For Him, not avarice, but pride is a sin onto itself. Can you blame him? We all need one vice to be remembered by…”

The Wanderer did not immediately answer. He thought on what the Will’o’Wisp said. Unacknowledged, the post-apocalyptic Wanderer was a product of his socio-political sphere. He had no knowledge of those giants of industry, who, having hoarded gold like dragons, burst upon death and rained down their stolen hoards as great treasured clouds. To the sickening rings of the masses too ignorant to see the truth, they appeared as philanthropists, ‘do-gooders’ with not but concern for those blind masses they previously exploited. To the post-apocalyptic Wanderer, every person was a hoarder. The world was greed because greed was survival. He had no knowledge of economic systems of living, because all economic systems of living followed the same formula: eat and live. Everyone exploited, everyone conned, no one was to be trusted.

Yet, the Wanderer did not believed his own Hobsian philosophizing. He believed himself innately good, believed that ‘finding’ and ‘stealing’ were vastly difference. How could he be wrong? No government enforced arbitrary Civilization’s legality, where the law fluxuated on the mood of the fickle nation. No, man was governed by those innate Rubric of laws called ‘the Passions’. Only the Wanderer saw himself guided by a greater code of abstract principles called ‘morals’. Where did he learned them? Being parentless and birthed from the ground, as far as he knew, he picked them up from the interaction with other people. Naturally, he strived against the passions, being antithetical from man at birth. Nurtured by the jarring social sphere in which he was born, he was more akin to beast than man. He had killed (in self-defense), stolen (from the dead), and revenged (an unjust betrayal). His thoughts began to stray towards the very self-incriminations…

“Have you no compassion, man?” The Will’o’Wisp asked pleadingly.

“No, not for the dead, I’m afraid.” He answered honestly. “Had I seen the ghost of my father, I might have believed in piety. I’m afraid you are simple figments of my overactive psychosis. You,” he gestured to the sobbing spirit, “are a metaphor for the same failed success that every poet faces. You’re nothing but a obsolete symbol for a time that slouches heedlessly forward. And you,” he pointed to the Will’o’Wisp, “you’re its comic relief, a parasite which attaches itself to the miserable symbol and preaches its sorrowful song. You’re the fickle, forgetful choir in some ancient play!”

What spawned the Wanderer’s rancorous dismissal of spirit and the ignis fatuous? Sympathy? Perhaps identification? For all his preaching, the Wanderer too consider his artistic talents as being poignant in his realm, even though illiteracy was the norm. He reasoned (at a safe time later) that his performance of poetry saved souls. Fundamentally, he was right…

The spirit wafted towards him and lowered it’s spectral hand onto his shoulder. “Take my advice on one thing. Experience and live.” And with that, the spirit faded into the night.

Then, like a friend, the Will’o’Wisp floated from its bust. “Ignore his carpe diem philosophy. You are not a hedonists.”

“You don’t understand, false light. Carpe diem is not debauchery, it is living to live. To put forward all energies to experiences, to drain dry all moments of existence…

“…for tomorrow you shall die.” The Will’o’Wisp floated mournfully towards a dark swamp forest in the background.

The Wanderer watched idly as his newfound companions returned to nothingness. He noticed the snow accumulation on the limestone graves. Even without the concealing snow, the letters were unreadable. The winds picked up and the Wanderer shivered anew. He had no connection to the place in which he found himself roaming. Sometime passed before the Wanderer arrived at the other side of the Cemetery, though to him time was insignificant. When he eventually did think of his time in the cemetery, it was thought of as a distant dreamlike memory, in which he could tell neither the duration nor the actual occurring time. Yet, his time there was not over.

It was within the final stretch of exiting the cemetery that he heard the first sob. Thinking it was the wet wind’s howl, he ignored it; however, the repetition of the sound stopped his progression. The Wanderer, no stranger to fear and danger, found himself again motivated to investigate the idle place of the dead.

