Endymion

The author was interested in the essential reality of life as dreamlike monologue. He conceived life as a story that one tells oneself. The lines flowed from his pen unscripted – guided by existential inquietude that seeks to become manifest. He thought of wayfaring Endymion and Selene:

Floating.

          Drifting upwards, beneath wandering, solitary clouds, their momentary shade dancing through sun-drenched fields – Endymion gathers his strength.

“Where does a shadow begin?” he asks, glancing at the azure sky. “Shadows are mere fragments of ethereal reality. Are they not?”

Endymion often trembles with fear at the thought of the temporary extinction that sleep brings on.

 “Shadows are to clouds as man is to time – a dissolvable fraction, a gossamer phantasm, a collage of flesh,” he consoles himself.

Inquietude and hope are staples of being. 

Endymion reminds himself that time and corporal flesh are dual aspects of an ethereal metaphysical order. The atomic, evanescent coherence that we witness as human existence is the matrix of our logos.

Clear as Nordic ice to those who can see, our drifting, like wispy clouds, puts on display insatiable inquietude – hunger and longing for an end not nullified by time. Is this an unattainable hope?

* 

Endymion trembles at the thought of extinction – a nonexistence we can foresee. This is the trouble, you see.  Like the fate of airy clouds, we anticipate our dissolution.

          As clouds multiply, Endymion gathers his strength.

          The storm approaches. He collects his sheep.

          He waits…and…waits, continues to wait until his staid, vital resemblance to iron begins to melt into the asphyxiating soil. 

“From flesh to soil – to fossil – is but a twitch of an eyelid in eternity,” he comforts himself.

          We… caught between flesh and soil, serve as the self-aware reservoir of the Divine; we are a semblance of time, a remnant of our past, a future unrealized, a forgotten memory and a trembling hand.

          At night, floating upwards, the moon beckons.

Drifting. Endymion, always proactive, a beating heart wonders…

          “What is the cost of wisdom to a trembling hand?  What unforeseeable scale will weigh the fibrous tissue of my heart… of my virtue when I have joined the soil?” Endymion asks.

Soil…

          That perennial witness. That ever-present earth – the beginning of fossilization, actualization of memories frozen in time.

“Am I an Endymion? The one who awaits Selene’s fateful kiss that grants me eternal life?” The author reflects.

          ‘Who can know non-being, anyhow?  Anticipation?  A warm, trembling hand?  An unstoppable crescendo? A resounding heart?  Who will be a witness to my having-been?  Who will finish my unfinished thoughts, my conversations?” 

Drifting.

*          

Always drifting in and out of certainty, unity, a pantomime of sensation. What a grandiloquent invention – creation – the accumulation of psychical energy… human existence, where only calcified emotions remain.

We. Always drifting, fragments, beings trapped in time.

          The fear of a trembling hand is assuaged by another quivering hand – another spirited lover of life.

“Who will grant me the honor of completing my unfinished sentences?” the author ponders.

          Floating. Drifting…the cycle continues.

Drifting under vagabond, rogue clouds. Fluttering under the gravity of his inner space, Endymion gathers his vital might – sweat drenching him in a sun-soaked field. Inquietude. Infinitude. Ingratitude : the essence of human contingency, our lifeblood. 

Floating, drifting into sleep. Endymion wanders like a wayfaring cloud…

What is the prize for keeping the score? 

Has Endymion already lived the colors of a tone poem, while awaiting Selene’s momentous kiss under the passing shadows on Mount Latmos?

*

          As Endymion enjoys the pleasure of his longing for yesterday, he is reminded that it is the reflective temperament that best appropriates the passage of time…what this means for human existence.

We capture the essence of time through cultivation of the inner life…the reservoir of intuitive faculties that enable us to will immortality. Endymion continues to dream.

The dream is a recurring one:

“I see a gap in a sea of darkness. I see myself floating upwards, slowly out of a primal, earthly tomb.  Peculiar… Upon awakening every morning, I become aware of the sensation that I am not the dreamer, rather a fiery messenger on a disagreeable errand.

           Last night I managed to peek out from the abysmal darkness that engulfs me.  Again, I am floating. Two nights ago, I was tossed into a frenzy of hope when I found myself on the ground, in a moonlit field, my hands clawing at the dewy night soil. But to no avail. I slowly descend back into my prison-void. I call out to my gentle flock, only to discover that I have no voice. I am mute – a frighten spectacle of a man.

          Between my flirtations with floating out of the abyss and my hopeless, eventual descent, I realize I have time to reflect on the vexed state of my being – I, a dreamer of time…”

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