Retriever

It is with heavy droopy limbs that I plod away at my keyboard attempting to bring you a message from beyond. With this tired and decaying biological miracle I struggle to open up a fissure into a hidden realm, a place where creatures shimmer in 7 or 12 dimensions at least, so that what you or I could see, even with the use of some subtle sense outside of biological eye sight, would seem to be ever moving and crawling, as if its flesh were composed of millions of pyramid shaped cells, always falling off and being replenished, just as our own skin cells flake off, leaving us continuously in a brand new skin. What if I were aware of the newness of this drowsy contraption in every moment? Really it is the drowsiness which hinders such a perception. Just as when you wake in the morning at the tolling of the digital alarm blinking with its red eyes formed of squared off Arabic numerals and feel that you can’t possible move, but force yourself up, and just by taking yourself through the motions of a person who is awake, the sleep begins to slip off of you, in the same manner as the aforementioned skin cells, just as you wake yourself up in the morning by showering and dressing, even if you feel like an animated corpse, so do I go through the motions of being the awakened messenger, even though inspiration is lost somewhere in the fog.
Just by lifting my satchel up and heaving the strap over my sagging shoulder, and strapping on my little winged sandals and using bobby pins to affix my little golden winged helmet securely upon my head, I heighten the chances of delivering a message today. Don’t think that I’m having illusions of grandeur; that I believe I am retrieving from the beyond some golden truth which I will deliver to you. Certainly not. I am like a good Labrador running out into the tall, seemingly impenetrable reeds to fetch a dead bird and bring it back to my master’s hand. Then I, the master, will turn the feathered thing over in my hand and look at it wonderingly.
‘Is this what I shot from the sky? Is this my own true nature?’
And I, the servant, will wag my black tail and loll my pink tongue and cock my head to the side imploring the master to give me some more work to do before I resign myself to lying around on the rug licking my own genitals or waiting at the front window to bark at the mailman, whilst the master reclines, atrophying in a lounge chair, watching images flash on a 20 inch square cathode tube monitor adorned by insect like antennae, perhaps even watching images of duck hunters. So I whine a little and wag my tail, and the master nods and raises the rifle and waits for something to move across the blue screen of our mind. BLAM! We don’t know what it is until we’ve caught it and killed it. Then we examine a corpse and ask ourselves,
"Is this a bird?"
If we were to assume that everything we could observe about dead birds was the truth about live birds, that would be an error. Could we really hope to learn about the nature of flying birds by shooting them down? We could at least be in a relationship with them, which is what we long for, the unification of our holy trinity, the master, the retriever, and the illusive quest. The bird is a dream, and the master is a stalker, and the retriever is a warrior, a fine infantry man doing the rough work. Meanwhile the general keeps an eye on the whole picture and plans and urges the infantry on towards the flag which dances intoxicatingly in the wind. When at last we tear it down and hold it in our sweaty grimy palms, what is it that we will have attained? We will not know, even then, while clutching it, all that we will have is its discarded outward manifestation, so that we will have to ask ourselves:
‘What could a flag be?’
A flag is a dream. A general is a stalker. An infantry man is a warrior.
Then we will turn our nose to the new horizon and begin the quest afresh. The relationship will manifest through a new set of outward forms.
This is the glimpse of the hidden which I will deliver; an artifact which marks the place where the mysterious passed in a lightning moment of awakening. It was present and alive for a moment in a fleeting relationship between you, and I, and its own unknowable nature. The byproduct of that union, of the heat that was generated when we closed the circuit for a moment and nearly shattered the illusion of separation, is the thing which we can hold in our hand when the circle is broken again , a dead bird, a photograph, a blog entry, a key to remind us that once we breached the gate of no gates, and if we strive for it, we will do it again.