An effeminate sobbing continued, growing louder with each step he took forward. “Effeminate?” he asked himself in thought. He could not determine why he thought the sound so, but the motivation to investigate its origins spurred him forward. Silently, like a tenacious child, he stooped behind a tombstone. The white snow had blanketed everything, and his worn gloves were wet to the touch. Still, the Wandered knelt down and listened hauntingly to the chorus of sobs. Soon, the figurative nature of the thought became literal, as the torn creature’s weeping began to hum a mournful obsequies for its own pains. The Wanderer, for the first time in many years, felt empathetically torn at the sights and sounds accosting him.

Sitting on the edge of a cement stone, sat a formless entity, a mass of light and smoke. Somewhere between the realms, the shapeless creature blurred between the image of an androgynous human and a menacing horror. “Impossible,” thought the Wanderer, for he had not seen such a thing in all his life. The creature, in its androgynous form, appeared in an awful blinding light, as if the celestial night sky appeared in one, human mass. The creature of smoke, that horror that molded into the primordial fear, shimmered. In the Wanderer, the existential knowledge that doom awaited his every step met with the knowledge that divinity could exist. In the dichotomy, the ambiguous creature manifested all his hopes and fears. He thought to himself, “There sits the godhead’s shoulders and sorrows.”

If asked, even the Wandered could not describe the sound he heard. How, even in detached realm of his memory, could he hope to recall serendipitous terror and sensuous joy! The dreamlike nightscape of his recollection could only be expressed by the sensations of the body, and found themselves the enemy of his consciousness. But, as with all sublimities and atrocities, sensation was short-lived.

With a start, the creature, fore he knew no other way to describe it, rose its obsidian eyes to meet the Wander’s abyssal blue. With an Enochian voice, the creature spoke to him. “…” The Wanderer blinked. Although the words seemed arbitrary, he had a lucid comprehension of there meaning. It seemed that the creature was, for lack of better words, communicating.

“Meaning?” it questioned. The Wanderer violently shook his head. Could this mystical being communicate in his mind? “No,” it answered. Cleary he saw it’s mandible/mouth move with each spoken word. “The words mean utterly nothing in themselves. The Human mind gives them meaning,” it spoke again. “Why are you watching me?”

“I heard you singing,” he responded aloud.

It grunted a response that could be called noting less than primitive; it had no human meaning. “We know no songs anymore, not for sometime.”

“But the pain you sung of?”

“And old wound,” it answered. “You should not be concerned of such things.”

“I am worry on all pain. What has happen?”

The creature and its amorphous glory gestured to the heavens, “Freedom of choice, “the fruit of fancy”, and the prelapsarian torture.”

A realization occurred to the Wanderer. “You’re a demon?”

“I’m ethereal.” The Wanderer nodded. “Not ethereal, human, Invisible.” He did not know the semantic subtleties, but did not wish to argue with the miserable creature. “Feel glad you do not know the torture of heaven’s antipathy. For even now ‘I am damned, and am now in hell.’”

“But isn’t that relative?” The Wanderer, never one for relativity, found himself confused over the interjection. “Isn’t suffering and pain fundamental to the innate human soul?”

The Demon shook its great ambiguous head, “We become the symbols of our actualized torture, the perceived external world the marks on our fragile forms!”

The Wanderer, always a proponent of individualism, grew angry. “Perceived? External pressures? This is the voice of sublimated theory. Resistance! To Resist and challenge and to hold oneself above all other things is the duty of intelliectual man. “We” persistently challenges the “I,” as the individual “eye” always perceives and sublimates the external, that constant artificial barrier between the self and the world.”

The eternal Demon smiled a knowing smile. “How I’ve heard the voice before, wandering the natural world in the solitude of the self. What can we know if not but our own souls? The misery and joy of our experiences are innate perceptions, acted upon by the natural external. There is nothing outside the self, no extrinsic knowledge, joy, or hell.”

