0:01
The cave was dark, small, hallowed and hollow all the same. The cool wind blew silently, echoing the emptiness within. It’s gunmetal shades gave off no light; black and white becomes messy when it turns to grey. Heaven forbid anything like that.
The cave turned. Its shade filled pupil aimed at me, called to me, promised me an end to my miseries, an end to my troubles, a reason to everything because nothing makes sense. Nothing has meaning, all an accidental miracle, the miracle being the fact that existence ever happened at all.
0:30
Why am I telling you, whoever you are, all of this? I don’t know. Maybe I am crying out for something: help; logic; hope; light; peace. Maybe I just want someone to talk to.
‘Communication is more than just words; communication is architecture, because of course it is quite obvious that a house which would be built without that sense, that will, that desire to communicate, would not look the way your house looks today.‘*
Whatever the fuck that means.
0:45
The cold winds of the cave are calling again. Its gaping black mouth of an eye keeps staring at me, eternally unblinking. I heard a loud crash, a single devastating click louder than any thunderclap, like God stomping Her mighty foot down in frustrated anger; She too, seems confused by all that we do; the pain we cause each other; the pain we cause ourselves. Unrelated and unrelenting, remembered and dismembered, discombobulated and frequently modulated into something more or less human: far from the original.
0:59
Feeling along, flesh and bone, waiting for the telephone to ring. Even God responds quicker than this. I want to pick up the receiver. I want to be a believer in that there is a light at the end of this cave, hoping and praying that it isn’t a freight train barreling down on me, or a forest fire burning wildly, or the explosion of a bullet being fired at my direction – a suicidal satori: it’ll all make sense in the end.
1:23
Things are changing, everything gets darker with every spark of light struck; it seems like the sudden burst of luminescence leaves behind an even greater shadow, like every step forward pushes the finish line that much further away; the Red Queen is a cruel bitch…
1:47
‘There has to be more to life than this, because in our confrontation with a cold, cold Universe, there is something comical to the idea that we can really impose our will on humanity: power corrupts!
‘And at the end of it all lies, of course, the final phenomenon of deterioration: entropy, which is a predictable dis-intergrations(sic) which the creative life ceases…everything has to fall apart.‘**
2:08
Climatic hands press into my temples, pushing everything and more out and apart from me, pulling away like a moth to a deceitfully promising blaze. It’s hard to say what really caught my attention, that well of gravity that lured me in like an aphid to a rose; a swarm of aphids, an apocalyptically teeming mass of hunger and dread, doom and foretelling, of glittering stars pulsing their final reserves, blinking out; twinkling out of existence for the very last time – I swear I won’t let it build up inside me…
2:35
SURPRISE – that light at the end of the tunnel, that light at the back of Plato’s cave, was in fact, without a showing of doubt, a bullet explosion. Something terrible is coming my way, an uncomfortable reality; a scared-shitless feeling that if I spoke too much about it, I’d suffer a cardiac arrest of reality; left standing alone in a movie theater long after the lights have gone out, dark shadows so deep, that they hurt to look at; squinting my eyes so hard that lights appear when there is no source of light to begin with; figments of my imagination? Who knows. It’s all a wonderful idea – too bad it doesn’t work…
2:59
Bang. So soft and blue, so, so blue, the kind of blue only the most poisonous of mushrooms could produce – poof, and it’s in the air – pow, and you’re gone.
That fiery explosion, it’s so cold, like a blanket, constricting, consuming, comforting in only a way that reality could by dropping you off in completely unknown void of avoidance: the emptiness we don’t want to believe; imposters within our own thoughts; a deserted desert thought; a warm place, a cold embrace – a sweet release…
3:00
…all in all, it was a pretty nice day.
*Tadeusz Zbigniew Danielewski
**Also Tadeusz Zbigniew Danielewski
A Place for Stories 