Jabberwocky: Deliverance

Every so often we hear a scream. An abraision on the surface, something deep inside that is trying to break out, something stifled, something dying, something essential. We hear the screams but we ignor them, driven by fear, apprehension or perhaps something more sinister. A sadistic instinct: the need to cull off the things that are not habitual, the cluttered array of emotions that confounds our simple existance. The scream we hear is the wilting innocence, the bleeding skies, the dying christ pinned to a satelite, the child inside, humanity, compassion, happieness. All these sacrificed in the name of a greater cause. The God that was dead is ressurected in television, in the poisoned water we are forced to imbibe, in the black-brown, liquefied flesh of victims that collects in the gutter. He is resurrected; a bloodied, bruised corpse, a branded abomination, a deformed utopia, a juggernaught. The only way He can reach us is through aversion, through the screams that we immediately asphyxiate. We count the sheep, we cry in our sleep and we dream like abacasses. The lies woven through our dreams like the rainbow on an oil slick: his prophesies of profitable and vital wars, of the future happieness achived through sacrifice, of the collateral we need to sustain humanity. How our children will be gratefull for our love when they discover the truth of God. And only through sacrifice can this be achieved; this, the sweetest and most fundamental of His lies, dispersed through the collective unconsciousness like blood in the water. And the sharks have picked up on the scent; they smell His fear and the guile of sanctity. He fears being dead.

Fear of death is something that we have learned to live with over the many millions of years of evolution. Death is all around us, always has been and always will be until the day we blink out of this abject existence. We live faced with the inevitability of death. The fear surrounds our lives: the wild animals hunting us out of our feeble tribes, the jingoist pursuing foreign intrests on TV screens, crossing the road, walking in the park, gathering at the water, as the sun sets. We are reminded persistantly, a primal memory, an instinct, of the thing that takes us in our sleep, picks us out from the herd; one by one, we all march on to the beat of its wings, its breath on our backs, we feel it all around us. So we gather around the alters and worship the violence in the hope that it will repell the malevolence that confronts us in sleep; TVs like campfires to the beast. Oh yes, fear is the new god, it is the only ubiquitous we know. But it is only ubiquitous; its power is null. It is in all dimensions yet it is purposeless, it exists but it only exists. We hold all of our worth in fear and the fear, in the end, is all for nothing; death is insignificant in the presence of omnipotence. The fear is ubiquitous but there is another omnipotent presence: this is the Jabberwocky. It encompasses all fear. It engages all existence. It is the antichrist - the perfect devastator, perfect hate, pure malevolence, born of denial, nursed on rape, eroding everything for all eternity. There is no escape. There is only death. This is the new God. This is how we live. This is how it is to be.

Jacob was dying. He lay in the hospital bed, the pure white linen folded neatly over his emaciated frame, the curtains drawn to the outside world to give him peace and respite. Cancer, the plague of the modern age, death in a generation of immortality, of digital omnipotentce; modern death. But there is nothing modern about death. It is the fourth or fith most ancient state of consiousness we know aside from life in-utero, consciousness, unconsciouness and perhaps pre-existence: the memory of god.

His family had visited that day, he could read it on their faces, the shock and pain. They stood by his bed, speaking in semi-whispers of their lives in an attempt to bring some calm to him, to prepare him for what he inevitably faced. Calm: a sedative for the fear, the welcomed mundane numbness that consumes our being; a modem's scream, white noise, a market forcast, another pill.

Jacob shut his eyes. The room was painful. His memory proded a smile from his pasty lips. His life had not been in vain; at least he'd found love. His children, how he adored them, how he wished he could see his youngest provide a grandchild, that was his only regret: that he would not live that long.

The life in the room had been drained with the colour of the walls, sapped of all but a faint blush of blue, like the blue of veins under pale skin. The machines: metranomes of his body; the tiles perfect and flawless like the light at the end of the tunnel: cold and apathetic. He was dying and death was all there was.

The cancer had rotted his lungs making it impossible to breath without assistance, eventually they would fail, even with assistance. The lungs would seize up and, slowly, he would suffocate, floundering at life with nothing else to do but let it take its course.

Jacob had thought about this moment the day that he had been diagnosed. The prelude to death. The weeks, months, years of pain, the flower arrangements and funeral arrangements, a life less than life, the tears shed by his children and wife, and his tears, the tears that no one would see, the hospital bed and nurses, the good-byes. So much pain.

He had taken a walk up to the headlands by the beach. He gazed up at the lighthouse, its white exterior smooth like bone. And ocean; the great mass of heaving water: a body, a living thing, the beast that has claimed millions of lives and yet we still go back to it because of some vague hedonistic urge. The ocean; the beast: dangerous, beautiful and tragic. Jacob had stood at the edge of the cliff, staring into the abysmal realms of Neptune, and considered submission. To leap into Atlantis, to end his life there without prolonging the agony.

He looked but did not jump. Something held him back. Perhaps fear, perhaps doubt, perhaps hope. His children…

This thought brought tears from his desiccated eyes and stung the corners. Only two tears dropped from his eyes, he continued to weep despite the absence of tears.

Jacob had never been a religious man but he believed in some kind of afterlife, moreso now that he was faced with death but even still he doubted this. This is why he wept. That God did not exist put him facing oblivion, whether that oblivion be deliverence from this corporeal, painfull existance or perpetual solitude, an end to life and the beginning of an eternity of non-existance, a slip stream of void. The possibility of nothing was what he feared.

