"The name which can be named is not the true name." -道德经
I don’t recall when I first encountered the dream of a pilgrimage, connecting the birthplace of the Messiah and founder of Letterism, Isidore Isou, and the deathplace of the Messiah and founder of Letterism, Fazlallah Astarabadi. I had harboured ideas to visit Botoșani, Isou’s birthplace, in the northern, “Moldavian” part of Romania, for some years, but had thus far been knocked back by certain of my fellow psychic workers, on account of the significant traversals of space, time and class that would be required. Against such investment in signification, actions were indefinitely postponed. However, in the aftermath of an affiliation with the union of Data Miners and Psychic Workers, various suggestions began once more to circulate, or at least to diffuse through the filaments of whatever media mycelia held us connected at that time.
Things are resolved, plans are made, a pilgrimage takes place, and time, and class, to mark the dawning of the 12th year since Isou’s passing, and so to finally turn the page, or so it is hoped, on those bitter, blood-inked chapters we call - after Fazlallah himself - the Age of Divinity.
Myself and another psychic worker begin our pilgrimage before the beginning, on 28th July, some days before joining our comrades in Bucharest. We are marking, precisely, the twelfth cycle of the sun since Isou’s death. Marking, or so it is written, the dawning of the twelfth year, since the passing of the Age of Divinity. No age ends in the downing of a day, but we are here because some people like to draw lines on maps.
We begin by time-travelling, a little less further to the east at first, to Kent, in South-East England. At the turning of the year we drift. A timeless Sunday afternoon, some six-thousand summers folded through it, meandering along the age-old Pilgrim’s Way, to the Coldrum Long Barrow. This tumbledown nest of stones is the Neolithic resting place of a group of dead workers, workers who once partook, and perhaps still do, in certain self-organised activities in this sleepy, seldom-frequented valley.
The living stones, and the dead workers who abide with them, have rested here close on six-thousand harvests now, even since the days of the first harvest and the very dawn of farming on this land. Standing witness to this agricultural advent, the monument thus also carries with it the strange weight of that lurid and human-wrought tall-tale we call ‘History’, that which the Age of Divinity claimed for its own. Yet the stones slumber on, overlooking and overdreaming far more than swathes of ripening cellulose, bristling and swaying in waves of human-raised plant-work and accumulated sunshine.
Amidst these Pilgrim’s Way-fairings, in the high summertide Lammas time, I have a ‘vision’. The word is inadequate, since what settles upon me then does not limit itself to a binocular squint alone. But here those tidings of nigh on six thousand summers wash over me, as the corn ripens again, at the dawning of the dog days. I think about how it has done, in this breathing rhythm of openings and closings, these six thousand years. And as time turns back on itself, I see clean across it. And I glimpse how many star-lit nights, and rain showers, and frosts, and leaf-falls, these stones have rested through, in this valley, since some passing muscles and daydreams hauled them up from the soil, into sunshine, into rain-wet, dew-wet dawns. And touching stone, across time, I feel these sleepers, as they watch over those very first harvests, and time opens up in the gap. I think about the dead, and about beginnings and endings, and I think about how many harvests there are left. It seems as though we have reached the end of some great cycle, which those stones began, across which yawns the impossible expanse of their dreaming sleep. The year turns again in the evening sun.
From that evening, 28th July, to the return of the Black Moon, 30th of August, thirty-three noons pass. Thirty-three noons to carry forth our intercalary time-travels, between the birth and the death of these Messiahs of the Age of Divinity. Fazlallah, who as God and Master, proclaims divinity in human form, Isou who extends this proclamation: ‘All Gods, All Masters’. Two bookends for the pages of a spiritual ‘anthropocene’: from the dawn to the twilight of capital, and its five-century murder of life on earth.
Thirty-three noons for thirty-three moons, the thirty-three moons that have passed over since the Black Moon last stalked these skies. And with its return, now, our time becomes intercalary, a month between months, where moon and sun meet, touch, renew their dance. This dance, and this moment out of time, even before the summer rising of Sirius above the dark, wet Nile was set aside for the traversal of worlds, of times, of classes.
