T H E E N D C O M M U N E

My steps are heavier than yesterday and the air feels denser. Colder, damper. I chip more and more in order to take breaths and it becomes more frightening with each and every one. The air filters through the grossness of my palate and becomes distilled of its natural freshness. A cloud of vapor forms in the strained breathings of exhaled air and the hairs on my arms bristle in the morning cold. The ground is frozen in wreaths of hoarfrost and the sudden, strange drop of temperature from yesterday is baffling to my senses; in the wake of this thought I shiver in body and mind. There is an uncanny atmosphere, an ambiance of natural Nordic melancholy convolving these woodlands now, a dismal fogginess… a foreboding imminence startling and unsettling… and the landscapes have shifted accordingly, along the lines of these eerie impressions – the terrain is churlish now: hundreds of robust roots, stumpy and sinuous and like serpents fleeing a scolding earth, penetrate the frost-bitten soil and reach like murky antennas towards a bitter sky exploded with a matted, lifeless, sullen coloring… like old lead it reflects the shining of the sun, and what comes of that disgraceful light is heavy, and it is sure to evoke a gloominess of the soul. Gone is the fragrance and the opulence, the softness of the scenic wanderings of yesterday, and gone is the warbling of the larks followed by hoarse answers from crows and magpies; gone are the deep green verdures and the redness of their abundance of berries. Where is my luscious , warm forest? The moist, mossy ground covered in delightful, edible mushrooms seems to have sunken deep into subterranean caverns beneath, as if undermined by a malignant magnetism of nature… the sprawling growth of the ground – an animal’s banquet in which I too have been reveling – seems now to have withered inexorably and unexplainably, as if under the cosmic nigrescence and reversion of a mighty sun... and it is an outright curse and horror… I no longer find lusciousness in the soil I tramp, but death, death and death… and I love it as much as I feel bothered by it.