A man at the edge of the world. Long before Homer, long before Gautama, he stood there and looked: unblinking, his eyes burning with a thousand years of sleeplessness, he held onto this secret vision as if his last breath were inextricably tied to it...

    Some say he's still there: poised between life and death, holding the universe on the tip of his gaze like a child balancing a crystal ball on the end of his finger. Should he fail...

    "What does he see?" you ask. No one knows - but there are stories - about this man at the edge of the world: ...Time bends around the fragments that he holds in his hand: he names them, and the air shrieks; he lets them fall, and they fall toward his heart, clear and burning like a golden tear. He stands there, wavering over the abyss opened at his feet: in that darkness within he sees the Object, the curve closing upon itself, hears the pulse of this Form calling out to him from the depths of such an immense impossibility... A woman's eyes... an iron gate... an acorn... He would like to cry - but the eyes that are seeing now do not know the meaning; he would like to laugh, but this heart has no echoes. There's silence, a silence as mute as the dreams of those who are still to be born - and in that silence, closing his eyes, he listens to the world falling out of the darkness, the world transformed into snow falling with a thick rustle all around him - his world sliding slowly, like a hallucination, flake after flake, beyond its own limits, beyond meaning, beyond Time itself...

    "But what does he have to do with our story?" you ask again, impatiently.

    Everything and nothing: I will tell you about Memory tonight, my friends - how the mind moves in and out of sleep, how oblivion of what you are creates the egos you take yourselves to be, how the vision you seek is already known to you and yet too powerful to be remembered as such... - yes, I will tell you of beauty so terrible that the soul cannot bear it, and of potentials so great that you sought shelter from them in the realm of Form and its irreversible ruin... I will sing of you, my ocean soul that came to break on a thousand shores which know not of each other, my freedom that longed to taste the weight of fear, and yet whose memory blows ceaselessly across the desolate steppes of my heart.

    But before we begin, all seated around this fire - cups filled with wine, horses neighing softly in the night's tender cloak, stars shimmering to the edge of the distant horizon - take a good look around you: all that you see now, as you see it, will never cease to exist - for it has indeed been this moment throughout eternity. And though you may not understand it yet, remember this as the story flows on...

    I walked through the back door of a tavern in Venice on the eve of my 30th birthday, after celebrating the laying of the first stone to the foundation of our New City - my crowning achievement as Chief Architect, and the transubstantiation of a dream man has been dreaming for millennia. ...I walked through a door on my way home - and the next time I opened my eyes all that was left to see around me was this Desert.

    Is that how it began? Or did it all begin much earlier, perhaps even before I noticed the beggar - was it only his manic pursuit which pushed me toward that particular exit, or was my very urge to visit such an ill-reputed place on a night like this a sign that something else was about to give way inside me? All I know is that everything I had ever wished for waited for me to celebrate it at home that night - my loving wife, my two beautiful children, my life's dream become reality - yet leaving the office that afternoon I could not escape the feeling that I was merely following the directions of a script which was not intended for me. This sense of unreality had started to plague me quite a few years back, but under normal circumstances the pressures and obligations of my profession would easily chase it away, dismissing it as a form of fashionable neurosis - a luxury item I simply could not afford. Occasionally, however, this feeling became so powerful that it turned into a physical sickness. Was it only a coincidence that this happened most commonly at times of great anticipation and sensual enjoyment? Was it all merely a sublimated form of guilt, or was some other, yet obscure mechanism, triggered into action in an attempt to prevent me from identifying too closely with that to which I was so ready to abandon myself?

    A subversive streak had thus gradually emerged into my character over the last few years, much to my family's distress, and quite beyond my control: it seemed as if my success had become a prison, and I would, at times, do everything in my power to undermine the reputation of solid responsibility on which this prison had been founded. I ran away from the self-righteous enterprise of the polished matrons and community-builders as if they had the plague, and sought my refuge among the anonymous tramps who litter our venerable piazzas - bumming a smoke, laughing at their coarse jokes, occasionally sharing with them a bottle of cheap wine, trying to lose myself in their midst - myself, and the oppressive urgency with which I was helping build this world surrounding us...

    And so it was again that evening, that I came to find myself in the company of a stranger, listening to the tall tales of a gruff old adventurer and breathing in that atmosphere soaked with smoke and alcohol and cheap tobacco - while my wife and friends waited impatiently over trays of champagne and hors-d'oeuvres, in our crystal-filled living room overlooking the Gran' Canal.

    He spoke of a man - and I saw it then as if my eyes and breath had become his: I saw that man and his whole life in the blink of an eye, and the dark roots of the tribe from which he had learnt his fear and longing together with his name, I saw him smelling the beasts' footprints, fighting them, bleeding and calling out for his brothers to share his danger and triumph, I saw him bending down to enter the tent made of hides, awkwardly caressing his mate, teaching his offspring to use the bow and arrow, then leaving, over and over, migrating together with his people in search of a better place.
    And then I saw him, in a particular instant of his life, a single one, when for a reason altogether beyond his understanding, the man stopped suddenly, like before an invisible wall, and a deep shiver, a terror without name tore his being apart. It was as if he had caught himself ready to step over a precipice, a bottomless fault into the substance of the world - but then, opening his eyes, the man saw that there was solid earth under his feet, steaming earth covered by yellow leaves - and, thus relieved, he walked away and continued to live amongst his own for many more years, until the snows of oblivion and old age, surrounding him, extinguished all except the single memory of that mysterious moment...

    I asked him how he knew that man, but instead of answering, he told me he'd not eaten in two days - so the innkeeper was fetched, and minutes later we were both leaning over steaming bowls of stew...

