THE ASPHODEL

Ghost, ghost! Upon the grey existence of pallid solemnity do we thrive, never accounted for, never to account. This meadow is dark, the gloomy meadow everyone is condemned to once they see no light in their living. To some it is a blessing. The fields we walk on are strained, sepia, a figment of film grain. The musty and murky depths of the soil tug us down and lift us up, treading on a light sheet on calm, divine. For when we are dead we do not think. For we do not wish to.

Today under the stars thousands of people die. It is done through a fortunate blessing, a sacred incarnation of a quiet peace and freedom. Walk through the stars, a long and dark corridor, stretching the millions of aeons towards impossible galaxies; the corridor dims and glows brighter and brighter, walk and tread upon it, this ethereal mist, and succumb to it; dissolve within it like a million sugar cubes within a teapot of incense, of tonic. I would see the tea, or whatever that is in the doomed pot, swirl, perhaps a million times, a vortex of symmetry, dissending opaqued fluidity within a concentration of abstract illusion, growing bigger and bigger, stronger and stronger, until it engulfs us meaninglessly all. Through the teapot and the tea do the stars appear, and our particles draw to it, the collective embodiment of the galaxy, one galaxy; we run and we dissolve into the night, into the day, through the asphodel.

We perceive our life as herb; the simple essence of a herb captures and captivates an entire soul, a peasant working and ploughing through the barren fields of clover and spices and fragrant blossom, a banker in a metropolis counting the deals, stroking the soft silky faces of fresh note and minted coin as he counts them with the notes folding and tumbling, the coins clattering and rumbling, a man and a woman under a tree. These herb may hallucinate, these herb may kill. Often is life perceived by thinkers as herb, where we taste, we nourish and heal from it, but eventually die from it. Should April constitute the birth and the death? In April blooms the asphodel, with its white petals radiating a strong vitality, a healthy spirit, a pure organic mineral. White, a symbol, brown, a taint, centering a lost hole, an abyss of a once paradise. There were fruits! Round, ovular, brown, orange, a herb of kind, perhaps a wolf, a cran, a pill. Our lives are herb; fertile, warm, meaningful. But is this illusion, delusional fantasy? Our reality is somewhat more bleak, a colourless spectrum living in the fleeting shadows of unmasked colour. O! How many have ever seen the asphodel so often and have looked so hard at it to comprehend that it is colourless? The colours diverge, the colours converge, fusing, fissing, into a blurred fiction, a clear and sharp reality – a black, a white. Such is the mechanism of the flower, when it turns divine; life itself is ruled over by a harsh fate. The flower, the teapot! I would strain my eyes, and catch a glimpse of the scary image that lurks beneath the willing mask ahead. Colour! If there were such a thing, the bases of all life would be torn apart, remolded, reshaped.

Such was an asphodel, a life. The sun never shines here, the edge of the earth. Dawn never rises, dusk never sets. The fields are beautiful. The fields are haunting. It is silence. The rustling of the leaves against the wind permeate it, resembling the unended chorus to a lyre, a song. The fields are grey. Forever will the leaves rustle. There is nothing but silence and the wind. One by one do the asphodels appear, blooming in turn, amidst a ghostly silence. Will any person ever see such a spectacular sight – oh, maybe they do, running about themselves frantically, searching for tranquility, dreaming for it. The asphodels bloom and thrive under a glorious dimness. There is no sun, but the cavern is filled with light unknown, a mysterious vitality. The fields rustle in the wind, songlike, lament. Slowly do the flowers wither.

They wither, in spite of decay, towards a terrible beauty. The petals darken, white to grey, grey to black. The petals slowly wither, gradually dissolving, decaying, a husk once more. The sepals droop and the organelles rot, deep down a dark charm of unblessed solitude. The pollen brushes itself, individual cell-layers scraping one another, a boy scraping his knee across a brick wall, breaking apart, dying. The dead pollen are then sent off into the wind.

Soon the air is filled with death and the smell of death. Rotting worms, if ever conceptualized, ooze out of the bodies of husks and cling on to them, a strangulation, a rattle. The stench of hopelessness is strong. The mysterious light flickers and rekindles itself, from horizon to hill, down this neutral abyss. Very soon nothing happens and the worms disappear and the asphodel generates itself back again, back into full bloom.

Then again is this an illusion. Gradually more rustling is heard. From the most distant horizon something can be seen moving. A gradual tessellation, an unmoving swarm. Colour, the illusion. Absence, the illusion. There is presence. But what sort of presence is this? Shadows form, shapes form. Gradually is it seen to be silhouettes of people wandering in solitude. Men, and women, and children, walking in phantasma, waking to phantasma. They will walk nearer. They will encircle the small asphodels with their bare and coarse feet and tread across them, in a state of sleep, unharming each other, one another, unharming the asphodel.

They have looked straight ahead with soulless eyes. Their irises, such, remain, the pupils, the different dissectments, intact. But the lack of a sparkle and a twinkle suggest a death, a soulless reincarnation. They flit like shadows. They do not speak, they do not smile. Nor do they touch. Without their blood they are witless, perhaps without a solid future. The men, the women and the children have no souls. Perhaps they are all just flesh and bone, without a heart, without a mind. The soulless exist alongside the asphodels, an unquiet peace, a turbulent sadness.

Such is the description of the asphodel. The fields of Asphodel, the meadows of Asphodel! Our lives revolve around this sad place, this sorry existence. Everywhere I go I see grey. The colour sharpened, the darkness blurred; suddenly the colour blurred, the darkness sharpened. Was it not ever meant to be like this so? Since never was there a genuine thing in the world. Construction ensued when time began, death ended, and life parallel to building formed, an excitement of chance. But did death never end, for we see it still, every day around us. It has never been known to us the exact formula for love and passion, except a passionate fury. Even then is the fury blurred, as irrationality comes into place with the fuzzy neurons switching down into hibernation and the irises popping out of life with the sight of fire, fire. Look at it, the asphodel! Every person is condemned to it, although many find it a blessing. With soul gone, can a body function without regard to anything. Already is our world similar to the asphodel, a gloomy illusion, the false sense of an ending. It is felt that dreams come true. But dreams are never created amongst the asphodels. An asphodel leads to suicide; a suicide leads to asphodel. Ever is the cyclic diagram repeating, rotating, indifferent to love, passion, fury, justice, hate, compassion. Never was anyone truly loved. If love were to exist on the face of this earth, it would become clear that grey hues would soften and darken in lighter moods and dawn would befall onto colour, onto vibrance, onto choice. Why are we condemned to the company of the asphodel? Who are we, and were we ever loved?