At work, he is a genius. His colleagues say so. Nothing seems to escape his fancy, or the edge of his clearly remarkable intellect. Besides being adept at the craft, as those that work on the shop floor prefer to term their trade, he seems to have the answer to even the most obscure question they say.
Not that he has more education than the rest, which makes his abilities even more difficult to comprehend, they admit, more so that his demeanour often belies his seeming repertoire of knowledge. In fact, he only managed to complete elementary school, as he would be first to say.
Growing up in a poor neighbourhood, where survival predicates on muscle bulk, he says taught him a few valuable lessons. Nonetheless, many find it hard apparently to reconcile the many obvious contradictions in his life. How someone who is so clearly benign in his ways could be so potent in his mind no doubt baffles his colleagues.
The first to get to work most mornings, he welcomes all with a smile, even if he is well into the day’s tasks for his team. He listens to their complaints and issues, and addresses them to their patent pleasure. He never seems to be angry even when clearly deliberately provoked. And he ends the day with well wishes to all.
Many are doubtless intrigued by his abilities. Before long, from a few that consult him at home, a steady stream of clients ensues, which eventually leads to the next phase in his life, one rich in mystery, laden with intrigue, and drenched in sorrow, many say, even as they revere him openly as the purveyor of whatever they so fervently seek.
That he resigns from work seems inevitable, given his bourgeoning practice at home. Away from clinkering machines, boring bowels with tools oiled with sweat, in simmers all day that drain ounces in ravenous waterways struggling to stay alive etching pathways along dreary faces, he foreshadows in a dark room before the hole in ecstatic frenzy.
With patronage shifting sands and barriers that at once delight and enrage, based on whose version holds of an emerging idiom that many contend promises a new era for the motion of the mind one and all, the profundity of the man that seems to be acquiring a supernatural status itself seems to be the rallying focus antithetical to the alleged shenanigan of the zeitgeist.
Apparently not detracted, he continues in his professed mission to help whoever, gratis, living on his annuity, gifts, and donations, to the obvious chagrin of others in the trade. It seems the more infuriating that his message is more acceptable, given its impact on the conduct of affairs in a notoriously decadent culture as even the people unabashedly admit.
Here then is who his competitors clearly see as a spoiler, a situation that they sooner address than continue to ignore. Yet, the wave of change seems unstoppable. They agree that they must act, and fast. The clandestine meeting though ended in rumpus, over an entirely different matter, even if it pertains to the same man.
Over the years, the source of his wisdom he says is the hole. At the center of his home in the room devoid of any light source, he meditates before delivering his message to his clients. He says there is nothing magical about what he does. His competition says the exact opposite, and that he is a heretic, a conman, who preys on the sentimentality of the innocent, an abuse they claim of prehistory, of void unconsciousness masquerading as present forging ephemeral links across time.
He counters with debunking the presentism they relish as unpalatable mishmash attuned to currency, a tantalizing multidirectional random motion from which nonetheless emerges the ingredients of the idiom that so piques them. Thus, he claims the hole inspires even as it befuddles the purveyor, its steamy recess the road to a veritable preconscious, the wellspring of wisdom across millennia that nature whispers when it does not bellow.
They cite the awkward nature of his house, its tilt in a peculiar manner in the direction whence the sun sets, the inner chamber of concrete that encloses a sanctuary where they claim his communication with questionable spirits takes place. He says he is the spirit, his own spirit, just as they are theirs, that the hole simply inspires him, and makes him a wiser spirit. He urges them to seek their own holes if they wished, which he assures them they would fine, even offering his services to them as he does to whoever cares, meantime.
He continues to influence many, whose consequent changing communication patterns clearly bear on their perception of reality, and how they conduct their lives. He exalts the pragmatics of the idiom, the wheels he says of the motion, the perpetual interpretation of reality crucial to human progress. He seems unperturbed by his critics, arguing that stripping how we interact of its nuances could only result in stagnation in abstract semantics, which is of only theoretical value.
Many continue to question his motive, which they argue would plunge all into the darkness in which he revels. He says their argument is academic, that what matters is the value in moving the motion forward, what he says may reveal more of the secrets of the realities that elude us, and that may be what hinders our contact with others elsewhere, whose perception and interpretation of their reality may be much different from ours just as those of our predecessors clearly were.
His perception of the eventual race at all levels to acquire the wisdom he says to comprehend our changing reality in ways essential to progress he says needs not imperil the pursuit by the spirits to roam free in cosmic intercourse, to enjoy the bounties of nature here and beyond in full, but rather would coalesce in the end as in the past in the realization of this goal, which to the obvious sorrow of his friends, he says he would likely miss, transitioning soon after, in his characteristic mystic manner.