Thirty-three noons for thirty-three letters, the thirty-three letters of Fazlallah’s sacred alphabet, completing the Persian script by folding in his own mystic letter. Each day of our out-of-time time-travels a letter, a letter in a metalanguage that sings out the fabric of time, space, and class. By reaching into the warp and weft of this time out-of-time, between the Ages of the World, can we somehow break the code? Edit that language, directly? That History? At the level of the letter? Can we reach into, and through, that messianic time that spans across all directions and weaves through all mystery? Not to interpret it, but, perhaps, in our own small way, to change the changes in this ever-changing flow? Such is the stuff of visions, visions that curl away like fountaining clouds, scudding above Alinja Tower in a noontide out of time.So we strike out, from a Bucharest choking in exhausted fumes, the reanimated labour of aeons-dead workers. Reaching, before too long, the non-living life of the mud volcanoes: alien, barren, speaking in the voices of those self-same living dead. From here to Lopătari, drowsing in its dusky valley. We eat, and drink, and travel to another time, to see how things might have been different, before capital robbed us of our little place on the hillside by the river, of the sun-warm rock where the girls used to bathe at noon, where we lay to watch the stars come out, while the moon set over the forest.
In the mountains, villages live on in the swinging rhythms of their different timezones. Each green, flower-winking valley another world away from the next, bridling up the horses and making hay in the way they’ve done, these last millennia. Above the forest, Bozioru’s hollowed rocks are seeded with souls, pilgrims who passed this way before us. Christian anarchists who took the easy way out, from a society they despaired to change, withdrawing into isolation and running to the hills, for the solitude of the cave, to rejoin the birds and the bears in the morning of the world.
And I cannot blame them. Who amongst us hasn’t day-dreamed it? Abandoning the material reality of which we are part for a cavern of the mind, to wall oneself up in a rocky cell and wait for the end times, leaving the world to its fate. Yet, and yet, as I listen hard, I hear again those echoes across time, emanating from the very labour of the caves. The echoes resound a curious certainty within me, that the monks have their second thoughts about withdrawal. Their sociality, I am sure, in the space of that long resounding second, wins out, even against the allure of stony isolation. And as they call out prayers into the reverberating rock, starting with a low hum, like that of the earth itself, I hear them now, raise their distant voices to a resonant chant. It carries low and loud across the valley, merging in great rolling waves with the songs of other caves, many miles apart. And within this rock-mouthed choir, I hear the voices of my comrades carrying behind, above, below and before me, as I make my descent through the wooded, sun-soaked valley. The trees become consonants to the flow of cave-round vowels, caves that were made for singing.
Via industry-scared plains and the pink mountain skies of Brasov, through the ruins of culture, in the streets of Sfântu Gheorghe, we wind the snake road through Transylvania to the heat of Botoșani. More messages from across time and space flit into my field of visions like classless diamonds in the dust of a pavement. In a flash I see the great square, at the turn of the so-called 20th century, now haunted by a bronze battalions of dead workers, humus for vain empires that their deaths could not save. Playing cards from a game of cosmic poker rain down around me - were they ‘sent’ from Isou, I wonder? Our journey together begins in earnest.
In the very same way, an earlier pilgrimage, to the wellspring of the Dérive, impossibly turned up messages from the dead, dropping from the skies and into the street, in the form of unknown card games. That day Nadja sent the king and queen of diamonds to kiss our footsteps in the rain-patter nightfall. Today, the heat of a noon gives way again to that same time across time. The king of hearts turns up through the swimming sun. The sepia forms of an old postcard shimmer skyward to retake their place in a square one hundred years gone. Isou is there. Hot-headed, frustrated, impotent. Not in the overgrown green of the graveyard, or the dog-sleep, slow dust, bone-scatted corn of the cemetery on the edge of town. Rusty iron stars of David, a spider-spun constellation under the watch of old trees and men.
In the dusk of Vaslui we break bread and the waters of a heavy melon, while home-crafted wines broker a neon blue communion. Bears bestride the cool of a sun-flecked melt lake, at the bottom of the shade-green tree bowl, speckled with dancing diamonds. How fast collective aspiration can sour, like sweat, how fast ruin, the thousands of lost hours of heaped up social labour, mouldering in monuments to the vain dreams of a space age. As they crumble now, to carcinogenic dust, we play among them. Vama Veche is the full stop to all this, the end of a line, inheriting that brief flame of hope that flutters and gasps: a sigh of relief, or perhaps just release, in the moment of collapse. That flame burned bright for one swift instant, then slowly faded out into the long night of the 20th century, the very ruins that reappear once more in the twisted metal of Kaliakra, in the hollowed honeycomb halls of Arkutino.