    He spoke to me of loss... the sensuality of loss. That self-contained universe, the self-imposed limits of a pain that does not want to forget the flavor of nostalgia; of redemption that will not accept any more hope than a night's worth of wine; of cynicism which doesn't wish itself so invulnerable that it won't feel the pangs of sentimentality; and finally of desire - of desire that would never, not for an instant, allow itself to forget its own sordid origins and transcend into love...
   He painted for me the world of his youth, spent in glorious idleness among the sailors and urchins of Buenos Aires - listening to their fabulous tales of distant lands and unimaginable treasures, basking in the wanderlust of their restless eyes, lulled to sleep by their inimitable voice in which defiance, fatalism and self-pity always shimmered beneath the surface of heroism... But that which he treasured the most was that moment of the evening when the "ladies" arrived, and their presence brought to life an urgency which seemed to recruit every fiber of these men's souls. He made me see it all: the yellowish lights through the haze, the low ceiling and smoky walls, diffuse voices, distant laughter; then, suddenly, a tango - probably paid for by that drunk, heart-broken-looking customer in the corner - and there it was, again: the young pair, measuring each other up with long, trashy looks, daring each other - the circling - the sudden grip, applauded by whistles - the steps, swift like a storm of provocations - the woman, rejected and proud, rejecting in her turn,  the seizing and the rubbing of naked desire, that need for human interaction so strong that they stripped each other of shame and skin and acts of love had to become daggers to be felt deep enough, there where the thirst burned like a maddening pain, unquenchable, unreachable - the stretching and leaning and falling, in a whirlwind of passion - and then the shrill, sudden end... beyond which nothing existed for the rest of that night, only the lingering, subdued sounds of the bandoneon, searing and tearing the soul with its distant, long-faded reminiscences and impossible longings...

    He told me of a river - a river which flows upstream, beneath the surface of the earth, and which makes men mad with thirst. Only the more they drink of it, the thirstier they get - so they keep pursuing it further and further toward its source, hoping the cooler waters will at last soothe their aching lips. In time, man and river become one - their purposes no longer distinguishable from each other.
   "Where does the river end?" I asked him. "Why does no one speak of it?" "It flows into the same abyss it started from", he said, "but by then there is no "one", no Mind left to know it... Many have seen the river, my friend, but few recognize it for what it is, and even fewer dare pursue it into the desert. Of those, however, most end up haunting the labyrinths of the ghost city for the rest of their lives, torn as they are between their knowledge of its illusory nature and the fear of abandoning this last realm of Form.
   "What of those who supersede this fear? You leave me to understand there have been more than one..."
   He smiled a strange, self-mocking smile: "Oblivion, my friend: there is nothing in the world kinder to the exhausted heart than oblivion... Nothing wipes away the bitterness of failure quicker than the denial of its object."
   "Is there nothing left beyond this ghost city, then? No vision left to sustain one's resolve?"

    He told me then of a cathedral... a cathedral unlike any other man has ever built... "the most beautiful thing ever conceived by Mind", he said. Yet when I asked him where, and when, and how he came to hear of it, and had he seen it with his own eyes, he became evasive. "Shadows..." I remember him saying. "I have seen - now and then - fragments of it... premonitions."

    Was he mad? At the time his words made me believe so - or at least that I was dealing with a well-trained charlatan who knew how to read the deepest secrets of a man's heart and exploit them for a few pitchers of wine. The hour was getting late and the vapor of alcohol around us had become positively nauseating. I stood up, ready to leave, and placed the last handful of change I had left on the table, asking him to drink his last cup that night in honor of Venice and its new image, which had been born today across from it, on the other shore of the lagoon. I made my way through the tables and headed for the door, when suddenly I heard him shout: "Wait! Wait, I want to pay you back for tonight!" He sprang out of his chair and thrust his heavy body into the crowd, trying to make way as he waved after me with one arm - while with the other elbow spreading a generous number of pokes and nudges. He had almost reached me when, out of the crowd, an obviously annoyed bear of a man grabbed him by the collar, turned and punched him in the face. The old man stumbled backwards a few steps, but remained standing. After a brief hesitation, he started back toward me - but by now the mocking crowd was closing in on him, jeering and ready for some free entertainment. Tables were quickly drawn aside, blocking the main exit toward which the poor victim was now trying to drag himself. Among the onlookers, smiles soon gave way to whistles and insults, and those few who tried to jump to his defense were quickly silenced by fists and broken chairs.
   As the fight started, I tried to reach through the crowd and grab a hold of my unfortunate friend, but the innkeeper had already seized me and was pushing me firmly toward the backdoor - cursing me, his customers, his ill-fated life and the police who'd come after him, should anything happen to a gentleman like me in his wretched tavern. "Go, go - you don't belong here, just look at all the trouble you've caused! Go down through the cellar, under the bridge, and you'll be back on Calle del Sturion as soon as you take a left!"
   Full of indignation, I tried to resist him as he continued dragging me toward the back - but the man obviously had years of experience in ridding himself of unwanted elements, and my attempts to escape his grip proved utterly useless. Just before he threw me out, I turned for one last time toward my poor old friend, who was now valiantly fighting for his head among the rowdy crowd - and heard him roar after me: "Remember the cathedral!... I promise you you'll see it one day!... Over the ruins of your City... you, too, will see it!"

