The town was dark but for a single post lamp left burning at town's edge. Still I crept silently feeling myself a vermin, a villain in the midst. On walking I found the town less saintly than my imagination had it then. Perhaps on the edge of nowhere a town like this was built as an outpost for miscreants. Still, I kept silent and slinked past. On the coast, I indeed found cliffs lapped by the might ocean. A fatted quarter moon stared me down, lit me against the high grass. I stared. i stared until I stopped my not thinking. The guilt, rage, mistrust were all a haze and a cloud, a dark disastrous thing filled to the brim and ready to push me from my perch, collapse me into the black waves, into the rocks that broached the water's fragile surface. But not thinking became a silence all at once. The beat pounding of the waves was more relentless than I could be. they bested and broke me. I couldn't crash at their feet and mean anything at all. There wasn't to be a crash that would change a stitch the action of those fierce waters.
The ocean, alive, comes at you. Its surges are always toward you, a just barely contained force. And yet its continual motion hides nothing. It is always vibrating with its infinite power. How could this not be our original source? If not literally, it must speak to us as our metaphorical home, initial chaos, full of force, power and life. How could dirt feel like our home? Are we such nothing to ourselves that we take dust as our kin above water? Who has ever felt in their in most depths that still? Perhaps a goal to achieve, but certainly no innate resonance. And to leave all animus to god's breath? No. The waves are clearly home for us. Even if home is being torn asunder. Especially.
Soon the colder early morning broke my reveries and drove me back. I nestled into a dry pine needle bed beneath bastard redwoods.
I awoke to swift kicks to my ribs by the same curmudgeonly cabman. He held a thin cigar in the corner of his mouth like a menacing factory. The kicks were, however ugly their bearer, not intended to do more than wake me.
"Quit, quit. I'm up. I paid you fair." But he had nothing to say to me and simply settled his coat and spun around, revealing Marianna at his heels.
"There's your prince miss. I'll be at the tavern. Send for me when you're ready to depart." He spat the ground, but then looked sheepish before the lady.
And then at once she was down at my side clasping my hands and weeping into them. "Forgive me. I didn't know you'd left. I didn't know how you were. How it was. I should have seen you. I'm so sorry."
She wept and I, amazed, couldn't speak. For all I wanted her to understand, to forgive me, she couldn't be to blame. Her perfect love, I couldn't bear. Her perfect love which could cover me, but never understand. Everything, but understand. That one fragile thing. Terrible, terrible knowledge leave me be. Never let me be.
"Peace, Marianna. You cannot weep me if you do not know me." I said with a rancor impressed upon me that I felt, but knew to be alien. But still she persisted. If knowledge was indeed the issue, she cared not a whit for it. And I? What have I ever cared for knowledge? There is no knowledge in the game, no logic that can dissuade the hand of fate from dropping upon you.
[more]
But Marianna would swallow me as the sea. More than the sea! There is nothing in Marianna but good. Undiscerning good that cannot love a good man more than a villain. That cannot distinguish the most vile spree of excess from the penitent man begging just a moment of solace. And what in the face of that can a man be?
And on she wept like one having committed a terrible wrong. I look at her now, in a single instant. I imagine more men would hate this women. That a man must hate an innocent that weeps for the depth of sin. Her guilt in the face of a spotless life makes plain the immensity of the abyss below the sinner. The cavernous pits are never so real or grand as in the sight of the self-condemned innocent. And I, a rake, will burn, extravagantly, torturously. This is the emotion the martyrs call upon us. It calls fear and the depths of hate. Even without thoughts of hypocrisy. No, we only think the martyrs to be self-congratulating hypocrites after. Only in their absence brought my violent death can we tell ourselves safely that their love for themselves drove them to do the ridiculous. But never in the face of them. Only hate.
And yet I felt nothing but a deep sadness looking at her now. A sadness touching at its depths a kind of exultant joy. More than peace, something complete. My thoughts of knowledge, my thought in total, meant nothing next to this feeling of entirety.
I couldn't speak. But sunk to my knees and wept with her. We would stand eventually and return to our rooms. I record this now still in the thrall of that moment. My little candle flicker and the steam off my tea move in a sort of synchronicity with my quill. Joy that is more than peace. And I know not what thoughts.