There workers freeze history in the attic, atop unfinished spiral stairs, pigeon-grey. 4.XI.89. Soft concrete fossil, to carry their scrawlings across time. Just days from collapse. It is the quick signature of a dashed-off dream, unfinished, cut. Heavy with the memory of cave prints, their shadows long cast, enduring, even as the hands that struck them evaporated. Or the pain-curled shadows of Pompeii, locked in stone. A trace. They carry that same eerie glimpse, the impossibility of tomorrow, and how we all go about our lives, unaware that we stand on the threshold of oblivion.
In the endless blue of the cape, that wraps us on three sides in glass-sharp light, a man plays nostalgic pop songs on an old accordion, channelling dead Americans. And we drive on, through fields, over slow-turning hilltops, gold and green, past a moonrise in the shallows of the ink black sea. Spiralling up and up through the mist of an old forest, to come upon a border post, out of time, a European tableau: past, present, future. And then suddenly, the mountains unfold from their forest blanket, stretching out towards the hazy minarets of another continent. Later, in the squeezed streets of Edirne cars and centuries cram together, as Friday prayers give way to a sleepy afternoon. Spires wake us to other days.
In Istanbul, premonitions of apocalypse, as a flash-flooded grand bazar falls into hush, watchful darkness and alleys turn to torrents. Men dance in the rain and we climb towers, exclamation marks to long centuries of petrified power, gazing out over wars and waters. Wet cats. Damp letters. Whole neighbourhoods of shoes. Heaving seas swell the rains’ afterbirth and pink rainbow bridges span great mosques, their turrets flashing green in sunset chill. Here we wade in, against, through, a surge of humanity, to make us provincial once more. Until we find relief in dogs, who play without heed to police or rain, who neither know, nor care for tomorrow.The Bosporus cleaves aeons, psyches as much as rocks, and the ribbon roads uncurl through stony red and ochre dust. From the gently bristling gazes and half-crumbled constructions of Kütahya, the hotels of Eskişehir bring comfort against the lie that we have little to lose from the insulation of our so-called ‘modern world’. That is to say, the patronising way in which people refer to that particular slice of contemporaneity most heavily dependent on imperial capital.
In the increasing gaps, what looks like wilderness to our eyes, the almost endless salt spans of Tuz Gölü glitter onto a flat world, in which one could disappear in an instant, simply by running at full pelt, directly towards the sun-splintered horizon. They say they will build a prison here, for the souls of dead workers. Yet the land makes specks of us, which is also somehow comforting, to imagine ourselves small, when faced with the vastness of the rifts we are opening up in geological time, rifts we can no more turn the page upon than our own flesh. Salt preserves. Salt as currency. Salt as tears.
Night falls on the dreamscape of Cappadocia; a green call to prayer resonating through the countless pores that millennia have opened into earth’s face. There is a certain conflict, or inner drama to this beauty: unbelievable, incredible, in the true sense of those words, but no less real for all that. With the consumption of wonder comes guilt, but perhaps wonder is all we have. Capital is the false answer to true questions. It ruins everything, even ruins, but somehow, sometimes, the wonder remains, buried somewhere under the screen, in the fear, and anguish, and relief, and love, and thrill, and the fiction we call freedom, and the breath-stealing spectacle of a balloon-strung sunrise.
Deep in the underground city, numberless peoples scrubbed out these dusty twists and bowls and knots, and lived and loved and laughed and ate and died down here, down the centuries, hidden from the sun. Theirs was no flight from nuclear wasteland, or climate apocalypse, but from the belief-hitched raids that have been the bread and butter of class society down its ten thousand winters. It is a cliché to say, once more, that the pages of History are inked in blood. Tyrants of one heap, of one surplus, sending their serfs to rain war and slaughter on the slaves of another. Yet now, this refuge, this home, becomes our labyrinth of timeless play, tunnelling above and below, round and down. Yet even in that joy, we are held by the silence, and the echoes, of those from whom class society stole, and steals, the very sun and stars. Our game, their game, a fathomless monument.
We press on, stalked by twisters over the sweeping expanse, turning into the heavy sky as it breaks about us in fearful collapse. Racing the dancing wind, it thunders either side of us, like a great galloping hell-horse, hail and spray surging up from rock-rivuletted roads, whilst javelins of lightning rain down around us like artillery fire. As we rush and crest the tumbling hog-back hills, I pass through that needle-eye that telescopes in moments of danger. Numb with survival, this terror comes as a thrill, waiting for a lightning bolt that never comes.
