He suddenly finds himself in a strange world, which he tries to understand so he can stay here for a while, keeping his mind calm and open and vowing not to criticise it. After all, there is no motivation for him to go back – he knows returning has long been an illusion, for something inescapably the same is evidently encoded in him, and it would be pointless to seek meaning in looking back. Through glimpses of the last remaining forms that still live on in his mind he tries, as of yore, to key new gestures, new situations. Like so many times before he feels strangely intoxicated by another as yet unknown place, but now he simultaneously feels abandoned, alone and betrayed. He is aware of this duality. His conciliatory attitude – for a pilgrim is not a conqueror, and can afford to be conciliatory – gradually brings insight, an unwelcome and bleak awareness that there is no longer a single direct path for him.
Tempted by a world that became so sated with its own spectacle, its fraudulent pretence of an endless growth curve, that it ultimately collapsed into itself, he feels the need for some kind of new synthesis to cleanse himself of all this.
Just as the world’s boundless consumerism has become hollow, so the simple and the ordinary have become exponentially more important, offsetting it. Latent disaster and desolation have become the permanent and ever-present shadow of a non-committal, interminable and empty freedom. The universal demand for an ingratiating happiness without the necessary days of intermittent fasting has run aground in the shallows of its own meaning and become merely the infinite freedom of unbroken tedium. For when there are connected vessels, we cannot seek to fill only one of them. Equilibrium, ever more precarious from one day to the next, has become unbalanced, and the coexistence of crisis and delight is out of kilter. In its infernal complexity and fragility the world has become wholly unpredictable. It seems that Emotion, which has been forgotten somewhere, is the last remaining hope. It emerges from the wilderness as something unnameable and abstract that will perhaps unite and transform all this dark complexity into a newly manifested hope, from which it will be possible to construct a column that reconnects heaven and earth, making the world meaningful once more. The horizontal can offer tenuous support for the newly erected vertical so that it can understand itself again. For the one ceases to exist without the other, and it takes us with it. A penetrating light slowly rises from somewhere in the depths.
But no, that was just brief, befuddled temptation. No chink of light has appeared here. Just that accursed, intrusive and lying dream interrupted by dawn inexorably breaking into the prevailing darkness…
