The Migration Of Geese
As it happens, I am sat down writing this from beyond the grave. Just as it should be, and always has been, yes? No matter the brevity or bite of my soul, I hold onto a fire in my belly and my spirit still. The ultimate is all who is eternal! I find that it is always worthwhile to keep oneself at the top of mind, unalive or undead. Aurelius, an individual whom I often look towards for guidance, always makes mention that he is going to croak whenever I see him. In fact, just yesterday he was telling me that an African barking spider nearly crawled up inside his brain while he was in the bathroom and that his whole life had apparently flashed before his eyes . . . If there is one thing that I’ve learned from him, it is that there is no liberation of spirit without reverence for life.
Even posthumously, it is I who types tirelessly the endless treatise for which I atone. Though in corporeality, I step into the shower for a shvitz when I am visited by the special angel of the night dark. Her appearance was of such otherworldly beauty that I had become dispirited upon discovering that all she wanted was my soul. I was even granted the alternative of presenting her with the soul of another should I be unable to offer her my own; I had three nights. “Tonight will be the first,” says the special angel of the night dark. She then gives me a soft kiss and disappears down the drain, leaving behind a seismic cloudburst in her wake. The shower had transformed into a deluge that began to engross me. My skin felt like it was filling up with water and I could feel myself starting to drown, falling into the depths of the waters deep, the soft spoken voice of the angel whose love lies crushing, choking my throat with an improbable carnage. It is then that I am thrust awake in my bed with my lungs dancing in my chest, and coughing hugely.
Kenji Tsuruta: Wandering Island (2010)
The next morning, let’s just say I was operating in a state of automation, mulling over my next move and how I was to go about completing the task that the angel had put forth. There was no way that I could conceivably kill someone — I began boiling some lentils. The importance of this trial not only lied in the acquisition of oneself, but in the acquiescence of another. It was something that needed to be done in short time and in high degree, similar to what Rudolf Steiner writes of the Water Trial in his initiation rites.
I had at once the whole day before me — it was now 5 PM and I had allowed myself to squander it. I hailed a cab and took a ride around the town square. While inside the car, I saw a flock of geese a hundredfold cutting through the sky as one illustrious organism. I was largely moved by this and told the driver to let me out there. I stood among the intersection watching the flock grow thinner as it peeled towards the vault of heaven. There were several laggards in the school, and one that I observed in particular had appeared by itself almost a mile and a half behind the others. This same bird then ceased flapping its wings altogether and begin cratering towards the earth like a shooting star. It must have landed somewhere behind the bowling alley. I meandered for a moment so as to investigate the crash site, but was unable to find out exactly where the bird had fallen and gave up. I headed back to my apartment which then concluded the second night.
I awoke on the dawn of the third day prepared to die; I even set an alarm that happened to coincide with an ambulance siren passing by. I have been told that when two unrelated instances occur simultaneously, it is always worth paying attention to. I had just purchased mercury from Mercari and was ready to sit down to administer it, when abruptly I hear a knock at the door thrice. It was my brother, James, telling me that he was finishing up some work over the border, wondering if I could look after his son in his stead until his return to which I agreed. He handed me the bassinet with the child and drove off.
As evening rolled around, I unplugged all that was electrical in my home and lit every candle that I had. I placed every pillow and every blanket that I owned in a heaping pile and placed my nephew at the top so that he was nearly touching the ceiling, lest the house fill up with water. Despite the child just emerging from the world of spirits not more than a few months ago, he was no doubt ill prepared in returning. I entered the bathroom and awaited for the angel in a meditation. Hours went by like this when I remembered that water is the conduit to other worlds. I had just watched the movie Constantine, and there was a line where Keanu Reeves says that it lubricates the transition from the human plane to the demon world. “Now ask me if there’s water in Hell!” he says. I turned on the shower and stepped into the basin.
The apparition of the special angel of the night dark appeared before me once again asking for what she came for in the softest voice: “It is your soul, or your life. There cannot be one without the other.” The bathroom then transformed into a vicious flood and began filling up like a tank. The angel through the rainstorm kisses my cheek in a death knell and my face starts falling off the bone. It is then that I realize that I have just been scalped, my blood aglitter mingling along the travertine in a dazzling glob of cerulean glimmering.
Battered by the crashing waves I knew that I was close to death, this I was certain of. I could feel it in my very essence. I resisted the blood loss as if attempting to crawl out of a grave where one has been buried alive, when by the very will of my dying breath I had become animated through the force of His Holiness: Let me by thy spear! Let me be thy spire! So help me, O Lord, if Christ believes that this is the fate that which I am deserved, then it is He who errors! O resurrecting torrent: purify thine flesh, and pardon thine spirit! It is at this moment, when from fewer the faucet, I see my soul substance swirling in a plume of smoke that begins respirating itself back into my lungs; alighting deep within my soul a fiery blaze anew . . . The skull shining breath . . . My energy never cleaner, my soul never sturdier, holier, nor ever to be overlooked again from here on after; I was unsure whether or not I was still conscious. No longer was I among the interior oceania: the storm had abated once and for all and I began to be overtaken by the light of my encroaching death when presto! the clock thickens back time and the skyline is restarted to twilight, the window at my opposite awash in a deep coral glow. I hear the din of thousands of birds enveloping the neighborhood and pry open the window to look, bearing witness to a grand migration of geese, flying in gales along the southern sky, as if the mast of a giant ship lay carrying them across the clouds . . . Glory be thy God! My life was spared . . .