epilogue - rebirth of among us forehead

To the writers and readers out there of this novel,

I lay awake at the starry sky, thinking to myself, of what I have written over the past few weeks. It strikes me time and time again of what writing means to us, as authors, and to readers whom we’ll likely never meet. The familiarity and dissonance encompassed in this unlikely certainty dumbfounds me, and yet heart-warming at the same time. I felt that I should take the time out to address all those who hide behind the anonymity of the visor and screen and pause the pen and to directly see; see what writing is truly about.

There is a certain peculiarity about this subject for which I so avidly scribe, of children’s games in the modern age. Those not in physical form, but lucid and concrete, flattened on the silver screen the anatomy of some inhuman form. Some call it childish, pubescent and philistine, crude characters drawn by hands seen less intricate than cave paintings of Lascaux. A type of silhouette: the impressionist visor, two stud-like feet, and a wide anterior for which inhumanly complexations and a smooth cortex resides behind. They laugh at the perceived shallowness of its content, a simple game of hunting and gathering, prey and predator; an amusement comparable to naughts & crosses, X’s & Y’s, foolishly ticking off boxes in a duel of predetermined fate. They say it’s the hive mind & crackheadedness, youthfulness tender corrupted by thought crime, adolescence that is far outrun by the mechanical hegemony, repeating, in loops like tape recorders an altiloquence some portmanteau from one mouth to another - ape like actions concocted to sway from limb-to-limb - incantation along some incessant rhyme echoing through ear to ear. They see, an insurrection against the ordered structure that is society, blighting the hope of tomorrow to utter incomprehensible cries as if yellow wallpapers on plastered boarders; victims infatuating short lived fantasies, curtains falling over scores of minutes, and rising again circumlocuting a broken epizeuxis, miming a given tautology like the lowest of intellects. Us to Them are like infarctions, brood mothers to be cleaned away with precision, outcasts ostracised by those beyond our control. And so we walk as impostors amongst those that wish to find us, though we primum non nocere, we imitate to massacre our dreams of a better future. Did we choose to do so ourselves? Or was it conformity, our corners that stood so valiantly sanded down until they were smooth; glistening eccentricities turned to but a dull satin taste?

Unnoticeable, inconspicuous, accepted?

Notwithstanding upon the mountainous claims, piled high like corpses outside Constantinople, they do not notice. They say art is an imitation, ephemeral dreams that will never beget. Platonian ideas to bring us away from forms; what I, and to that extent we, have put down are only to yonder fugacious fruits, phantasmagoria frighteningly flighting, flattering falsiloquence flamboyantly fleeting floccinaucinihilipilification, a mere farce for fun. They are not wrong. We flagellate ourselves with metonymic scars, hold the porter to the door, behind which lies the regicide of our character, and laugh. The scornfulness of such itself a grave comedy. We investigate the mirror every day, searching for ourselves and a realm where we need not so begrudgingly fight for tomorrow. Wishing, that some day, some night, some live, some die to find in samsara a goodness they may importune for the utmost of serendipity. Is a fiction of deities or mortals, or of both? Probing, that on the other side of reality, there lies a fantasy in wait, only to find ourselves once again and again and again.

But perhaps they are not right either.

“假作真时真亦假，无为有处有还无”

The dreams of the red chamber an imitation of art, the impostor of impersonation. The writer brings not his transient fever dreams, instead, transcendental reveries inking the blank slate. We write, not of those that may never be, but those that might be, to those that could become. What blooms behind the trail of our words are nonetheless infantile innocence, yet invoking the hefty price for adulthood. Looks once lost, are forever forgotten, suppressed under the facade of maturity. Are we then, ravaging impostors, or are we the genial crewmate, paradoxically intertwined concepts that echo the equally obfuscate reality of fact and fantasia. So why should it matter? Beauty is truth, truth beauty —that is all. Why do we fear being discovered by others, ejected into the ridicule of the masses if we are not wrong? And therefore, I see under the pen we wield, flowers. But not in the likes of Epiphany, blooming for only the dawn before whither, but sunflowers, turning their blossom and chasing the light, Dandelions asway with the wind for a better future -竹ノ花 未だ咲かぬ その身だからこそ生きよと

So why I write? I look to the dream catcher on the wall. It moves gently in the wind, feathers and string propelling the paper-thin figure to sway side to side. Looking closer, its thin threads connect beads of amber, and weave together a net of some circles, squares, and triangles. But its gaps are too big to catch anything material, certainly not birds, insects or loose leaves dancing in the gust. Only ethereal dreams, too formless to be trapped by humanly machinery, benevolently sift through its weaves and leave behind comet trails, so that we may wish upon our own star, what envisions we have today may become reality tomorrow. It is elementary but reminding us of the bildungsroman to bring us to being. Youth, and what a subject to be ridiculed by the established. UnCrowned bystanders to tyrannise the innocent nature of the subject, though as if they are covetous to our imaginative felicity. It requires a respite of existentialism to look back in crisis and grasp hard at the newborn naivety. But I am in trepidation, for we ourselves might become what we once feared.

Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

Will we, after our dreams filter through the relentless metropolis, still fight for our freedom as if in another world? Or will it be deflated, dried up, sugar over like plums in the sun?

And maybe that’s why we write today. Our keys, typewriters and whatever the method pertaining to the lucid realities so far yet so close. These are dreams that we cannot afford to defer, and so we record them down in our own renaissance. However small they may be, of salt pellets and silver shavings, or chaotic and sporadic like we who conceived them, they contain visions beyond the monotonous window painted by the hue of suffocating civilisation, the sigh of this widowed evening veiled with mist and rain.

We are the masters of a new sword called the pen, for whom we strike new gods. Those smithed by the fire of Prometheus, bearing upon Caucasus the consequences of saving the world, relentlessly changing form from one to another, carrying hope from the heavens to the most helpless, destitute but creative of Daedalus among us. So that when eventually, Chronos comes to whisk away us blind visionaries, we may have memorabilia to what once could have been. Aspirations and texts passed on from one generation to the next, surpassing tropes, paradigms, and dynasties. Until one day, we can see amidst those thousand blades forged, unknown to death nor grasped fully by those yet alive, dreams becoming of reality. We are our own legends, like Kaisers valiantly coursing this earth.

So, fly - L'oiseau qui vole n'a pas de maître

Let words flow beyond the limitations of the page, Plus Ultra, beyond the barriers of imagination and pass the present contemplation. If we are uncapable of anything, then let it be seeing how far we can go. If we are unable to achieve something, then let the forthcoming continue the forgoing. If we look to ourselves and see only failure, even though we may jester about it, then look again. A black hole isn't perfectly black, so do stars light up the dark forest we drift through. We pick up past dreams passed down like classics, reforging them into brighter stars today. 報いを望む 夢物語は 時空を越えて 語り継がれるだろう Even if they don’t notice, tis grace that we as writers have alone, secrets only few discover and cherish. So let it be an oxymoron perpetuating as Sisyphus, but not without cause, because there is reason for us to look to the yonder, exceed the future’s limits, and find our way. This may be the end to this story, but how about yours? and so do ask yourself everyday –

Why do you write?