Visions Fugitives

Pile of buffalo skulls, ca. 1880's.

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

 -Paul Valéry

It came to me in a series of dreams: The race; a great battle upon the vastation; the infuriate sun gazing upon the carnage.

I sat immobile as upon a throne enshrouded in darkness. And the gates before me opened up as the maw of some great beast and my eyes burned with the terrible vision and my heart was drunk with horror.

And I beheld a horde of men innumerable: wild-eyed, mouths besprent with froth, faces twisted into masks of agony. Blind, stupid animals. They swarm forward, mindless as ants; they sing hymns of blood and death.

It is whittled down to the few. One stumbles and falls; he crawls upon the ground like a dog, begging for mercy. A loud crack, and double fistfuls of gore vomit from his temple. Bad luck. Another simply stops; he stands there, blinking stupidly. A pair of hands emerge and one hand holds a razor wrapped in silk and his throat is cut like a sheep, carmine fountains of life erupting from his veins. And yet one more halts of his own volition and stands his ground with great shouts of defiance and the figures swarm forward and he is mobbed and he is sodomized and he is slain to the sound of laughter as loud as screams.

The gates closed and again was I engulfed in darkness. And as I traveled through universes of pain and suffering, I beheld a great void: And there I sat, as immobile as the three-faced beast in the lake of ice, and my limbs were paralyzed in fear; and the demon by my side knelt down and whispered atrocities unto my ear, the vision of which is recorded herewith.

Underneath the westering sun was there a great slaughter and the funeral pyres burned with unslakeable thirst and did choke the sky with their foul discharge, and the wolves and the buzzards and the feeders of carrion went half-crazed from the stench of decay. And the reivers roamed the vastation, wretched trains of concubines and catamites in their wake, their alien forms oversized with coagulate gore, gimlet-eyed, irresistible as death as their magnetic pull guides them to the last few broken hovels upon the wasteland and the air is filled with the whine of flies and the cacophony of screams. And all was beheld and burned to ashes underneath the pandemonium of the dying sun.