When the world has ended, I shall lie down to rest... and then I can die into a peace eternal. But! I am afraid I have forgotten to bring an obol for the ferry-man. Or, forgotten... rather I am too poor. I have not an obol. And how may I solve this problem, a decisive issue: how may I cross this river without jobbery? Because I have no coin, I really have not. And I am not too good of a thief... my nerves twitch easily. I had to use my very last ones to bribe my way down here, to these cavernous lands and dead subterranean marshes. I had found a passageway through a system of catacomba purposefully hidden in the sylvan country somewhere in the land of Arcas, but to my great dismay I found that it was also controlled by bandits who conventiently charged every traveller and pilgrim zealous enough to have found the tunnels... And whatever the reason, the mission, the rationale for their departure down there, a coin was to be paid. And that was how they made a living, they said. They would never hurt you or even harass you. Either you pay and descend to the river, or you do not pay, and then you will be forcibly but respectfully ejected from the mysterious burrows, and forget that anything of it even ever happened. So, I paid. But what now? Can I talk my way with Charon, the ferryman? Will he listen?  Is it impossible for me to bypass somehow, to evade and elude, or am I doomed to the shore forever? Am I and my pennyless pockets to be rejected by even the boatkeeper of death? Is this what monstrous language money talks? It is, seemingly. Maybe I can lure behind the stones of the ragged Styx-beaches as if a lion in ambush? And painted in camouflage with the war-paints, the ochre of Dysnomian menses! Might I drown enraptured Narcissus in his own mirror cowardly, to search his purse and his cloak for any last single coinage?

VI : An Obol for the Ferry-Man

Sometimes I want a respite from the ever awareness of death. I want a hole to retreat to, an opium embrace, a careless void in which to ever take refuge. n these moments I want to become a hermit of emotional reclusiveness, a stranger to angst, a prodigal son of hedonism. But that is a strange enterprise of a life, and certainly no healthy approach to dying. Sometimes it is so easy to become the cistern of human sin, to drink from oneself, to host feasts of indulgences in one's own very personal honor... to suck, taste the marrow of virtue, but to spit it out. To become disgusting and weak but for a moment, to incarnate the spirit of lazy, uncultured gluttony, and to give oneself the luxurious, self-coddling privilege of simply ignoring what should not be ignored. Sometimes I want shout as if a child: “you, go away, wicked one!”, for I don't want to be reminded all the time that human life is weird and absurd and, on top of that, dark and nefarious and mischievous... I am very well aware already, and I just want a breather, a break, a short pause sometimes. But a short break easily becomes long then longer, when you despise what you ought to return to. But however much this inclination of escape and this vulnerable call to spiritual shelter pumps my heart and coarses through my veins, explodes in my mind, I cannot close my eyes to what I want hiding from, however much I want it closing these eyes. Truly, one has to find a cave obscure, a Hira of one's own, in order to flee the ever presence of the false kings, the doxies for celebrity and power, the thieves and those cold of heart, the dishonest jesters, the propagators of sin and evil, the molesters and tormentors, the wicked influencers and corruptors sermoning their pugnacious histrionics, and all the floggers and strikers and intruders and attackers moving about in the dead of our nights. But whenever I feel this need to escape, and when I so do, when I allow myself to get stuck in these morasses of self-pity and sloth masqueraded as moral indignation, afterwards I feel a heavy feeling of guilt, of shame and of vitriolic self-contempt. Because I am not some lazy, torpid person or some promulgator of limp, idle ideals - my eye is fixed on the sun! And as a pinch of salt into the sores of a world stricken aburst, I continue my rogue spiritual terrorism: God condemned me hereto, and I shall raise a living hell just for that very reason.
 

When, some time, the endless tirade of foeti clog the mother-womb to cause its final, inevitable corruption, and when the buried nobilities of our ancestral dead arise from the crust of the soil we trample, then I might find a great and sullen repose... then might I renounce my faith in extremism, this polar star of radical individuality growing about on the firmament like a rapturous aurora or some phantasm of hope and fire, the bejewelled chariot of Gods thundering about the starry sky after a hundred and hundred somber moons!