Sunset’s arrival in the frayed time-scape of Hattusa is a quivering relief. Stony gods look back blank, as cupped hands trace their butter-soft contours across millennia. In the shadows of a great, empty hall, villagers scrape their living still, as the world passes by. The lion gate itself hangs implacable, like the maw of time through which we all fall, whilst heedless lichen grow great forests across the rocks, facing into the wind and the coming night. Here, kings no one remembers tossed out useless orders to nameless, numberless generations. The city has fallen now, to piles of rocks. Prophets are silent. Everything passes.
From the damp rains of Yozgat, to the cool, sunset lakes of the Euphrates, and out, to what seems like the ends of the earth - at least within the half-conscious frame of our provincial European myths. Persia stretches before us, above us looms Ararat – a name that reaches straight out of ancient legend, from the deep dormant sermons of childhood. Breathless, I walk towards the mountain, over a horizon-wide sweep of broken gold corn. And I stand and stare beneath its snow-capped gravity, a power that reaches down across time, and into the buried places of the heart. And yet it is silent. Will this ancient being not give up its secrets? Perhaps not. Or perhaps the silence is the secret? We seal a complicity in the desert sun, beneath a moon-blue sky. No ark is forthcoming.
In the late light, the desert road narrows, threading the checkpoints, down a gully of nations and through a time-hole, to another age. At the border, days stretch again in front of us, and around us, and behind us, as the sun rolls in a red ball down the face of the mountains. Released at last into the blackness, we glide into the sparse, neon-lit dark, where in some alternate timeline someone has bedecked Dubai in the tattered garb of a Soviet Union that has not fallen. A land-locked, time-locked island. From this surreal dreamscape petro-principality of hot wind and hollowed out automotopia, a dim replay of 1950s America, or 1980s Russia plays to an empty cinema. We look out across the rooftops, and across the lake towards Iran.
Thus, at last, the day arrives. I can scarcely believe we have reached this place, but from the moment I awake, there is an excitement, and the sense of something profound unfolding, of which we are now on the cusp. As we float effortlessly, slowly, into the mountains, it feels almost like we are being drawn, automatically, by some invisible thread. I drive, for the first time with ease, without hurry. I realise that the whole way along this long road from Botoșani, I’ve been filled with a heart-gulping anxiety, the fear that somehow we won’t make it, that we’ll be thwarted and have to turn back, or worse. Now all of that melts into soft golden sunshine and an overwhelming crystal light. In the heady air that surrounds us, we ascended towards sparkling mountains. There is nothing left to do now, nothing left to stop us, to intervene or obstruct our goal, cherished so long and so far, through fear and wonder.
Onwards, upwards, we float, as around us rise rock turrets and pinnacles, beyond imagination, beyond anything I’ve ever encountered, towering over the stillness of the desert plains, like messengers from another world. Breathing the somehow fresh heat of the clean, clear air, we wind on, through villages and foothills, until at last, with an almost indescribable, building, creeping sense of joy, we round one last hillside and there, across the valley – amazement! - the glistening golden dome of Fazlallah Astarabadi’s mausoleum shines out, gleaming like a sunrise. There it nestles, in a profound, untouched, untouchable peace, sleeping softly in the arms of the mountain.As we turn up towards this small, humble, yet perfectly formed building, a shiver passes over me, and my eyes well with tears. Stepping inside its cool, still darkness, my feet sink tentatively into a clean, soft carpet. It soaks up the sound as we catch our breath with a whisper. And there it is, at last, the tomb of Fazlallah. A simple stone clasps the fragments of carved letters, worn smooth by time, held together in the airy, domed shade of the tomb. In the stillness, pure light streams through the doorway, which opens upon the gold and blue beyond, of limitless mountain air. Beyond words, beyond all, a deep sense of peace, and of tenderness stays with me. I am unable to say more, although a whole ocean of feelings lies beneath these simple clichés.
At length, washing our hands in the cool spring that babbles beneath the tree that shades the mausoleum garden, we take our leave of this peaceful place, leaving behind its kindly guardians, the old women who tend the air-stirred roses that flank its walls.