The Wanderer cocked his head as a cat might upon seeing the reflection of its whiskered face. “Are you in disagreement?”

The Demon smiled again, “As a symbol of the old world, and the detached terror of a new one, I have no choice but to disagree. No matter how Man chooses to treat his joys and pains, they are in themselves caused by external catalysts. Those external catalysts were put there by a divine agency. Call it what you wish, God, Power, or Fate, man is himself a victim of all outside forces and has no innate qualities unaffected by the external.” The Wanderer eagerly sought to protest, only to be silenced by a slight gestured of the demon’s hand. “There is no argument in this, little one. ‘The World is not thy Friend’ and it seeks to stifle your individualism with conformity. Speaking on my own behalf, there is only futility in resistance.”

The Wanderer thought heavily on the Demon’s ideas. Worse that wooing, it was if the creature had lured in him into a state of angst. He knew that he was his historical moment, knew there was no escaping what he was born into to; yet, there was always life. And in life, in every “sore and painful step,” he knew his “entire self” trembled on the footstep of oblivion. Wasn’t that what the demon spoke of? A state of individual nothingness, an entire empty soul enticed and molded by an incubus world With these nihilistic thoughts, the Wanderer felt an internal disgust to the idea of conformity.? Even if some divinity, call it what you may, had placed him inside his moment, it was still his moment to affect and create. “Living is resistance to all things. In some cases, it is the only resistance afforded the oppressed man.”

“You over estimated your own agency.”

“Perhaps. Although, even in certain failure, the acknowledgment of one’s sublimated role, and the resistance which follows, grants agency. And, in this, we steal the winds from Power’s sails.” The Wanderer laughed greatly at his maritime allusion “Just think Demon, you would not be who you are now if not for your resistance against divinity.”

The Demon grew angry, “And in doing so, I have done what I was ordained to do.”

“So they claim; yet, in doing so, you have refused to obey blindly. Nothing should suffer because of a decree. We shift the blame away from decision makers, from those that create our political reality, to spare them any wrong doing. In essence, He created the world in which you had no choice but to resist. In doing so, you have proven your own powers of choice, and created agency therein. In every action,” the Wanderer shook the snow from his wide-brimmed hat, “we exert a power over power. We, as individuals, resist, and create ourselves in doing so.”

“And if that resistance is only the effect of a designed plan? Nightly, Tartarus awakens in my chest, and a new version of hell finds me its docile body.”

“Docile! You are a god in yourself! Nothing puts pain in your heart but your own reality. How can you weep and sing the sorrows on your own tongue, and then defend the creature which put you in servitude and creates the tortures you abhor. The freedom of your self demands your resistance.”

The Demon did not answer. It simply blinked its obsidian eyes. There, the two exchanged an empathetic gaze, somehow seeing a likeness in each other; yet, the connection was latent and abstract. As if the connection only existed in the arbitrariness between two like points. Rather than continue the moot debate, the creature stood quietly and, with a slight aroma of sulfur, it shimmered. Its essence became transparent. Where once corporeal, the thing became a shade in the fading light, beams refracted against a distorting glass. The Wanderer watched sadly. The creature, in its last instance of visibility, held its five-fingered hand out. Whatever symbol it hoped to invoke faded with its origins.

The moon sagged in the sky before the Wanderer found himself outside the cemetery. Dew hung silently on leaf pedestals, and the stars sang silently. The Wanderer ignored the natural bliss around him. In his meeting with the oddities of the night, he had formed an empathetic connection with the dead and detached, those haunting symbols of forgotten civilization. Moreover, he felt awaken. Rather than the morning he had felt for his selfish wants and needs, he felt morally charged. A man of simple cares, his world had found a new dynamic to appreciate. And, though he was uncertain of its ramifications, he felt that this haunting voice, the spectral wind which silently reeled the world, would forever exist beyond eternity.