    When did I arrive here? It seems to me that it's been storming for thousands of years now... When I raise my eyes from the page the light is yellow and hazed, the sounds of the world are muffled, as if coming back across vast expanses of time. There is no night, no day, only the the glow of memory settling over the volumes of this forgotten library, the faint rustle of dust falling from the lips of History into my ear, and then into eternal oblivion. This is it - the final echo of all immortal legacies.
   I am so far today from all the things I was once taught - about myself and days like these, about this earth that I continue to tread upon more as a confirmation that I am still alive than by virtue of anything I might hope to discover.
   When did I leave? Why? I know the story of that man, but his reasons are no longer my reasons, in the same way that his face, his step, his hunger, his exhaustion are now all foreign to me, like those of a stranger. Who was he? What does it matter? An echo of metaphors, he vanished like the aftertaste of a poem. But in the silent wake that followed this disappearance, the faintest of all dawns stirred for a moment somewhere on the horizon - and since then I've been sitting here, quietly, waiting for the sunrise to show me where I am.

    Do you feel how the air quivers? Almost imperceptibly, just enough to prevent one from falling asleep. It's cold... colder than it's been in a long time. I could try to tell you stories, here things seem to change very slowly, time hardly moves - but we have to be careful with words, for many have been left behind in the great cataclysm, and of the ones still with us, most are just ghosts of their former selves.

    I have been here before!
   This sickness, this madness, this poison, this... terrible gift... - I've come for it before!

    Nothing mattered, nothing ever mattered - now I close my eyes and see so far back and there was never anything real, anything alive other than this inhuman thirst, no other driving force, no other criterion, no other conceivable endpoint!... They talked of sacrifice and sanctity and rolled their eyes behind my back while I grinned my devil's grin and savored the taste of my own blood, for I knew all along there is nothing but sweet rapture in the destruction of that for which you do not care anymore. And how could I care, how could it matter, when all I found around me did nothing but mock and darken that vision of beauty I had in my heart? Every experience seemed mere repetition, every emotion seemed vulgar, every expression - trivial, every thought - not daring enough, never daring enough! I went through life tearing at its fabric with every turn, gasping for air like a child tearing through its placenta, my lungs screaming with the promise of a real life that never came. Was it madness? But it felt as if there was nothing left of this life that I didn't know, that I hadn't experienced. Nothing left to inspire one to go on living...While 'on the other side' - there at least one had hope. Impossible to define, like an ever-collapsing horizon - yet the wind of freedom blew from that direction, and the radiance of a sunrise unlike any other spilled from under the unapproachable gates...
   "Unapproachable"... But what if, one day, they proved not to be so?

    And what if, moreover, one lifted his eyes upon them, only to realize that this could not be the first time he had found himself in this position?

    Failed.
    The word that has become a world unto itself.
    Why?
    How could I have failed?

    Is there such a thing as a universal soul? In this place where silence makes dreams a reality and light carries on the golden haze of ageless, roaming dust clouds, it seems to me that memory is all that is left of the world. I have no name for myself, no desire to return to what has been - only this intoxicating thirst, this fever that keeps me floating above the ever changing landscape of nostalgia...

    Have I been all that I remember today? Are those my tears falling on the fresh grave, is that my sword ripping into a man's chest, is that my voice crying defiance from the all the dungeons and pyres of history?

    My own or my brother's - it no longer makes a difference in this place. There is only one man who ever lived - and that man has now come to the end of himself.

    Or has he?

    "We were blessed with too many teachers, you could say.

    They came hungry with desire, restless, defiant, contemptuous of all but the Highest and the Unformed. They came to rest but for one night in our humble village of shepherds and stonecutters; and they stayed forever after, to turn it into this: this - a fortress of pure gold and pure thought.

    They came hungry and restless, but as they gathered 'round the fire that night, they fell in love with the poetry of their own hunger. And so the hunger became thought, and as they learnt each other's name, thought became dogma, and after summer passed, dogma turned into hard stone: the stone of public debate squares, and universities, and palaces, and prisons.

    They seemed to enjoy building for a while, as we enjoyed watching them build. They created complex rules for thinking and speaking and judging the truth, and we enjoyed seeing the passion of their minds wrestling each other, grasping for Reason, challenging each other to ever greater heights... But then the dry season came, and hunger made them defensive, malicious, competitive... We watched in disbelief, then horror as their ideas became weapons and their sports- a ruthless game of power and survival... Within only a few years, from their temples turned into fortresses, those who had come to us with songs on their lips turned into fierce and fanatical tyrants, ready to destroy anything that threatened their influence. They burned people for their beliefs. They arrested and ridiculed, threatened and ostracized. They lied to and hypnotized the masses into controlled hysteria. They created "the civic eye", the daemon of conformity - that abstract, gnawing fear of being perceived as "different", hence possibly subversive, possibly dangerous - the fear of being expelled by society. And so they replaced the temporary fears of starvation or attack with the permanent, insidious anxiety of staying "acceptable to others" - as judged through every gesture of every day of one's life. Oh yes, anxiety fell like a thick fog over the village, and the thicker it got, the closer people huddled together, so that fewer and fewer had the courage left to stand by themselves or, God forbid, to venture beyond the walls.

    For there were theories by now, some better accepted than others, as to what lay beyond, and how we needed to prepare for that, and how long it should take, and even as to whether or not it made any sense to continue the journey, when we could in principle build a tall enough tower and gaze into the distance, or just extrapolate from what we've seen so far.

