Читать книгу Malchus - Charles William Johns - Страница 5

I am Malchus. I will put you in your place. At the expense of my actions you have yourselves a story, and if I am the protagonist I am also the antagonist. In fact I am mainly the jester, the fool, the drunken one. For your self-composed clear conscience, gentlemanly and naive, I have crucified myself. And far from literature being ‘evil’ it has become the law for me; it surveys me, keeps me in my place-the confession. So we both have our places, you and I, and far from wanting to be wrapped up in the story, I suggest you remain thoroughly out. Blood can spill from my hands to yours quite easily from a turn of the page (or from closing this book in disgust). The written word has a habit of unsticking itself from its page and gallivanting about as if it were your very own conscience.

Why is it that we return, again and again, to books, as if there were some insight to be gained, as if we could bypass experience, the consequence of experience, the consequence of actions and decisions in this very real world we attempt to shield ourselves from? It is as if we were naive enough to think that knowledge could be gained without a loss. Every emotion is a disturbance of some kind. The intricacies of loss is an art form and I am happy to have suffered so that you may enjoy the ‘pleasure of the text’.

Every sensation, every mode of enjoyment, is a mode of communication; one says “I like this”, or, “why did you sting me nettle?” But to who are we communicating with in these frivolous human scenarios? Perhaps to each other? Our inner-selves? God? And so the history of life becomes the history of a conversation, spanning miles and miles, echoing even further into caverns, catacombs, connecting burning stars to our stratosphere through the instrument of human perception, uniting insects rattling in bushes between the footsteps of a young man’s morning walk. In this sense everyone knows everyone, we have all spoken to each other in this life, we have all expressed something to everyone, and-for now-I become known; my little voice is heard over a blizzard of premature utterances. Very well. The entirety of human existence is one voice fighting over another.