Apollonian Figures in a Dionysian World
Our march forward had become a slog, the progress of students of sacred myths finally released to live them―long on the gossamer structures that magically animate those seductive and seditious ideas but short on the ways of words that actually do the work―ways that lined the tomes that motivated yet tethered our every move and breathlessly anchored our urgent and gestured-insistence on the critical character of our pursuits.
Now cast from the safety of those words and separated from the structured and structuring structure of our teachers, eyes sunken and gray now that the glossy and moist infatuation with ideas―not any ideas but ideas that convinced us we could make a difference―had shown itself to be unstable and unsustainable at increasing distance from its core.
But―we had come too far and worked too hard to convince ourselves that our own path would lead to a nirvana capable of sustaining us — like oxygen — above all. The hunger we felt, only penance for a prior life of decadence and modern excess that we promised ourselves would be soon purified from our bodies.
Still a pack, lurching in our almost-addled trajectory, perhaps as much for the condolence of warmth and the memory of our once-ardent collective as anything else―before us, in the darkness and faintly visible through a hovering layer of dust produced by our own fatigued footfalls―one of us near the front of our mass noticed with choked gasp and gesture, faint and loamy lights on the horizon.
Raising our heads from their dazed lock on the only thing we could find stable — the very feet that produced the cloud that choked us — to the author of this alert and along his shaking and outstretched arm to its target on the horizon. It took time for our eyes to adjust to the distance, but one by one in our ranks the sounds of quickening breaths and desiccated but excited murmuring evidenced this sight was spreading through our number―sounds that themselves produced a distantly familiar urgency that now propelled us toward the light―a vision that―in our suddenly unifying movement and almost animated affect―we silently agreed was now a vision worth working toward.
Even with this vision still a horizon away we―at first hardly whispered, but gradually with more commitment―imagined what could await us at this still distant site. Voices in our shared darkness grew animated, even giddy, with the more extreme of these prospects. Even the most guarded among us seemed to lower their guard and allow for―even―optimistic possibilities yet only imagined-possible.
Inside all of this―in time―we erected a whirl of words that captured and fuelled and levitated our billowing and yet untested postulates.
I may have been the only one to notice, but it started to become apparent that our slog had somehow returned to something approaching a march. Again we found our selves with―we were increasingly convinced―reason evidencing our presence at the cusp of differences that would make a difference.
