Beyond

Standing atop the great wall, the hot wind sears our rag-draped almost naked body, and the burning sun reddens our prison-blanched exposed skin. Sand whips our face from the vast desert before us and we turn to the hagged, bent man beside us, held tightly, as are we, by a bristling muscled guard, oiled arms glistening with sweat beneath leather and polished metal. We squint at our companion, another half starved prisoner, gaunt and stooped, defeated, eyes closed, ready to accept his fate. He cracks his eyes open, and croaks a rasping crackle, eyes suddenly wide as he is flung from the edge of the great wall unceremoniously, tumbling, strangely like a scrap in the wind, emaciated, falling, flailing, crunching; to an end below, then drifting and settling, finally, in a still heap at the bottom of a sand dune. Rejected, expelled.

The wall is the end of the world. Behind us is a bursting megapolis, a city high and vast and consuming. A civilisation of greed and vice and power and Kings. Of technology and ease and perpetual motion and growth and desire. Of riches and decadence and everything and everything and everything. A dominion where there is only one way, and to be outspoken is to be rejected, expelled.

Before us is nothing. Desert and death. And now it is our turn, we are cast from the wall to our end, we fall and anticipate judgement and finality.

Yet we wake. And it is dark. Not dark as the afterlife, but dark and fresh and pricked by a million points above us. We hurt, but we aren't broken - or anything like it. We laugh! We are the refuse, the outspoken distaste of narrow minds, ejected from everything - and yet alive! We move, carefully, testing the sum of our parts, creaking, hurting, but all, miraculously working!

We look up at the wall from which we fell, our guards long gone, vast in its height; impregnable, solid, impossible. We look down at the still silent form of our comrade. In the dark we see clasped in his dead grasp a little black notebook. What else have we? We take it.

We limp slowly, the soft sand cooler, cold in fact in the dark of night. For how long? Until we can limp and breathe no more. The night is eternity. We limp and breathe. The night is eternity. We limp and breathe. We choke! We retch! A stench so vile and pervasive it is as if we have ourselves rotted. Before us in the rising light of the dawn is a vast sea - a sea belched from a giant pipe, the only protrusion from the great vast wall, rejecting, expelling, as it did us, refuse from the greatness and perfection of the capitalism beyond. A sewer. Of death and putrescence. We cannot pass it and we haven't energy to escape it. We sit on its banks and watch the sun rise above its fuming mire and again await the fate that should have befallen us. We faint.

We yet wake again. We have sunk in the muddy muck of the black shore. The sun is high and we are blistered and peeling where we are exposed but where we have sunk we are shielded by disgust and thick refuse. We cannot think, so the unthinkable assumes action. We let a puddle fill our mouth with its vileness and we drink. A toast to death. And in our hand is clasped that book, and it is held aloft by our near-mummified arm, and we see it blurred through failing eyes as it falls open, and it’s sketches are of great trees and flowers and abundant fruits and grasses to taunt us, but we hold it’s mocking pages above ourselves for the little black book is our only shelter from the furnace in the sky. And we faint.

We wake and it is night, and we drink again and vomit and faint.

And then it is day and night and day and night and day and night. And then we don’t know if it is day or night. And then we don’t know anything.

And then we wake, and we can see anew, and we know something. We know that before our eye is a green shoot. For among the sketches of great trees and flowers and abundant fruits and grasses are pressed specimens and dried husks of wild grains and the tiny dried seed pods of forest giants. Our little book held aloft in our peeling, paralysed arm their only protection from the blinding heat, and the squelching refuse of a libidinous kingdom proving fertile for their tender roots. We cannot move, sustained only by liquid bile. We wait for death but now unconvincingly; hope has sprouted.

There is a day where some grass, beyond the need of the shelter of a book, gives us a stem of nourishment, and the next day has replenished itself so we take again, it thanks us in its multiplication the next day with a seed head, and the next day with two more.

There is a day when we can rise, our dried up joints gradually stretching again into the shape of something living, and we see now that around us the stagnant swamp has become populated with small plants. And we eat, and plain green food we would have rejected in another life is to us as extravagant as a banquet. And the life in the plants thanks us and grows ever more.

There is a day where the viscous liquid at the base of the plants has cleared and we taste it and though it is yet of the bog, to our parched lips it is as delicate as fine wine.

There is a day when the plants have become woody, and as tall as we stand. No longer do we shade them with a little black book, but they shade us; and more: they shade their own, and others for the book had many pages and many saved vestiges, so now we sit in the dappled light on the banks of a sea of death yet alive, and we read and understand the plants and love them and nurture them all the more.

There is a day where we feel health again. And we cannot see the sea of filth for the boughs, and we forget it's stench and we smell a flower and eat fresh ripe fruit. And we are happier outside the wall than ever within it.

There is a day when we hear a rustle and look and find a creature, nesting in a bough. And things that swim and things that fly and things that crawl and leap and scuttle appear. From where? But life will find it's niche and creation will have its way. The shore of the mire has become a verdant garden; a haven.

And now it is a forest.

There is a night, that is lit like the day. A thousand times a thousand suns flicker on and off beyond the wall and a deafening torrent of destructive cacophony fills the void with rumbling pounding death, and the screams of a million times a million in anguish.

And there is a day in the desert, now forest, beyond the wall where the belching of the giant refuse pipe expels it’s last and itself is dead.

The forest now self sustaining, swallows the swamp of death and rot with life and vibrant vitality.

There is a day where some few, limping, blistered survivors of self imploding gluttony forced beyond their own barrier of death come pleading for life outside it. At the border of our forest they beg us with their sad gold and their jewels that they have dragged even across their desolation. And though those riches are ours and they number twenty times a thousand we let them enter; but leave those possessions in a pile in the sand, for there is no place here for their useless weight.

And there is a day where the forest swallows those heaps of lifeless wealth that lie at its threshold, and the bones of those who would not be separated from them. Yet those who left it, with us, to melt in the burning sands and entered the cool of the forest lived more fully than ever they would have, as did we until at last surrendering, satisfied and whole, to the forest too.

And since then vigorous vines have scaled the impossible wall and passed beyond it.

And the world is in balance for a time.