Stygian silence: postscript

I was listening to James Lee Burke’s “A Private Cathedral” for the fifth or sixth time yesterday. This passage appears toward the end. It gets at what I was attempting with “Stygian silence” far better than I did.

I suspect our behavior seemed grandiose. We were certainly outnumbered and outgunned. We were also physically exhausted and emotionally burned out, the way you feel coming off a three-day whiskey drunk, lights flickering behind your eyelids, a bilious taste in your mouth, a clammy smell like a field mortuary on your skin. I tried to keep in mind the admonition of Stonewall Jackson I quoted earlier: “Always mystify, mislead and surprise.”

I also believed we had another weapon on our side: Shondell was a bully, and like all bullies, he was probably a coward.

The electrical system was still down, and the ship surrounded by fog, which gave us an appreciable degree of cover. The downside? We could not be certain of our environment. We seemed to be in a vortex, one similar to the eye of a storm. Even though the sun had risen, the sky was dark again, the waves filled with the same black luminosity I had seen when I had stood on the dock by the amusement pier, wondering if Homer was still with us, his Sirens winking at us, lifting their wet hair off their breasts, guiding us onto the rocks.

The truth is, I wanted the world to be enchanted, hung with mysteries and flights of the imagination. Why? Because with that belief, we become subsumed by creation and a participant in it, a living particle inside infinity. We abide in the presence of Charlemagne’s knights riding up the road to Roncevaux. We flee mediocrity and predictability, and we delight in the rising and setting of the sun and no longer fear death because indeed the Earth abideth forever. I wanted Gideon to be real. I wanted to hear the clash of shields, and Arthur pulling his sword from the rock, and see Guinevere on the parapet of the castle, and the dawn shrouded with a golden nimbus.

Why not? It beats dining out at Chuck E. Cheese.