Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 1 Number 2, July 2000

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A Fable (2)

by

Theo Malekin

There was a desert in my head

I lived inside a five-gated city.Narrow twisting stairways; coal smog tang at the back of the throat; seagulls congregating over night-lit domes, undersides lit like ghosts; men with murder in their eyes; veiled women watching, always watching from shadows; blind crippled beggars, teeth jutting through cheek; worn out whores trawling the alleys; the muezzin's lonely song like the voice of the soul of the world.The city gates had always been closed.No one went in or out.

Some schools said the city was built by gods and then abandoned, others by demons who had hidden the inner light with stone and dust, heat and dirt: the divine symmetry broken by the irregular streets where treachery blossomed like a delicate flower. Still other scholars stated that the city had merely grown, evolved from the dust; that the inner light was dead and stone the only reality.

The desert grew inside me. I could no longer contain it. Sand like flakes of the sun blew through the streets: silence dropped in the schools, the old men playing backgammon paused. I slipped through the gap of silence into the desert that lives at the heart of things. I left the city.

I travelled for many years. I stopped at oases, talked to the gods of these places in the cool shade of a palm tree, some figure built of shadow, speech like rustling leaves.Oracular voices, full of things too big for thought.

At a spring, the water showed me my face: the mask of time. All things in that face, baked by many suns, scoured by many winds, hollowed by the sand.