Dreams In A Backwater: Part Six, I, (5)

(5)

And yet, must each tiny step forward in understanding be paid for with such an exacting price? Must life be so unremitting in its demonstration of callous power? Must death?

Another of my cats has disappeared. The homeless male I took in about four months ago – I let him outside one night a week ago and he never came back. Whether he was hit by a car and killed, or was injured by a car, or a human, or some other animal and crawled off somewhere to hole up and die, whether he simply wandered out of his known range and got lost, I do not know. If he has holed up somewhere, or if he got lost, it could not have happened at a worse time. The weather this past week has been as bad as I've ever known it to be, with temperatures falling well below zero one night, freezing rain falling the next, followed by days and days of high winds and heavy snow . . . I have of course scoured the neighborhood – and indeed the whole of the downtown area – many times over, looking for him. There is no sign of him to be found. He is simply gone.

And gone too, finally, is hope. Hope not only for the life of this one poor cat, but hope for everything – and faith in anything. Gone is all faith in any kind of god. Gone is all faith in any externally derived guidance in any form. Gone is all faith in the belief that life speaks to me in order to teach me. Gone are all gambits of thought, all theories, all philosophies, any and all forms of reasoning motivated by a desire to shore up the belief that there exists some kind of an ethical underpinning to the operations of reality. What else is left but science? What else remains but the pitiless exigencies of biology? But no: Gone is the man who would ask such questions. Gone is all faith in the authority of Me. Gone is all anger against injustice. Gone is the idealistic dream. We are nothing more than diatoms set adrift upon an endless sea. Words drown in futility. Gone is everything but empty laughter and the hollow weeping of tears. Nature is indifferent. Humans are indifferent. We are all of us, and each of us, alone. Now, as always, I find this realization to be the only path to freedom I will ever know, and the only succor I will ever find.

Tonight, as I searched through the neighborhood one last time, walking up and down the streets and alleyways, peering under porches, poking under bushes, straining to see and follow any tiny paw prints left in the snow, I noticed a car that had gotten stuck in the icy slush. It had pulled halfway out of a drive; the front half of the car was jutting out into the street. One person sat in the driver's seat behind the steering wheel, another was bent over the car's rear end, rocking it forward and back, forward and back, trying to get it free.

When I saw them I crossed over to the other side of the road.

"Sir?" I heard a voice calling to me and half turned my head. "Sir? Could you maybe give us a hand here, please?" I kept on walking.

"Well hey, thanks a lot, buddy!" the voice shouted after me sarcastically. "I sure hope I can help you out someday!"

I'll never ask you for help, I thought. I never will. Never. Never. Never.

"Asshole," the voice muttered.

I hunched my shoulders against the wind, and I kept on walking.

* * *

DEATH

At the end of all illusion (no, not all, never all)
     what is there?
Death hides on the rooftops covered with snow.
Death hides in the motion of headlights of cars.
Death hides in the darkened windows of houses.
Death hides in the gridwork of roads,
     each one running straight off into nowhere.
Death hides in the ticking of the kitchen clock.
Death hides in the howling of the winter wind.

How endless the variety of forms death takes: It hides
     not in the shadows of things, but in each thing itself:
Each tree, each bird, each automobile, each plane,
     each blade of grass, each and every cloud and star.
Everything is eaten from within.

There is a light inside that darkness, yes;
I have seen that light.
It flares up suddenly and then goes out,
Leaving new worlds, new suns, new stars, in its wake.
That light is death.
At the end of all illusion (no, not all, never all)
     what is there?
Tonight, sitting by my window, I wait and watch
     for my little cat, lost a week ago, to come back home.