    And so they went on, classifying the theories and building the towers and sprinkling the show with a few arrests here and there, for the raising of the public morale - and all the while one could see, from the hills, the Western road fading out - fallen into disuse, eroded by sandstorms, strewn with abandoned starts and acts of despair... But still the hope, the legend remained. It wasn't until four centuries ago, when the Academy recorded it officially in its new encyclopedia, that people finally stopped to acknowledge and accept what should have long been obvious to all: the road leading out of the City, the road our ancestors discovered thousands of years ago, was gone. And if there was indeed a great ocean at the end of it, or any other such wonder, by now we had no possibility of proof left, except what was to be learnt from some old poems... The good thing in all of this, of course, was that by now no one had any interest left in them, for no one ever dreamed of leaving the Golden City again

    I am inside you now, and I am also on the shore... Looking in your eyes I see the tall dark waves, you wash in my surf and I am washed into the sand by you, I close my eyes and the sand between my teeth tastes like your hair and as I kiss you I find myself crying tears that I cannot say are from happiness or terror, for they are of both: the beauty of being now, here, this one thought of God - and then nothing. Nothing... My love, how I wish it it was not the sweetness of this moment, but the glory of that dizzying, eternal nothingness that I could share with you!...

    I look into your eyes, my love, and I can see the seeds of my destruction behind that thought which is not even conscious yet in you; I see the shadow of terror begin to rise and I know that soon this premonition, this dark presence you now barely feel will grow stronger, until you will recognize it and give it a name, and that on that day I will lose you forever. I cannot explain it to you, why this vision which is all beauty inside me will frighten you so, but I know now that there is nothing I can do to change that. I can feel it growing, I can feel the monster rising from the deep to swallow me, to become me - yet what I fear is not the moment of my deliverance, but its reflection - that terrifying mask of madness in your eyes.

    My body... my dream body... gate of joy and perdition, in whose shadow I sold my future for fragments of the past! ...I've died for this piece of amber, and for this garden I've stayed another year. These are the silks that have painted my existence on the canvas of our time, this is the lover whose caresses have punctuated and renewed my life like spring showers over thousands of other, forgettable caresses. This is my home - open to the sky and still so shaded, so intimate, as if built not from clay, but from the ashes of all the years gone by... this fortress, that took me half a century to cross - only to discover, on its threshold, that the morning which seemed to hold so many promises was already over, the horizon darkened, that it was far too late now... far too late to leave...

    And so I stayed... between the walls of red earth echoing with the fountain's rustle, the cold tile floors on which the light filtering in from the outside sometimes casts golden shadows that stir my childhood memories, between the statues, lost in the perfection of their stone thoughts, among the scents of my exotic night flowers and the voluptuous, color-dripping orgy of these silks whose mere touch bewitches my soul... And yes, among the dreams... they that visit me night after night - increasingly longer, more real-like... The strange dreams of the desert, in which the senses become sharper than ever, aching with desire and memory, thirsty to the point of agony, overpowering - oh, but through that hunger you know this is no ordinary hunger, not one that you can satisfy, not anymore - and that impossibility sears your mind like a cloud of fire... But it is only there, in that fire, in that devastating madness of regret, that you have ever felt the breath of redemption brush your cheek... and from that whisper of a presence began to hope again, and in that twilight hour of resignation and tenderness began to dream of another world, another life, another destiny...

    Yes, I have died to you, my friend, but do not reproach yourself, nor be angry with me... I am tired. I want to sleep... It is as simple as that.

    He went back into the desert that night., and fell down into the sand, and stared out into the heaving darkness for a long, long time. He was asking again, as always, the question had never changed - only perhaps tonight there was more sadness and less hope to it, but he was here nevertheless, because he had nothing left to believe in but his nakedness and the childish earnestness of the question, and the purity of silence as he waited. Indeed, it was in that naked, humble waiting, more than in any of the answers he had ever fancied, that he felt closest to home. And tonight, perhaps more than ever before, he needed the comfort of home.
     He lay there in the sand, too tired to truly want an answer, content with just being that living, breathing expectation, his eyes diving into the void like a child falling on his mother's bosom.

   He asked. How did he ask? By breathing. By closing his eyes. By not breathing. By the pain of it. He fell into the sand and let go of his mind and let go of his heartbeat and his desire to breathe, until all that he had been metamorphosed into this open shell exposing its raw, silent, urgent need to the vast beauty of the ocean.
   He asked. When did he ask? When he woke up in the morning and when he closed his eyes on the edge of sleep, when he laid down the first stone of a new house and when he contemplated the ruins of the Angkor Wat, from the glory of the tallest mountain summit and the mysterious garden of his lover's whispers... He had asked coming into this world as well as on that day he stared for hours down a gun's barrel, he had asked with the smiling eyes of a child and the bitter, ironic grimace of the old man. He asked with curiosity, with enthusiasm, he asked in sadness and in joy, in ecstasy and cold cynicism, in mocking smiles and muted cries of despair - but the question never changed.
   He asked. What did he ask? The Why and How and When of being? But his lips never moved, his mind would not chisel such questions, for it would not accept such answers as could be given to them in answer to its prayer. A vision? But visions always come to us through the distorting window of our hopes and delusions: what vision could transcend that doubt as long as the mind preserved its critical powers, or the suspicion of madness, once those powers had been suspended?
   No, what he asked for was different - more silent, less visible, yet on a different level more penetrating and urgent than any of these questions. It was... - well, it was almost that - unspeakably, shamefully that - absurdly and pointlessly yet desperately that: a child in pain, incurable pain, seeking his mother's eyes. Past tears, past prayers and false hope - there was nothing left but acknowledgement.

    This was what he wanted.