Before we leave, I walk a little way up the dry, golden hillside, looking down over the mausoleum into the vast stretches of air beyond. Behind it towers the terrible, transcendent peak of Alinja Tower, tearing up into heaven itself. It is to here we press on, coming to an impossible staircase, stretching up to the very ramparts of the sky. We begin a punishing ascent in the midday sun, gasping and snatching at the thinning air, and at any strip of shade in the ley of a crag. Lizards scuttle for cover, while spinning eagles cry and cartwheel overhead, their screeches echoing bleakly between splintered, soaring cliffs. Never in the creations of wildest fantasy have I seen, or even dreamed the ascent of such a fortress. It feels as if we are climbing the very summit of the world.
Reaching the peak at last, crested by an ornate labyrinth, the fortress walls survey a sweeping mountainscape of spire-split desert and glittering lakes, stretching out across the plains of Iran, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Turkey. The eagles scream and soar and the sun hums down. I begin to become very lightheaded. I cannot catch my breath in the hot, sparse air. Almost fainting, I remove my shoes and lay down in the shade beneath a wall. From Fazlallah’s execution site his golden-roofed tomb winks in the vastness of the valley below.
I close my eyes against the blue-white glare and the sun beats and streaks in pulsing red billows through my closed eyelids, rushing like mountain winds through the depths of my ears. Softly I sink into this crimson sea and all becomes light. Slowly, every muscle loosens and my breath begins to flow softly, in waves, merging with the swirling currents of light and air until I drift from consciousness into some measureless space of pure release. Amidst these clouds and swirls I hear a voiceless voice repeating and resounding through the percussive rhythm of the depths, at one with the billowing, rushing clouds, arising around and within me: ‘Allah’, ‘Allah’, ‘Allah’, it mouths, turning and sinking, rising and falling, like breath slowly becoming other to itself. Winding, rolling, furling, lapping: Al laf’, ‘All af’, ‘All laugh’, it repeats. ‘I love’, ‘I love’, ‘I love’. Softly, the on-rushing crimson clouds diffuse to pure light and I am cradled in the softest space of safety and comfort, like my whole body has become as light as air and I am floating through an infinite, warm and peaceful sea. And as I begin to speak the words, my mouth grows bitter with iron and starts to flow and spurt with blood, blood that flows up and babbles from my lips like a stuttering stream, springing from the shadows of the earth. I awake refreshed and smiling.
And so, onward. From the desert we drive on, through endless turning knots that span great breadths of plateau. Vast regions that soar and plunge for hours at a time, turning through mountainscapes of unimagined scale, the very rock alive with colour. After long hours, Ani is not of this life. In dreams alone did I imagine such a place, at the end of 30km of boulder-strewn, storm-wracked dirt, to the very end of the world, it seems. That people find life in the shadows of this place is itself so incongruous as to give the carcass of this absent civilisation an uncanny gravity, like those first footsteps on the surface of the moon, persisting outwards into the empty expanse of the future. In the swiftly gathering darkness of a storm, which surfs the very crest of dusk, lightning now and then splinters down amongst the reaching ruins that fall away into the blackness of the windswept steppe.
Looking out across unfathomable expanses of time and humanity, again there are no words. We just stand and blink. Once, the biggest city in the world. Now, rubble. The seeming inevitability of plunder. The bottomlessness of cruelty. The will to live amidst ruins. Empty towers, tumbled cathedrals, abandoned citadels, clinging to the precipice of mighty ravines, hemmed in on all sides. And when this mighty city fell, Mongol hordes sweeping through like the storm, no one was left alive. Blood must have run in these streets, where shadows now gather in the uneasy grass. The silence lies as heavy as the screams once must, resounding off the turrets, piercing as the lightning that now slices the twilight. Thunder shakes the heavy atmosphere and looking out over the darkening plain of the dead city, the weight of empty centuries hangs like horror in the air, foreboding. Black snakes cross our path in silent warning. Night falls hard and deep.
In Kars we pass the kitten-kissed church-mosque that breathes lightly in the morning by the glittering river. Then, as the sun grows hot, we climb the ruins of the monument to humanity; erected out of spectacle, pulled down out of spite. Twisted metal, barren rubble, toxic dust, somehow the most fitting monument there could be, for a humanity that would make themselves gods in their own image, asserting their divinity by enslaving and plundering the world.