The machines made perfunctory tones, they were not intended to mollify but they had this side effect, regardless of their intentions. Their indifferent measurement of his life signs was comforting because emotion had exhausted Jacob. It was assuring to know that when his life ended there would still be something that endured in the presence of death, even if it wasn’t alive, all that mattered was that something remained. A sound, an electronic impulse.

Jacob drifted into a light sleep. His thoughts remained focusing on the din of the cancer ward. A tone made him suddenly open his eyes. There he saw it: Death. It was death and it was here for him. Death was not cloaked, skeletal remains, weilding a hoe. It was intangeble, an instinct. 'So here it is' he thought. His life had ended and what had come of it? He tried to think of his loved ones but it took him. He was alive but he was being taken. Through the halls of the hospital, the grieving relatives from tomorrow leaning on chairs, waiting, crying, comforting each other. There! His wife and children. Here it allowed him to linger a moment. 'This is the last I will see of them,' he thought. 'Beyond this I may never touch Beverly's skin or feel her warm breath upon my face; her sigh after a kiss.' His son, so tall and strong, had his arms around his mother. His daughter sat with her head in her hands on a blue plastic chair. 'She is so young, there is so much more for her to learn, so much I could have taught her.' But here he was moved on through the hall, out of the hospital.

Jacob was not dead. He could still feel his life, his breath. He still felt that he was a part of this world. He was experiencing it for the first time as a voyer, an incorporeal being, what the laymen term out of body or astral traveling. Lifeless but still living; without time.

The taxi rank. People stood around smoking and chatting about the important and the trivial. Someone walking their dog. Down on the street the cars rushed by. A car stereo thumping out of a small European made car, some stupid dance song about sex. Its passengers wore designer sunglasses, they did not smile, they barely acknowledged the street that they were driving through.

Now a shop: a florist, and another: a bakery. A whole row of shops, a pathologist's surgery, and more shops, he was coming up to a mall. People walked in and out of the automatic doors with nothing in their heads but bags of stuff in their hands. Jacob's soul shuddered. 'What new hell is this?' he thought almost laughing at the inappropriate thought. 'What is this? It is a mall but why am I here? Is this heaven? No…' but he was not so sure. Heaven? It was not his idea of heaven but amongst the resonance of his thoughts, just audible under the din of cash registers and atm machines, somewhere there was a thought. It was not his thoughts he heard but the thoughts none the less regarded this new hell, this mall, to be heaven.

He was rising above the mall now, floating along the street, the cars moving faster, now slower now much faster than he. A school, the students sitting in the classrooms attentive to the words being spoken; the words meaning nothing that Jacob could comprehend but he was beyond mere comprehension. He saw everything. Every misleading adjective and every offensive facial twitch, the architect moulding, kneading, fingers probing deep into the young minds. Everything, the breeze, the soil, the exhaust fumes, the rays of sunshine and it all meant nothing. He could not comprehend either as a part or as a whole. His mind still functioned but there was nothing…

A factory now, the workers lined up at the tables, fastening screws, another factory, people in white coats, large vats of chemicals…
A pall of smoke rising, lifed by the breeze, a ballet of smog.

The microcosm of the suburbs interlocking, freeways surging forth, a business district like the obituaries page. The small world of the urban jungle laid out beneath him and he did not understand it. 'What is this all for?' Jacob felt his individual thoughts above the grey noise of the mass unconsciousness, the chatter of billions of thoughts humming, only occasionally audible at the base of his awareness and nearly indecipherable. 'Look at them and their bright and shiny things, their flashing lights and colours, their massive brains. No one knows this.'

Now an entire continent spread out before him. A mass of ocean. The curve of the globe, the sun a gleaming ball of fire and energy.

Now the globe in its entirety. A world of activity and yet it appeared still.

Jacob now had his mind back. He was still alive. In the world… in the hospital his nurse was wandering past his room. She failed to notice the vacuum of life at his head: the Jabberwocky corrupting his final moments, prodding his soul, provoking indifference. It baited the way with absolute truth yet even absolute truth is only a half truth. The most bitten lure is not a lie but a half truth.

And here Jacob saw the earth. And it was still. The Orb, cold like a gun. No emotion inside him. This was his last glimps of home. No more spring, no more oceans or birds. No people… Beneath the apathy, Jacob felt something unusual. He could not place it. It was irritating, sinister, it was black like a blood clot; a vague emptiness but it was not a void. There was something there and Jacob struggled to grasp it.

He suddenly felt the hospital room around him. He was indeed still a part of this world but all he could see was the blackness of space. All he could hear was the dull hum of a thousand wasted dreams and thoughts. All he could feel was the black, obscure emptiness. But he still felt the room. Like a dream, like a half formed thought, it was there. It brushed at the hairs on his neck. He was dying.

This was the end. Another moment and it would be gone. He felt the room again. This time he could hear the machines and the nurse, urgently trying to keep his life until the doctors arrived. There was something else in that room, that small blue room, the hospital room so far away and yet so close if he reached out his hand he could touch it. Jacob felt the reality of the hospital rush back. He still felt aware of floating above everything but now he also experienced the hospital room. The floating was at another point in time. His vision of the room returned. He faced the end, the jabberwocky.

A cruel rejection from the breast of life, Jacob drifted, the heart monitor's monotone fading from his ear and the globe dissapearing from his vision as the quickening of the abyss sucked him inside. The life he had once loved and cherished he now harboured not a single memory, nor remorse for the lost sentience, not even recognition as the cold globe became a blackened pixil merging within oblivion with a billion other stars that blinked out of sight. Darkness engulfing him like the ocean. He was rejected from life but welcomed, into the nothing, warmly into the arms of non-existence as a denial of presence, a cipher, a void god, the Jabberwocky.