    That afternoon he found himself again in the Church's womb, staring as if possessed at the old well beneath the great open dome, the well which had been the first foundation, the very reason of the ancient settlement - and the arch relic the church had been erected to protect. He stayed away from it, however, for tonight he felt weak and less sure of himself than usual, and he knew he had reason to avoid it - ...this bottomless well whose dark waters revealed the face of eternity, whispering to those who leaned over its edge one word alone: Loss.

    Yet something drew him irresistibly to it. He felt compelled, not by fascination but rather by familiarity, by a strange and horrible sense of intimacy with this monstrous thing that was breathing at the bottom of the well; he feared it not with the clean fear with which one faces a new enemy, but with the icy , secret terror that swells the dreams of one who has exorcised his darkest demon: for the inner labyrinths of his being, once carved by fear, will always be open and vulnerable to it. And it is there, in the moist, forgotten solitude of darkness, it is there, if the beast ever returns, that one will first, through the rumbling of stone and the wail of echoes, be made aware of its presence. But then it will be too late to run or to forget: one has to face and kill the beast, or turn and be killed by madness.
   He had been dreaming of this well throughout his life, for as far back as he could remember... Even as a child, when its meaning was still mysterious to him, he had had visions of a water so still and endlessly deep that he would cry in his sleep and pray for an end to his consciousness, in order to stop himself from falling ever further.
   Later, he had this dream again, but this time his eyes were wide-open and dry as he stared for a full night at the face of his dead grandmother - and in the course of that night he came to recognize it - the dark waters, this pain so deep that one could only hope for death to end it, and yet, yet... at the heart of this Inexorable, in the dizzying vision of irreversible loss, he could discern a source of fascination which would forevermore fight to keep consciousness alive: for it was here and only here, in this hemisection of eternity on the very doorstep of his ordinary life, that man was given a glimpse of the infinite. It was here, most likely, in the bewildered agony of his farewells, that he must have first had the vision of a shore, and of a sea impossible to cross, and of a longing impossible to forget - and, one day, of a thought so daring that it all suddenly seemed possible.
   But man inhabits the space between heaven and waters for a reason, and for that very reason endless soaring is as unbearable to him as endless fall... From time to time, his skin scorched by the ruthless sun, even the most astute adventurer would seek a moment's peace and reassurance in the soothing touch of the water. The strong would only stop for that moment, that one drop. The weak... the weak would stay enough to savor that first sip and then, inevitably, their thirst aroused, would bend over the edge of the well and immerse themselves again in its sweet shadow.
   Therein lay its danger... For he had learnt, in the course of his years, that loss - this broken, obscure reflection of the absolute, was more inviting, less frightening to man than the austerity of a knowledge which gave him what he yearned for but stripped him of everything human, including the memory of what it is to yearn.
   He had faced Mara innumerable times. He had watched this masterful and tireless magician command the most delicate and sensuous forms out of the darkness, creating worlds and stories and weaving, out of dreams and passions, long spans of time like flower garlands whose only purpose was then to feed the fire on which a human life invariably ended. All this beauty, the tenderness of its shadows, its scents, its joy, its glory... all that lay unborn in the womb of darkness and all that ever was - all of it seemed but a reflection of these waters, he thought. He looked down as far as he could. Was it possible for a man to go over? Yes, indeed, but it was also possible to look at it and keep one's ground, as he now was. For all death wishes, no matter how tempting, dry up under the scorching contempt of a will that says "Not enough!"

    You close your eyes to find yourself back inside the whale's womb. To feel the vertigo of depth as she dives into the present. The pressure of silence, of attention mounting inside, the reverberation of time forced to stop. You want to taste it, that pure silence, that pure being you believe is yourself. You dive with the whale and you know it to be the first Abyss, you know that there's a bottomlessness to your fall. You fall, and you know that whatever remains, whatever this is, there is nothing untrue left about it. It is the last syllable of your name, the last breath of love and wonder in your heart, and your naked body becomes taut with the shock of infinity as you submerge it into the baptism of the Present.

    But why is it that we identify with this nakedness alone, that we so easily denounce the web of dreams that cloaks us as Other, worthless, illusory? The present is a window on infinity, but the house it opens out of is built of past and future alone. We breathe through the knowledge that the present exists, but our contours are carved into the substance of memory. We are defined by memory. Hence we are defined by loss.

    Venice was once a woman I held in my arms and now she lies in the stone at the base of the great Western wall. She is now dust, dispersed by the wind toward a thousand horizons, parts of her carelessly built into houses and statues and bridges by people who never knew her as other than dust. The oblivion that is worse than oblivion. The relentless march of history over what so rapidly becomes nameless, faceless, meaningless. She was my life, we looked out the window and touched the same sun as we embraced... What is the meaning of that now? What does it matter that a hundred years have passed since, or a thousand, or five thousand? She gets further away from me with every sunset, with every man that is born not knowing her name - yet the growing distance is not a measure of detachment, but one of despair. Or perhaps madness. For how can I grasp all that has happened between that glimpse of eternity and this one, and remain sane?

   How do you scatter the petals of the lily, when your own hand has the whiteness of snow?
   How do you tell the swan to stop its song, when your own voice cries out to heaven night after night?
   How do you extinguish love's flame, when everything you know on this earth behaves like fire?

    But the meaning you attribute to them, this meaning of love, is nothing but one moment's metaphor, one way for consciousness to shine through the world's crystal, one arbitrary angle out of an infinite whirlwind of possibilities. Why do you cling to it, my stranger, my brother? What is this form to you, that you always return to it, from no matter how far and no matter how late?