Day-long canyons, threading crevasses, winding flooded valleys, towering waterfalls, miles, upon miles, upon miles of tunnels, through the deep peaks. Until, from desert and mountain, we pass through the earth and emerge in Georgia. Buzzing and gleaming like Miami, or Hanoi, the hills are suddenly heavy with mist-cloaked forest, the air a bath of humidity. A great preying mantis winks in the neon. Cars throng and heave, we breathe, the city bursts like a firework, or a bud. Swimming in the last quarter of the moon, on the far side of the black sea, we pause. All those nights I looked east across the expanses of darkness, was this the place I imagined looking back at me? Across space? Across time? Across class? Like staring at a star and just for a moment holding onto the vague idea, hope even, that someone out there is looking back across the void.
As the heat of the day drowns in the sea of a crimson-gold sunset, we board our ship, long after midnight. The cicadas are quiet here, the waves take their place. Lolling, rolling and plunging, into comfortable wells of sleep, like babies in cradles. In the mornings and evenings the gloss-black dolphins play around us in weaving jets. The deck makes a fine observatory for deep wet sunsets of crimson-copper, burnished sunrises of pale gold, the first stars, the last of the moon, endless blue-black, white-flecked waves. There is comfort in routine, in days of slow conversation that drifts in and out of sleep. Nowhere to go, nothing to do. No outside world to impinge on our maritime safe haven. Wine is raised in toast after toast: to country, to family, and other substitutes. High spirits and high seas.
Then finally, one slightly sad, sunny morning, the Bulgarian coast fades out of the grey-blue distance. In time we will dock, depart, drive on, and still on, through fields and villages, chasing the light, as time hovers, crossing the Danube’s rattling ancient bridge at dusk. Somehow it feels like coming home, having gone around the world and come back to the same place, but from the other side. The dark roads give way to a city of light and tired sighs that can barely comprehend what they have done and all they have seen.
As someone who would not have described themselves as ‘spiritual’, this whole experience comes as something of a shock to me, one that causes not a little mental and emotional discomfort, turmoil even. I set out with levity, although there was apprehension and anxiety too, and without any real conception of what I expected, or why I was even doing this. I was not even sure I wanted to. What I found was something I was not prepared for. Call it energetic materialism, revolutionary animism, or any name you want. The men of the Age of Divinity made themselves into gods, at the expense of everything. Fazlallah is the Messiah of this Age because he makes god a man, Isou is the return of the Messiah, precisely because he proclaims the truth of this for all humanity, and thus closes this age up in its own impossibility. The Age of the man-god. An Age, the very expression of which, has brought about its own apocalypse. It is the folly of believing ourselves to be infinite beings in a finite world, rather than finite beings in an infinite one. In elevating ourself above the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the animals, this man-god, in the space of five hundred years, has shredded the living web of which we are, he is, or was, but one strand. That Age is over.
Perhaps an Age of Revolutionary Animism, an Age of the Planetary Proletariat can take its place? If there is still something left amidst the ruins, as the death-throes of Divinity flail their last. And did I become another cliché? Another ‘orientalist’ who ‘escapes’ the ‘West’ and comes back spouting off some garbled spirituality? Falling into the same age-old eschatological traps? I’m not sure. I certainly reject the characterisation of any ‘revelations’ I happened upon as anything other than materialist - albeit magico-materialist, perhaps.
Nevertheless, I have to turn to the tired clichés and the worn-out sub-poetry of serious culture here, if only because what this is, this moment in a life, in time, I somehow find to be beyond the words that the Age of Divinity has bequeathed me. Perhaps, in the final analysis, it lies beyond letters themselves?I began this as little more than a play ‘pilgrimage’, a joke, or perhaps some quasi-artistic simulation of a pilgrimage, a ‘post-spiritual’, ‘postmodern pilgrimage’ perhaps? What I discovered, unwittingly, was that the joke is the real thing, and, in the end, words are of little use for that. And yet, and yet, and yet, my everyday world of words, and work, and fussy little activities, and everyday language, has been turned on its head. This is the real joke; it was the joke pilgrimage that was real. When I came back to my life, nothing really made sense. Myopic preoccupations and occupations, tinsel and trinkets, all risible and useless and destined for the dumping ground, sad stains, stupid litter, long after we and anyone who would remember us - or even care - is long gone up in smoke and so much hot air. My society is sick. Surely its days now number very few. We make ourselves gods, and with this take upon ourselves divinity’s capricious power to destroy, everything. Isou’s new dawn was no more than a twilight, of men who would be gods. Real life is elsewhere, a seed that blows away on the wind.
