. . . this, then, is a past that is not, that never was. One constructed, as all pasts are.
. . . and now is then just as then was now, and our past folds into our present like flour.
. . . and this monument, which because it is shouted and seen and smelled. . .
. . . which because it is not made of concrete, with men and horses and flags stilled in stone. . .
. . . fools us.
. . . we think it more genuine, more real. Erect a desert from the grain, and believe in the former for fear that the latter isn't enough. History, the past, our story, whatever we call it, has no bearing upon what has happened. . .
. . . only what will happen.
. . . and so even this date is a lie. A unholy history. And the voices which populated that moment. . .
. . . a vagary that means everything to the point of nothing. . .
. . . are lost to this moment, which names "that" then and pretends that now is something other than what it was back when.
. . . what we have, then and now, are monuments that render the past silent and demand sense over recognition. And the past, a mere murmur, emerges a soundless nothing. But just as "that," in its capacity to be everything, means nothing, so too is a soundless nothing inverted. . .
. . . and, yet, current voices blather on and on--because to think, to listen, to remain silent long enough to hear the jagged narratives, which knot our strands and saturate our roots in blood, is to face the enormity of past. . .
. . . the scope of complicity, which haunts not because a return is impossible but because all we do is return and then return again.
. . . and so those voices are drowned out by the bombard of pride, which blazes and cracks across the sky and does so just loud enough to make other cracks, which whipped across backs and pocked faces, inaudible.
. . . but these monuments, which demand due attention for a present that masquerades as past, must be heard.
. . . or so we say. . .
. . . or so we say. . .
. . . can't you see by the dawn's early light
. . . and the answer is no.
No. . . we can't see.
. . . because we hail a moment that never was, that is not, that will not.
. . . it will not, refuses to face its diffuse and ugly nature, and returns but does not return to the past.
. . . or so we think au bout du petit matin. . .
. . . and where truths are lost to sounds that never cohere. . .
. . . what does this mean, we ask.
. . . but this monument, this gathering of old men, doesn't want to know the answer. . .
. . . they--these men who are we--are left with no sense, a disorientation that comes from voices thrown from every angle. And rather than face this cacophony of contradictions and voices, they gather. . .
. . . and ask those who were once gathered to gather now. . .
. . . to set fire to entire bodies of knowledge, of pasts complete, which when shot across the sky bloom like some strange fruit
. . . that is seen but never heard over the canon. . .
. . .which after the party has dispersed, is safekept in the archives of universities and in memories that remember nothing, nothing at all, but the faint bloat of a stomach and the smell of flesh roasted over a pit. . .
-Lokee