    Liberation.
   I am standing at the top of the Western Gate, looking over the golden skin of my beloved city for the last time tonight. A cloudless blue sky, a soft silent breeze caressing my back, the warmth of the sun flooding everything I see before me: every stone, every crevasse, every corner. The dream keeps dreaming itself on - innocent and tender, beautiful and daring, never ceasing to rise up and greet the sun, never forgetting any of its nightmares... My golden child, whose face I shall never see again... My beloved. Oh, my beloved!

    But what is the measure of man, if not courage - no matter how crazy and painful a choice it forces one to make?! I lived in a dream until now: very well, I could go on living in a dream. I gathered the sweetness of life and enjoyed it, and the praises I sang to it were then turned into delight for others - we ate of it until we became full, and then we slept it off, and ate again. So sweetness begets sweetness, and men never get close to the end of the meal - but life can be lived in that way, and I could have chosen to do it.
   But life can also be lived otherwise: one opens his eyes briefly between dreams, and in the morning one vaguely remembers a strange mist outside the window, an in-between world of shadow and light, premonitions, unrecognizable stirrings and unearthly purity... One can ask himself - what might that cold and unfamiliar daybreak moment feel like, on the outside? What is the taste of that pure water on the leaves?
   But to know that, one must be able to break the dream: to break away in the middle of it, tear oneself off from its warmth and familiar colors, and opening that door, cast one's shivering body into the unknown.
   What is the unknown?
   Is it any more real?
   Is it any closer to Truth, or at least meaning?
   Is it the only Unknown?
   These are questions that come later on, for most. Questions that never go away, that become bleeding ulcers of doubt and anxiety, for some. For now, however, one finds himself outside the dream, trembling, in shock, struggling to discern through the unfamiliar mists, waiting for something he's completely unsure of, wondering aloud - was it worth it?
   If, at that moment, one catches the echo of one's voice reflected back to him through the fog and, looking back, sees the house dark and deserted for the very first time... - then, then perhaps, the answer ought to be "yes". Yes, it was worth it, for I had never known that such silence, such waiting was possible. Or that it would lie at the foundation of everything around me, even my very home. Or finally, that in that waiting, pure and simple, the knowledge of being alive would for the first time become the devastating rapture of existence.

    Yesterday, for the first time, I saw the City from outside the gates: I saw the great Clock toppled in the middle of the square, its face already sinking into the sand; I saw the frescoes lining the exterior walls of the University lose their brilliance under the ruthless light of the mid-day sun, then fade away like ghosts confronted by a higher Reason.... I saw the names wash off their funeral stones and the stones themselves melt to form an obelisk whose top was lost among the clouds, like an endless chain of prayers, or perhaps the propagation of a single, unanswered longing...

    The City was turning before my eyes - turning into its own epitaph, and into a knowledge for which I had no language - yet.

    Would there be a language for what lay ahead?

    The ego propagating itself forward, trying to built statues every step of the way...
   But I am telling you that the greatness of man lies beyond all these statues, that there is something more precious to human spirit than pouring itself into all these forms, that these forms represent a fear which must be conquered. Only then will our mind be able to bear the vision of that truth which compels us to erect statues and then tear them down as imperfect; that truth which makes it possible for us to start revolutions and turn our breast toward the firing squad; that truth which inebriates us with suffering and courage as we leave our families and set out on the monk's path; that truth which, nevertheless, we seldom can imagine from this side of the gate.

    For as we get closer, the gentle expectation projected by our mind begins to change form, and breathe, and loom and there we have the first foreboding that Truth is not, perhaps, like other constructs of the human mind, that it does not behave like the objects we were used to deal with. Go further, and the creature begins to stir - and then a fragmentary glimpse makes us freeze, as we begin to intuit the monster's possible dimensions. Go further - an ominously impersonal, mind-darkening panic begins to rise like an overcast sky, winds of terrible loneliness and apprehension start to blow and you can't help but wonder where you are and why you ever wanted to come here. Go further - and the black storms begin to pull you in with a strength which is no longer that of reason, but that of a physical, mechanical phenomenon superseding and acting not on your mind, or at least not the analytical mind you know, but on something within you you never knew existed: the pull of an immense gravitation sucking you in, flattening your knowledge of the world to an irrelevant, unidimensional line, distorting all perception - Truth: not something to be eaten by the mind, but that to which the mind must offer itself as sacrifice.

    Is it suicide? Does something survive? I don't know. But one must be prepared to take that leap, to look at Truth thus, with his whole being; for as long as there is fear, holding back, as long as man possesses a mind an is not that mind, truth will remain representation - an imperfect series of crumbling statues, crumbling solutions wherever man decided to stop in his search and declare: "Now I know!"

To really know is to be.

    To understand freedom, you must understand the immensity of this fall.

    Long before it is over, he has lost all refuge, all illusion, all hope... He is naked and empty, more so than even before he was born, for the body itself will have slipped off like a dead skin. He is alone - past any recollection of humanity, past being able to even imagine it any more. And into this aloneness he keeps diving, fascinated by his own fear, by the immensity of this damnation that continues to open before him, beyond his most daring dreams, beyond his worst nightmares, a space that is boundlessly, relentlessly, deliriously generating itself around him, blooming from the ashes of he who sacrificed everything like a flower of the unknown... that unknown which is his last refuge.

