Soul's End

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This is Noldo's brain on caffeine, Eliot, and mosquito bites at three in the morning; a dreadful sight indeed. Points to those who spot the very obvious Nietzche references.

The line 'The presence of a soul distinguishes the living human body from a corpse' was appropriated from Plato.




Originally written for the second prompt of the Monthly Challenge; finally, I decided that it didn't fit well enough. However, it's one of my best pieces yet, so I figured I'd put it up anyway.

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I

Echoes in the footsteps of time, what might
have been, what could have been, what never will
be. The light in December’s weary grey
is tarnished like the smoke of a cigar.
Footfalls whisper even now; still echoes
in the silence of the cavern. A drop
of water in the black overturns the
Universe.
                Other, stranger
voices live in the black shadows; drowning
forever, a thousand times again. What
is unstill at the edge of night? Gold gleams
gently, caught in green light; precious is the
soul, even more than the morning scent of
roses. No shaft of sunlight has entered
here; no ray nor spark nor turn of eye; and
in the end, all will fall to dust and dark,
shadowing and tasting and
foreseeing
         the inevitable.
The inevitable is shadowed in the dance of the stars.

Books, torn paper and dust-laced parchment
and silver letters, slowly fading; a page
reads itself to the mind.

The presence of a soul distinguishes the living human body from a corpse.


II

In the still corners of the mind, time slows
and eddies in the perpetuity
of things possible and things imagined. Threads
of silence and of fate are woven; here
is lucid stillness, here eternal doubt,
of this we forge heroes.
            In renewal, the
old made explicit, to elucidate and
understand; the resolution of past and future
in the new reaches of thought, cast
into the depths of knowing and unknowing
until the ocean’s depths wildly echo back.

Renewal is the erasure
of the memory
of unsavoury things past.


III

Time lost
is time irredeemable.
Words move, living things
in consciousness. Horror glances, passes on.
The phoenix rises from the ashes in dusty
smokefall; this is the freedom of the mind.
This is
time.


IV

The abyss also gazes back, and yet somehow
the gaze into the abyss is unafraid; softly
the wind passes. Softly time passes. The
turning of the world continues unhindered.
Rebirth is a process in the continuous alter,
A change in the working of the heart. The
mind, unrestrained in thought, wanders.
            But to what cause
the mind owes its debt, and the thought its price,
     he knows not. This wind has blown
the dead leaves unresisting over the plains where
no leaves are. Strangers
meet in the waning light with fearful scrutiny
and uncertain glance. He is still the same,
knowing himself; he is still another
at the very edge of unending dark.
He treads the pavement in hesitant urgency,
waiting for death on rustling wings. In the
grey December city, the streets sing
unheard.


V

                      Time
stills, and slows, and swirls,
for the renewal of the mind is a difficult thing
even when completely past. It is the very
end of time. The locket swings. Gold. Dazzle.
The light is still, caught in
time; it lingers like the drawn-out note of a
violin. The dark descends with imprecision.
Does time fall? It slows, freezes, swirling at birth and at the end.
It freezes over in a hundred Decembers. He knows
death brings time dying, dying time. But
in a way he is old, and in a way new, in the
rearrangement of thought. Time
is falling to a close. The gaze into the abyss
is no longer afraid, and he is resigned
to the breaking of the world in birth or end.