Valley of Strangers: Between Here and There (Σ [Ø])
To get There, you must leave Here, but you never really do get There because when you leave Here to get There you end up in a quasi no-man’s land called Nowhere. That is what happened to me the other day, when, in the meandering mayhem of my macabre madness, I left Here.
It was a cloudy, late afternoon. The neon tangerine sun began to set between the paths of Here and There. Shadows had cast their presence on the headstones marking the unread novels of the lives of the denizens of There. Night began to prematurely cover the landscape like a permanent, eerie, total solar eclipse. I found my Self wandering through a bright chartreuse valley to get There. Those lovely verdant pastures were the only scintilla of blurry color in an otherwise dismal, dull world. A fine mist surrounded me like an imperceptible mizzle of rain. Other than that, there was not much going on in my travels to There. An occasional orb-like being would bounce and shuffle around in branches of a random tree and otherwise decorate the unremarkable landscape. Some of those beings orange, some silver, and occasionally green and red. When I arrived There, I found my Self amidst other lost travelers. They too were somewhere between Here and There.
There is an odd place, like an altered state of dream transcendence momentarily at one with an implicate order: like dreaming about the night at night and dreaming of dreaming. To dream about the thing itself There is no getting around it. Here, it is the thing in and of itself but surreal notwithstanding. There is nothing definite, just a sort of dull, pale shade of grayish grey. It is quiet. No one says much – no one can – Time is indefinitely finite, There. The future does not exist There, only the past exists. The present is somewhere between Here and There.
There is a dead life, There, unlike Here, because There is where the convolutions of reverse entropy live in elaborate gold and marble mausoleums built into large stone walls or sides of enormous trees. Occasionally, the denizens of There leave their palaces to speak with those Here but the conversation is usually limited. Appreciating how infinitely limited Time is There, I hurried along my course.
I followed a brass banister leading up to one level of denizens. Making a motionless turn around a bend, I reached a row of the silent palaces. I knocked upon the door of one of the inhabitants of There. The large gold door opened hesitatingly as if restrained by the rattling of heavy chains. A figure opened the door. It wore a suit and black tie with a tarnished, anchor tie tack. The suit and tie were tattered and soiled from years of decomposition through the century.
I was struck by the odd similarity between It and Me.
The thing studied my face intensely and quizzically.
“Do you have a name, sir?” I asked, out of curiosity.
“I used to, but when you get to Nowhere, you lose your Self and anchor along the way. So, I have no name. Not now.” It replied.
“What was your name? “I asked. ‘
“Nothing About ME, Σ [Ø],” It replied.
“What are you doing, here?” It queried.
Momentarily confused because I thought that I left Here to get There, I replied, “I’m not Here. I’m There. Isn’t that where I am? Could That be where I am?”
The ghoul continued to stare at me. I could not help but notice the strange hue to its amber-gray skin. It had concave sage-gray eyes reflecting inwards and not reflecting anything at all. The creature had a subtle layer of moisture to its translucent skin. He was a startling, imposing, menacing figure. “If That is where you are, then, I’m afraid to tell you that you have reached Nowhere,” the infirm continued.
I peeked into the infirm’s dwelling. The cold chamber was sparsely furnished, dimly lit, and had a peculiar dampness that smelled of mold and decay. I could taste the sticky, stale air upon my lips. The floor was of gray marble, and the walls were a mourning dove gray. There was a grated stained-glass window, half-opened, and to the left of the gold door. An old unsteady wooden chair with missing rungs stood to the right of the grated window. Given the rigor of the invalid before me, I could not imagine the thing bending over or sitting in that chair. I saw a photograph of a young girl on a rickety table next to the wooden chair. She could not have been more than twelve years old. She had convex sage-gray eyes like mine.
“Would you like to come in?” It gestured with its withered, patina hand.
“You know that I can’t go in There!” I answered emphatically.
We stared quietly at each other for what seemed an eternity. The more It stared at me, the more I fixed my scrutiny and attention to It. It seemed to vanish before my eyes like a fine mist.
“Time’s up,” It continued.
“How can that be?” I asked. “There is no present There. It seems to me that you’d have to be Here to say that with any conviction. All you have is the past, and there’s plenty of time for that, There!”
“It depends upon your perspective,” It went on, “because if I were you and you were me, together we would be infinity and neither of us would be between Here and There. So … time’s up for me, my friend, until and if we should chance to meet again.”
“WAIT!” I pleaded. “Before you close that door on me, tell me how to get back Here.”
“Why, the same way that you got There is how you get Here, but then again, I think that you’d just end up Nowhere again,” It snickered. I turned away slowly. Engravings on the sandstone markers were illegible through rain and the passage of Time. “What is Time?” I wondered. “Is Time just a conundrum of the caprice of imagination? Where does Time exist between Here and There?”
Whether our Time between Here and There is a sojourn or an odyssey, we realize that we are not traveling in a valley of strangers. For the inevitability of chance is not a happenstance. The greatest gift of self-discovery is the comprehension of the inner connectedness of all matter and the illusory nature of time and reality.
Perhaps, I am not the stranger that I once thought …