    The gilded bricks have reached the bottom of the knapsack, and their sharp edges are now scoring my back with every step I take. The foot sinks to the ankle into the soft sand that started covering the road two days ago. Judging by the sun, it's getting close to noon - time to find shelter and stop. But even so, lying down during the day and walking after dusk, the scorching wind of the desert hurts my lungs with every breath. My face has become dry like touchwood, immovable, and the skin seems to tear every time I open my mouth to sip a few drops of water. (Fortunately, that will soon become unnecessary: the flask is almost empty.) Ha! An image flashes before my lunatic gaze - of an old wretch and myself basking in the ruby glimmer of a thousand goblets of wine, and the words which danced like bewitching metaphors beneath the safe, star-studded frescoes of the inn's vaults: "The laws of devastation and of death you will know, the fierce flame of contempt and the monstrous hole that gapes at night in the desert sky, and the vertigo on the edge of Being, and the tears mixed with laughter and that collapse, over and over, in the white sands of oblivion and, above all these - the thirst... the thirst that will come back with every morning's awakening, unsatisfied, undying, blind like a torrent, stronger than your self-pity, more ruthless than your exhaustion, more terrifying than your fear of what lies ahead..." But who knew, then, that words could do all this to one's body?

    Something terrible is happening around me for the last few days. There are no more shadows. Rocks, shrubs, even the great sand dunes - everything I pass by is shadowless, as if submerged in an eternal noontide... The wind has stopped, there is over everything a new silence, blind and ominous like a plague. My steps are muffled. The only sound I can hear is that of my heart - every beat a little louder, a little slower, crushing something bitter against my chest and spilling it into my veins - an unspoken, mind-numbing, eye-darkening doubt. ...Yesterday the sun didn't go down any more.
   The horizon is playing, wavering before my eyes like an incandescent storm - look, the red clay shimmers all the way up here... I wonder how long it's been since I last rested. I'd like to stumble, cling to something, stop for an instant only... - but in the shade of which being, and which hour?!

    Oh, I would like it to rain and I know that from here on it will never rain again, that the solitude of the desert is more forbidding than any other, and that in this endless noon into which I sink deeper and deeper there will be no more shadow or night for the man fallen behind, only the acceleration of this imminent unfolding and the silent nightmares of the desert devouring its fear of itself!...

    The sky is scorching blue, an unforgiving thought etched on my retina, hissing like smoldering fire in my ears, burning my guts into the ash of abstraction - relentless terrifying unsurpassable transparent heartless desire: the neurosis of freedom.

    The desert is all around me and I am paralyzed. The thirst is in me, the thirst of that revolt which brought me here - but instead of running toward the water, I lie here and let it consume me... I can't move - caught like an insect in the flowing amber of days whose passing has no meaning any longer - for it all now is Brahma's day and I carry the taste of infinity on the grains of sand between my lips... I have seen the end... and I have no desire to go any further. The urgency is gone.

    There is no greater expression of courage or defiance than crossing the desert. That is because this is also, lucidly, the last expression: it is a process of self-combustion.

    And in that process there comes a moment when what had to burn is all gone - and you realize these were your bridges behind you; but there are no bridges ahead: the fire continues to burn as if on empty, out of inertia, casting into the Unknown nothing but the shadows of your old, deposed demons. There is nothing but your bare self left - a better, purified, nearly "saintly" self - so saintly, in fact, that it can't even resurrect the memory of desire for that brief moment necessary to take the final step - out of the game.

    That is where faith - whatever it means - must make itself felt: to replace, for that crucial instant, the lost mechanism of desire. Without it, one is lost and his bones will never leave this desolate, in-between place...

    He had a dream that night, a dream about a lake and two cathedrals.

    The first was a fantastic vision of granite and stained glass, rising so tall its spires were lost among the clouds, while its vast inner spaces sheltered all of man's greatest works of art - from the colossal stone bulls of ancient Assyria, to Bach's Vergnugte Ruh, to the golden skyline of his beloved Venice and the shattering translucent blue figures of Klee and Chagall... And as he wandered beneath its glorious, dazzling vaults, his heart filled with pride at the skill and dedication of his brothers, and he thought to himself: "If it were written that man should perish today, I could not find reason to weep - for not one single stone is missing from his masterpiece"...

    Then he found himself on the outside, standing upon the lakeshore, staring down at a second cathedral: at the water's edge the image split into two, and an inconceivable dream of pure, transparent geometry opened like a window into the mind of God - a dizzying vision of pure structure and self-generating laws, the birth of illusion as layer upon layer this blooming complexity folded back on itself... yet while the yearning and intelligence of Form shimmered like a kaleidoscope from every angle, one searched in vain for recognizable details, shapes or colors... A cathedral of emptiness, perpetuating across the millennia that inner work of purification and self-discovery - the deconstruction of the Ego... A cathedral of emptiness - so that, in a world become transparent, that truth shining at the heart of all Manifest would reflect freely and consciously from every angle of Creation, in a vision of such glory and beauty that no mind alone could comprehend...

    As he approached, he saw a river entering the great gates of the cathedral, then flowing out through the reflection of its open dome - flowing out into a bottomless abyss filled with stars... He came even closer, and then saw images begin to emerge within the cathedral of emptiness - devoid of substance, like ghosts, yet so painfully close that he could read the trace of every tear over their faces... He saw it all as if through a magnifying crystal - so many lives rising out of the darkness, the aspirations of men taking shape into cities and monuments, reaching skyward like colossal arms of stone...

    He looked upstream - and in the water's turbulent, impatient surface he saw fragments, the foreshadowing of those lives and cities... then he looked down, there where the river found its exit from the cathedral - and he saw the cities' outlines beginning to twist and tear, the lives that had burned with love and passion turn into icy memories - and all of these forms, carried over the edge of the abyss, shatter into countless pieces, whose light flickered briefly like that of dying embers, then vanished forever together with the name they once held - that day when they passed through the gates of Meaning... In that darkness he saw his past desires, he saw them burn like golden tears, and in their light he saw the entire world reflected in a shimmering, unreal beauty, rising up to him like a final and desperate plea... And then it was over, as they sled beyond the limits of the Possible, along the path of that asymptotic fall... He was to see them forever now as they continued to fall, ever further, ever fainter and yet forever there, in that direction - and now he understood that the savage pain which was crushing his heart was not due to the unrealization of those desires, but precisely to their passing into illusion.

