Zion. You find your own end. I know this well.
Yet I cannot help but believe all this will end in darkness and nothing else.
How can I tell when anything is finished? Even in the clean, clear world of fiction, the story invites itself to go on. The characters don’t all drop dead in the final sentence. Further life is implied by the thing’s ending and – beyond that – by its being written and bound in a book.
All landscape paintings have borders that depict, not the edge of a void, but the landscape’s continuation. And even portraits against black, like Rembrandt’s, even a picture of a single person, implies the existence of other people. How else did the painted man get his crooked nose; who cut his hair and who made his coat?
Where does anything really finish?
Text implies – and necessitates – paratext.
Outside my window a donkey fights his cousin. The ass and the zebra: the beginning and the end.
I look for teleosis – completion, perfection. It is not to be found in Ur.
Apparently, it can be found in Zion. But I don’t know where that is. I’ve talked to every scholar, consulted every astrologer, and none of them have told me of a place, real or metaphysical, called Zion. But I hear the phrase, silently, day after day: Zion – you find your own end.
If I am to find my end anywhere, it’s in this country, in the desert, travelling between cities. Bandits are rife these days. The youth have no war to occupy them. The Assyrians are quiet.
Would that I could find a holy mountain and…become a God. I can conceive of nothing else.
What of immortality – fatherhood? Securing your place in the cycle, letting him forth, letting yourself continue? No. Such passed me by.
Worldly glory? Unless the king fears some omen, and selects an interloper for a scapegoat…and even if that interloper, of his thousands of subjects, was me…secular glory is unlikely.
So there is nothing else. There is no reason to go out into the world. I knew this when I first became aware, when I was formed of the clay of being, and I saw the whole cycle, the blackness of the soul’s soils. But it is one thing to know and quite another to experience it. I saw my own end as soon as the midwife opened my unwilling eyes. All that remains is this question – Zion.
Zion. What kind of shining city is this, that the silent voice I lately hear tells me of it day after day? Must I found it? Is Zion a place that doesn’t exist? Or a place that should exist? Is it a new god I must dig from the ground, or find in the heavens?
In old age I feel a curious sensation. It is not a bodily feeling, but it affects my…vision? No – my incipient ‘am’. There is a new separation…between what is, and…
What could be?
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