It is half six in the morning. It is still dark outside. He looks out through the window a second time in the direction of the pen. Stillness fills the air. Not even the cock seems ready yet. The gloom he feels is patent. Yet, he has to go. It is now a matter of must. It is no longer in his hands.
The letter in his mind is clear on the instructions. He must be familiar with being ordered around by now. After all, he has just returned from another tour, his third in as many months. Because he lives alone, he does not have anyone home to worry about it seems, until now, the moment not long after he returns to bed that his door bell rings.
He does not intend to go back to sleep it seems, being already fully dressed in his work clothes. The weight on his mind of his imminent assignment may be momentarily too much for him to bear. He may be contemplative or in despair and needs just some time to shake his anguish off. Whatever is going on in his mind, his demeanour reveals nothing even as the real reason for him slumping back in bed is about to unfold.
At thirty five, he has said that life appears to be leaving him behind. Not that he is desperate for change according to him. What he says bothers him is the frenetic pace of his life, his ostensible restiveness in an endless charade of gaucherie masquerading as toil, even industry, imposed from within to placate a bastardized collective psychic template.
He denies that he is philistine. In fact, he argues that basic forms imbue him inspiring structures in his mind that may seem alien to the very hue his thoughts manifest of a tendency as in many toward centripetal alignments that nonetheless fades amidst the confusion its seemingly invariable derailment engenders as it morphs in an existential hodgepodge.
There is no reason, he contends, for him to engage in chicanery, which he says plagues a meiotic system of immoderate languor garbed in Olympian rhetorical splendour. This he is unabashed about it appears informs his incessant quest, the inner turmoil he says his inclination for action expresses, a determination to mortify an impulse to gratify he says he battles ad infinitum.
The war exploits of his grandfather sways him for a moment from those of thrills as sufficient to mangle his imagination that he admits somewhat appeases his torment. Perhaps for the fact that the shimmer of gold and silver that line the edge carved out of the wall around him caresses, that change brings such pain he admits highlights that the valour on display in his ruminations depresses.
For stories that he says should inspire to seem as some hold the bastion of an intelligentsia he says steers the course of the collective psyche along a moribund path, which he openly disagrees is in keeping with an existential angst that requires expiation for its character to truly reveal itself.
He says he struggles with this convoluted mindset all his life, thrust upon him by history twisted by the zeitgeist, which because he sees and still with which he waltz ramps his torment just even thinking about it, in particular, within the framework his mind now momentarily revels lost in his grandfather’s world.
Then he snaps, back to his own world, which he says in contrast to a celebration of diligence and untainted hubris in the values that romanticize the coalition of the races that dissolve into manifest valour, free of the encumbrances that compromise it now, sure of the shared goals that glorify the variegation, even a semblance of which now has little in common with the past, makes him want to hide from view.
But he says he would confront the demons that threaten his soul with extinction. He says he would no longer run around helter-skelter with his tongue curled up in his cheeks, in spasmodic paralysis. So they continue. One after another the stories emerge to a pointed declaration of epiphany by him he says heralds a new dawn, not still but full of life, laden with changes that are for real, and goals that foster peace of mind for him and for all, and in effect progress along where it should.
It soon becomes uncertain who is proselytizing. Nonetheless, the direction he heads stands out. He disregards the mention of his confession, the guilt of heresy he attributes to his erstwhile worldview, or as he puts it imposed mindset, one whose toga he now sheds, for meaning to make sense, and not just as the material for justification of its pursuit within an established agenda.
He shudders he says to embrace his love as embalmed in his psyche, a ritual of deafening incantations dated in the transition that a gap between roller-coater emotions and the emergence of proper cognition, sobered by experience, characterizes, an experience that nonetheless informs now the wisdom to guide him through the next phase of his uneasy life.
That he admits to not even being focused opening the door, and to the relief he feels since then of a chance to exhale maximally, fully cognizant of the change in his mission to follow he admits has only materialized in his dreams, mollifies he says. That it is a marked departure from the stilts that negate any consideration of the expression in real terms of actions in general deemed actual but as he argues, still known to be absurd, he concedes.
He gets a pat on his back for finally coming out clean, something that his mother admits she no longer has to struggle with herself as a result. He says now he knows he is coming back home for a reason, and not just to prepare for another tour in the eternal hassles of a hustler, a celestial miscreant hankering after the shadows in the sand drawn by fellow sojourners just as confused as him about the existential angst that also boggles their minds.
Not that the blend into now of a glorious past in his psyche matters as much as his newfound ability to decipher his history not in concrete terms as hitherto, but more that it manifests at all given the background of grand narratives from which it emerges, into the realization of the flaws of the cacophony of the said-to-be less universals into which it presumably morphed that he is now better able to understand he says, clearing up his confusion.