    And then he felt such despair that, without thinking, he thrust himself over the edge of the precipice, in a hopeless attempt to stop this deadly hemorrhaging, to save the world he knew and loved beyond all promise of salvation...

    He fell, and knew this to be the end, and then laughed with relief as he heard the great roar of the ocean beneath him... He fell and fell, deafened by the wind of this endless present, barely hanging unto himself as the acceleration ripped him apart, he fell breathlessly into the void of this ruthless knowledge, like an Imminence that could no longer be postponed, a collapse without break toward the center of this wisdom he had sought across the hundreds of thousands of lives through which he had made his ascent - and which was at last receiving him into her bosom, granting his destruction with the same passion with which it had once created and cast him into the world...

    And then, as he took leave of his name and readied his heart for the embrace of the ocean, one last question flashed before his mind: he had grasped the blueprint of the universe for only one instant before it started to collapse under its own gravitation - how could the world exist then? What force could counteract the pull of this tremendous Knowledge and sustain the blooming illusion in all its radiance and glory?

    With that, he found himself back on the edge - and he woke up.

    There will never be an answer. There will never be something to bring back from the edge of the world and place it in your hands like a loving son, that miraculous flower I had wanted for so long to be able to bring you. My parents, my child, I look behind and see the murky night shadows of history drawing near upon you, I see you groping and falling, afraid, calling out for that light which your heart always felt would be revealed to you when the time came - yet despite my sorrow and anguish I cannot reach you: I do not have a sword, a weapon to cast across the desert and help you dispel the darkness - for there is no such weapon.

    There will never be an answer... And yet - what a roar there will be! For a stone exists too, but only man can understand the repercussions of that existence; and among men, of all those who have seen a sunrise, how many have really felt it? But I am talking to you now of the equivalent of a billion sunrises in every grain of earth - such is the imperative of Creation - and a night heavy with the scents and shadows of every garden that ever existed - such is the mystery that pervades this entire creation.

    The Abyss is man's deepest dimension. And it's not an answer. It's not a vision, not a theological solution or a cosmogony. It's not "the end of the road", or even the eternal peace of nibbana.

    For what one seeks, over and above such "solutions", what one longs to understand, beyond all reason and hope, is simply this: the pathos of being alive.

    The taste of the earth. The resonance through eternity of having been alive once, of having experienced creation and wonder and longing and death. The taste of having stood, for one instant only, alone and silent in the face of infinity. And the compassion for all things which, like you, have stood there since history began.

    The taste of being alive... Of living as if come back from the other side, of arid and vast and cold splendor - the neverending desert night... Trying to find, in life, that subtle quiver of the air, the prescient breath of the great nostalgia that is to come... To reach and hold and touch, before that becomes the impossible and unending obsession which will haunt you for all eternity, as you become trapped by your ultimate wisdom at the center of the great Hologram...

    That night I walked to the edge of the ocean and stood before it until dawn, trying to comprehend for the first time this simple truth: that Memory can only be explored as a matter of angles, and hence that no Soul shall ever know itself other than peripherally, through broken shoreline and eroded, cast-away shards. What I am, what I know, is all that is knowable from the shore: a name, a dryness in the back of the throat, the shadow growing longer beneath the setting sun. To go beyond that, to begin to truly Remember, there is only one way: away from the sands' recorded history, and into the ever-shifting hologram of emotions, impressions and dreams our hearts weave beneath the surface of conscious thought. Does that mean, then, that to become truer to itself the soul must learn to forget more, learn to watch the exquisite detail of its creations blur into a haze of intersecting memories and parallel stories: the Mind become transparent, free - one being, one heart alone from one end of time to the other?...

    Man's history is but a journey across a desolate expanse of beauty and nostalgia: the beauty of the temples we erect - hope, freedom, aspiration; the nostalgia of the imminent decay we know to be contained within them... For one has not experienced the greatest dimension of love until the object of that love is irreversibly lost. Real love does not exist in the present - that is merely a point-like projection - but only as aspiration or memory. All that is human in us is about loss: the emergence of meaning in a sea of impermanence, and the wake of its dissipation... Ours is the ability to create it, to make something Exist in this eternal garden of shifting sand: love creates ripples across its placid expanse, and the sand becomes stone for a while. But at what cost?

    Is there another way to cross this desert? Another way it can be understood? Perhaps. But how would we know it, other than through the reverberations we carry in our bones? How could we ever tell that they are not merely the echo of this howling wind, the mirage of the shimmering horizons?

    One looks for meaning? No: one looks for purpose, above all. An insomnia that lasts a hundred years is a maddening prospect unless one finds a way to imagine dreams and dream himself asleep. But underneath all the colors and movement, at the bottom of all that is Formed, the Being lies awake, its eyes wide open... Whatever it sees, in that deafening confrontation with emptiness - that shiver of lucidity is the only instant we have ever known Truth.

    All that ever was will never die: it is there for eternity, retrievable in the implicate order of Memory, and part of our transcendence is to learn how to find it. To move toward what we are is to recognize that we have crossed the high plains of Reality from thousands of directions, under a thousand guises - that we are, each, much more than one journey: we're the very heart of the storm that has been sweeping this desert from the beginning of time...