Emanuel Stoica - The Blue Room - prose -on topic TRUE and SELF KNOWLEDGE

                               The Blue Room

Selection of bilingual volume of short stories "Windows to the Unreal". English version - Ana Cociş . "Clusium" Publishing House, 2008

Should the world die, the only ones that would enjoy it would be the hyenas. It doesn’t even matter how many legs they would have in such case. In an apocalyptic world dominated by dreams, desires, useless fear, such a category develops a final instinct, the Feast. The corpse is merely an object. An object which makes the hyenas happy, as they feed on it and are hungry no more.
 The world dies every day. And every day the hyenas rejoice. For the time being, the world is also being born. The hyenas are not upset. They are interested in holding the object that can satisfy their hunger close at hand. Unless they find a corpse, they start acting without hesitation. The pray has many reasons to be sad. Among these, the fact that such hyenas don’t even remember what they swallowed the previous day. A memory effort would disturb their digestion. I just told you that their religion was the Feast. And that they fed on objects called corpses. This is what the world turns into when it dies. This is why you have to frighten the hyenas, so that they may not turn you into an object before your time and that they may not enjoy their satiety only because they have met you. This is what can happen in an apocalyptic world dominated by dreams, desires and useless fear. Hyenas are born and die. Worms or some nameless bugs eat them. Then the bugs also die. Some larger or smaller creatures, the bacteria, feed on them… The bacteria themselves die, in their turn.
A wise man said that when a man dies, a whole universe dies with him…
                                                       *

The rain was whipping the face of the silent pilgrim. The seemingly infinite darkness, the dampness of his clothes, glued to his body like hog suckers were exhausting his patience. Once again, he hadn’t been able to defeat the Veil. He had been travelling far, way beyond the worlds consciously accessible to those he was going to meet. He always knew what he had to do on his way back but…couldn’t explain how he knew it. He was stepping on the sharp rocks without feeling them anymore, unable to hear his own footsteps. Flashes of lightning were howling desperately, lost into the nothingness. They too seemed to feel cursed because no one ever watched them anymore. The eyes – almost useless accessories. The stars hadn’t been watched for whole centuries. The day – merely a legend. The world – a meaningless idea in the absence of self-consciousness. On this floor the lights were off. The three torches, still burning, were lightening each-other’s way.

