faller Chapter 2 silence

Chapter 2

silence

there is the story.

the telling of the story.

there is the listening.

and there is the silence. when no story is being told.

there is the making of music.

there is the dancing and the singing and the listening.

and there is the silence. The silence that lies beyond the reach of any music or any voice.

this thing, this third thing is not known by many.

it is forgotten by even more.

and that is what gives it its power.

some are born with this thing, this silence, swimming with them inside the womb. their spines do not straighten up as easily as others and they find it harder to walk and when they do walk they fall down again and again. if they find the strength to stand then this thing, this thing that even they cannot see or know that it is there, but they suspect is there, has always been there, they have some hidden thought that perhaps this is the way that the world must be, that this thing would knock them down or drag them down and if they crawl back up then it will do the same thing again and again.

and again.

and again.

for some of these people if they open up their mouths to speak then they will find that the words have been strangled. mangled. choked. smothered. deep deep down inside of them even before these words could be given birth. and so they, these people, most of them, fall silent, remain silent, for this hint of a feeling inside of them tells them that it is useless and fruitless to even try, because the words will never be able to leave their mouths fully alive or alive in any way that matters.

when the black robes came they had with them a book that said that the word was the beginning. and yet this book also said that their god was too large, too vast and unknowable for mere words to encompass.

there are some things that are too large for the minds and mouths of mere human beings to grasp.

the black robes had that much right.

but it is not just their god or anyone else’s gods that live beyond the words. it is other things too.

it is those things that make us silent. not in awe or in reverence, but because the silence is so much larger than we can understand and because the words and the music have been taken away, strangled stillborn inside of us, and we fall silent because we have no other choice, because we have nothing at all to offer the world that has not already been offered in a better and more truthful and more substantial way.

that emptiness also is too large for words or understanding or meaning.

we stay silent. we fall down or we do not even ever rise up, not because we feel the power of things moving through us but because we feel nothing at all, because our throats and our legs and our hearts and our stomachs are numb and frozen and horribly unspeakably empty.

i know.

i know.

i can feel it just out of reach, too large for any words. and my thoughts can form but they will not survive. they desperately seek some kind of shape, but the shapes that will not hold in fullness or declination, mere ghosts of the stories that desire so very much to be told.

i know.

i cannot speak these things.

but i know.

i try to stand and i fall down again and again because my body and my brain have been beaten down by men.

but also because i was born to fall down.

i was born with part of me already long ago dead and i can wrestle down these dead words, but they will never be enough.

they will never be the story.

not the whole story.

i know.

those others see only the mangled form, the scarred and wordless form that is called body today, a body that stumbles and stutters and falls down on the ground frothing at the mouth. but they cannot see the rest.

they cannot see me and they cannot hear me.

they cannot hear the hidden me or see the hidden me because he was strangled mute and contorted in the womb and so he lurks so deep down inside of this scarred, stumbling and stammering shell.

this is not the telling of my story.

this is not the music, the song or the drumming of my song.

this is what is left of me when everything else, all the stories and all the music have gone silent, have been taken away from me.

this is the voice of a dying animal in its cage.

strangled.

numb.

too small and starved and desiccated to be anything like the real thing.

this is not the telling of my story.

it is dead words on a dead page, perhaps on dying leaves of paper, just dying dead bits of shadow, with the stink of death still upon them.

this is all that there is left to my story.

there may be no one out there to listen.

there may be nothing left inside me to be worth the reading of it.

but i will tell what i can.

i will stumble and i will fall and i may never escape the confines of this nothing, these fragments of a trapped and bitter mind.

but i will tell it.

i will try to tell it.

i will try again and again and fail and fall again and again, hurl my body against the walls of this cage that i am trapped in, until this dead or dying thing has been told.

it may signify nothing at all.

in the end, after all the sound and the fury, it will almost certainly signify nothing.

but i will tell it.

i will try to tell it.

it is not the telling of my story.

but it will be something.

it will be something like the telling of a story.

and that, even that, will be better than the silence.

anything, anything at all, will be better than the silence.

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