JUDGMENT

by Maximillian von Fischgeist

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I am neither light nor shadow, soul nor substance. I am neither empty nor whole, forgiving nor forgiven. I simply am, and that is everything and nothing, but it is enough.

Twenty-nine years have registered on the cold hands of time since my random birth to the Chaos. But for me there is no past, no fearful need to analyze moments already gone. The past is only a dim collection of sepia tarnished photographs, meaningless monuments in a graveyard of things already finished, unaware and uncaring of the eyes foolish enough to waste their gaze upon them. The future is likewise blank, a void of uncertainty whose landscape is unknowable until those moments ahead become fixed in time and join the frozen wasteland of the past.

There is only now - always, unceasing, relentlessly and desperately clutching at and railing against the Chaos. The wolf bays at the moon, and we give it meaning, though it has none. The cat cries into the blackness from the stench of its alley, and we call it mourning, though it is only base animal instinct. The shark turns blank eyes to its prey, swiftly darts through dark waters, bears down on its victim with a hundred razor sharp teeth, and we shudder with the chill of the deepest ocean, assigning the vague and fabricated human characteristic of “evil” to the mindless fish.

Humanity cannot bear the Chaos, cannot cope with the empty sky, cannot touch the distant stars and so dreams in futility of doing so, giving them names, classifying them by color, by size, by heat, by light, by an imaginary system of mathematics and physics - anything to convince itself that it can master the Chaos. But lives are fleeting in the void, spinning aimlessly in the spiral that has no beginning and no end.

I am no better, no worse. There are snapshots of me in the photo album of the past: In one I am ten years old and I hold a bloody knife in the temple of a nonexistent god; in another I am sixteen and breastfeed an infant girl who will not see her first birthday; in another I am four and afraid in a small dark place and with a sobbing whimper ask the twittering rats if they can tell me where I am. These things are finished; they are less than trivial.

With every old second that ticks off the hands of the clock that has no reason with which to contemplate its own function, I die. With every new second the hands grope for dumbly but steadily, I am reborn. Unable to grasp the infinity of the Chaos, we attempt to break it down into understandable blocks of millennia, epochs, eras, centuries, decades, years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds. But there is ever only one second. And we cannot stand it, so we dissect it further into milliseconds, nanoseconds, until finally there is nothing and we ourselves dissolve into the Chaos.

There is only now, and in it only us as we are now. Not as we were, or as we will be. The world turns because it does not know better. The planets beyond circle because they have not yet been told not to. The galaxy spins because it has no more urgent matter to attend to at the moment. The universe tumbles in the Chaos because that is what it does best.

We are the same. We turn and circle and spin and tumble because we must. If we do not, we disappear into the Chaos and others take our places, neatly treading the same footprints in the sand, believing the steps they take on their journeys are unique and that theirs are less or more meaningful than were ours. But this is only vanity.

There is only now, and here I am, readying myself to pose for another photograph to add to the endless collection. And now the flash blinds me, the camera fulfills its purpose. In this photograph, I am dressed in a garish leotard of white and gold. I stand in a wrestling ring and can smell the acrid accumulation of uncountable stains of sweat and blood on the mat. There is a vast audience around me. Thousands of eyes gape at me in wonder, for at my feet is a woman’s corpse. She has become one with the Chaos. In one hand I hold a sword wet with fresh blood and in the other I hold the woman’s severed head, a look of shock still frozen on the face. To wear such a gaudy costume and stand in a wrestling ring and have decapitated a woman called Dr. Cutter but whose actual name is perhaps not recorded anywhere in the world - these decisions were made in the past and I no longer give them any consideration. Their meaning is lost, simply more fodder for that part of the Chaos that has ceased to be.

And now is a new now, and the photograph is lost to the past with the others, one of the infinity that make up something that we do not understand and cannot.

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(September 2005)