All three had the same obsession. They knew that eventually they would find out what had made them follow the Road. It was the only detail they could use as a start point to imagine eternity beyond the torment of their obsessions. They had never talked about it among themselves. In fact, they had never spoken to each-other at all. They were so used to each-other that there was no need to do it. The light of the flames returned charged with a terrible force to the margin of the veil which covered everyone’s face up to their eye-balls.
 The Guardian, a warrior spectrum, whose unique concern seemed to be that of frightening everyone who had ever met The Accompanied One, was practising a gruesome reflection by gently stroking the hilt of a terrible sword, which none of the remaining recalled ever being used. His foot-prints were the only ones visible in the sand. Only his eyes could be seen, hiding a tamed force which could easily be imagined as terrible. No one wanted to know about it anymore. The Guardian had never implied that he wanted to show it. He seemed to be gazing through and beyond the creatures of this reality.
 At first, The Scholar had seen him as a hallucination. His perception had changed rather soon, though. He started to believe he was dealing with a creature who had access to multiple dimensions, but who refused communication. It was easier and relatively logical for him to accept this. What he found rather strange – the way The Guardian always managed to precede the arrival of The Accompanied One. The fact that the sand retained his foot-prints was another feature that The Scholar would analyse at times, considering only the consequences. The causes were far too insignificant at the moment. He examined only the depth of the foot-prints trying to create a theory which should enlighten his understanding. He felt closer and closer to the truth.
 The Prophet, a caviller. It seemed that nothing could ever please him. Condemned to a sort of misunderstanding… His drama, his prophecies whose meanings were always revealed too late…. Once he had seen himself drifting in a sea of words. The letters were flowing, enshrouding any logical thread, turning ideas into paper balls later thrown away into the large receptacle of the mind’s debris. The gods-given gift seemed then an existential stain on the microscopic universe of a world no more significant than an atom, when looked upon through the Creator’s infinite eye.
 Many times, in his ancient dreams, indecipherable Images would intermix. They belonged to another world. Strange moods, scented with peace, herb odours, and ant-hills watched with a new-born baby’s curiosity. Nameless objects which waited to be given a name, dialogues with a white dog, voyages into a world whose every recess was worth exploring, immense in its diversity, but undivided. In one of the sequences, a large empty room. The sound of planks creaking under the soft-shoed sole of a 2 year-old baby, an echo that had to be explored, certainly, and something that made the atmosphere seem imprinted with an obsessive Voronet blue springing from some corner, from an invisible eye, from the walls or from a stain of old paint…
 How had they all disappeared? Where were the wonders of the blue room that he had never managed to find again? He suspected that it had been real, the details seemed too unforgettable to have been just an illusion… The Prophet had tried many times to recreate the itinerary. He always arrived in an empty place, where nothing had ever been built. There was something like a dried-out lake, or its surroundings, in the area. He could only remember the grass enshrouding him, stroking his face, his EGO, sending a message of the infinite joy of living, feeling, observing… What if he could find the secret of the blue room in the idea that only the strong survive?
 The Prophet threw some wood on the fire, muttering words that sounded like a spell. The prayer rose like a butterfly. In the same time as the smoke of the offering’s scent, the distant torments of the storm mingled in a huge, futile, unchained rage.
 ‘I live, I die, I am Osyris… I live, I die, I am the barley, I don’t disappear’. The inscription on a great hot flagstone in the middle of the fire. The words carved into the stone seemed to be feeding on the incandescent offspring of that matter-consuming process.
 For a few moments, the eyes of The Scholar and those of The Prophet focused on the Pilgrim’s coming. Always the last to arrive. The hasty return of their eyes to the flame expressed their disappointment. The last to come, The Accompanied One, was alone this time, too. His foot-steps sounded as they had sounded a year, or a century,…or a millennium before… The veil could not be defeated yet. Time wasn’t even important anymore. What had had to be done, had been done and what was to be done from that moment on would be fulfilled. This was the Law.
 His sword clashed against the rock when he sat down. The sound grinned gruesomely, like the death of an infernal creature. Being harsh on himself, he couldn’t understand his exhaustion. He knew he had forgotten its causes. Eventually, the meditation received the touch of his force, too. For a few moments, the old obsession-image got hold of him, he turned into a bird, or a locust, then into a flock of locusts, then… As always, he voluptuously experienced the moment when his consciousness of being part of a whole aroused again.
 To turn defeat into victory… even apparently. For a second, there was the possibility to start fresh, if only in one’s imagination, so as to believe in oneself once again. There was an absolutely perverse beauty in this statement but it was a necessity that he had discovered once and didn’t want to forget. The obvious defeat was denoted by the very unwillingness to acknowledge the surrender. So, the fight went on… The weapons? Absolutely unconventional, maybe the final weapon, victory was all that mattered in such psychological moments… He perceived nameless images, allowing them to drift into the meditation, dividing his torment into three. In return, he received from the others worlds that overlapped his own… The torment of a viper on the edge of a scythe. The chopped snake, the blood flowing out of it, pity and horror. He would have run back to the peace and echo of a bluish room, next to that oak-tree at whose roots flew the best water in the world, with pitcher-like taste, if he hadn’t been told it was worse than to attend the death of the creature. It kept struggling until sunset.
 Flashes of lightning were howling darkly, desperately lost into the nothingness. Charged with a terrible force, the light of the holy fire was returning to the margin of the veil which covered their faces up to the eye-balls. The bug was looking for shelter in a shadowy recess of the cave wall, away from the flame light. His kind was the only one who wasn’t yet suffering. The discretion required by the survival of the species, under the circumstances created by the trophic chain since its birth, had already turned into a conspicuous modus vivendi. The insect-kind would have screamed in shame. The cockroaches had turned into dinosaurs feeding on the decaying remains of a world in agony. No prophecy had ever announced it. To the cockroaches, it made no difference anyway. Living in that putrid, comfort-providing world, their collective consciousness had had the revelation of a feast which nourished its apocalyptic libido. They were everywhere. The remains, a plentifulness ferociously grasped by this species, for which decay was prosperity. The main flaw of this seemingly pest-favouring situation was their inevitable extinction. One day everything would come to an end. By dying, the fat cockroaches themselves had become a mass of putrid waste, swallowing the next generations of ant-hills fed with the world’s remains.
 The cockroach’s running towards the perverse, shielding darkness stopped abruptly. The fist of the Guardian had crushed it.
 Is it the strongest who survive? One of the questions he would have liked to find an answer to. Condemned to search without ever finding answers to match the questions, the three had been meeting for the pain-sharing ritual since long forgotten times. Who were the strong? Was there still truth in the statement ‘Cogito ergo sum’? Or was it that the reality had become a supreme punishment for the pride that this mental offspring could unleash?
 The feeling of an intense, almost unbearable combustion interrupted the meditation. Without warning, the Guardian had stepped in the middle of the sacred fire. The footprints that marked his way were deeper than usual; the closer they got to the fire, the faster they vanished, The Scholar noticed quickly.
 For the first and the last time, the same thoughts crossed the mind of the three. Their only grace – the moment when they would realize that this was the end of the Road. The writing, in the middle of the flames, on a large glowing flagstone. The words carved into the stone seemed to feed on the glow springing from that matter-consuming process. All of a sudden, the universe crumbled within itself. “You are on the throne of Osyris, as a representative of The First amongst those in the West. Partake of his power, receive his crown.”
 A moment as infinite as eternity. The road towards the people of the West, behind them. Omnipresent – only the Veil waiting to transform it into a mystery again.
                                            *
 See-saw, screech-scratch, question and answer. The blue room was alive, at least parts of it seemed animated. Through a piece of the floor, the little man was questioning the Blue, which had got attached somewhere to the top left corner. The echo, an occasional translator. “Child, you’ve got lost again! Let’s go... We’ve been so worried”, the old man’s voice said. “Damn this business”, he muttered, somewhat relieved…
 Scolded, clinging to the protective hand of the father, the kid was trotting a little frightened through the huge grass. They were climbing past the oak tree with the best water in the world, tasting like pitcher. It was at that moment that he understood for the first time. The search had started again.

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