Lacrimosa
By ProjectAssos
- 423 reads
Full of tears will be that day
When from the ashes shall arise
The guilty man to be judged;
Therefore spare him, O God,
Merciful Lord Jesus,
Grant them eternal rest.
Amen.
The white sky overflowed into a veil of translucent fog that covered the silent cemetery. Bare trees, the cold and he – a living creature amongst the dead; dead the same as them. Bleached hair, tired black piercing eyes and the name Assos, written in katakana, under his left eye. He was dressed in a black uniform worn by Japanese students, with a white shirt underneath. With a book in his hand, he stood above the grave of his faithful friend – his only friend.
This vast world seemed too small that one could survive in it, so now he was dreaming peacefully in a black coffin, in the embrace of white chrysanthemums.
He has been a poet – an excellent poet – but now he was just a painful reminiscence in the past of his faithful friend. All the memories he left behind were nothing more than an echo of his spirit trapped in between two paperback covers – now in Assos’ hands.
Not wanting to possess that dead child of his friend’s mind Assos speaks in agony: “Here you have it. Take it with you. Take this bastard whom nobody wanted.” – His words disappear into the grave, together with the book.
And the book leaned onto the chest from which it once wrenched free. Her fate being to disappear from this world together with her creator. All those years spent bleeding her creation were in vain.
Assos observes her. She hypnotises him with her cries. She screams… She wants life. She wants to be reborn every time somebody reads her. She screams. She cries for her creator, and her screams, her cries mingle with the sound of the raging sea.
Her owner, was just a few feet away, lying on the beach covered with darkness and with Assos’ gaze. Assos is not Assos anylonger, he is Lord Byron, and the corpse next to him, that of his friend Shelley. And the book, that of his friend Keats – the one he gave to Percy for his birthday.
“First John, and now you leave me too… My old friend. To die under such unfortunate circumstances, why? What shall I tell to your beloved wife? How embittered she will be to learn about your fate? – Silently he squeezed it through his trembling lips, with the moon revealing his teary eyes.
Deeply lost in the labyrinth of grieve and remembrance of his dead friend, he collects firewood. In a delirium he piles it up, and puts the body on the pile, and the book on the body. A spark on the tip if a match flickered in the dark for a moment, but the dark devoured it with its cold jaws, only to have that same spark be reborn in a blaze which banished the dark.
The same as the dark devoured the spark, now the flames devoured the body together with the book.
The hot kisses of the flame were slowly burning the body. The book disappeared in the flames merging with the silver moon high up in the depths of the black sea. Out of the ashes of the book, the untamed heart of the artist, emerged.
Byron awakes from the delirium into a trance. The heart calls for him. Out of its unrestrained desire to create it calls. And Byron answers that call. He stretches his hand out towards the flames, feeling its hot touch, but the other voice is stronger, pooling Assos to itself.
Out of reality Assos awakes into a dream; out of a dream he falls into waking. In front of him a teacher, and around him a forest of insidious smiles. In his ears still rings the song of the sea, and his heart still tightens, out of the loss of his friend.
Like a marionette, the teacher bounced around as she talked in anger, yet all her words disappeared in the vacuum of Assos disorientation. And all he did was to nod confirmatively in the rhythm of the teacher’s furious foot hitting the ground.
“Go, wash your face, and then return. You can’t follow the lecture like that.” – She commanded and he obeyed
The stench of ammonia, semi-darkness, the sound of the sea, the bonfire, the grave, the book, the friend, he as Assos, and he as Bayron. Everything was spinning. Reality and fiction were entwining in a tedious dance on the stage of Assos consciousness. The cold water run through his fingers – he observed it. It was twinkling in the dark, and it was noisy returning Assos into reality. He collects the water with his hands and dives his face into it. And does it again. And again.
He lifts his head and the bright light of the neon lamp blinds him. He moves his hand over his pale face – touches the dark circles under his eyes. He leaves the bathroom and enters the living room clothed in moonshine. He looks at the room in detail, as if it was his first time standing there. It was a small room filled with books and paper, scattered all around the floor. Surrounded by them, a small couch, an armchair and a table, stood in the middle. On the table, just a laptop and an ashtray full of cigarette butts.
Assos lies down on the couch, takes a box of cigarettes out of his pocket and light one up. The tip of the cigarette lightens up with an orange flicker, and the blue smoke mixs up with the stale air. He observes the tip if the cigarette, observes himself out of the armchair.
“Why do you prepare my funeral?” – Assos in the armchair asks
“I do not prepare it, I already did it.” – Assos on the couch answers
“All right… Why did you bury me? – Assos in the armchair asks again
“And again you ask wrongly” – Counters Assos, with his gaze fixed at the tip of the cigarette as he lies on the couch
“Then, how should I ask you?”
“It is true that I buried you, but do not blame me. Blame those who killed you.”
“It is no one’s fault but yours. All the blame is on you.”
“How that?” – Assos askes absent-eyed
“The same way there is no life without death, nor death without life, the same way there is no poet without poetry, no poetry without a poet. In other words, there is no Me without You…”
“And no Me without You”
Assos in the armchair nods affirmatively with a painful smile carved into his face. Assos on the couch lies observing the cigarette as it turns into ashes. The ash breaks and falls, as thus the snow – out of the blood-illuminated sky. Assos, knee deep in snow, stands on a meadow far up of any civilisation. It is night. The smell of coal and cold pierce through his nose.
Assos breaths in wistfully and falls to his knees. He chokes in tears as the blood flows out of his wrists tainting the snow scarlet. He gives off a frightful scream. That of an agonised creature. And the scream echoes into the distance, echoes into the dark night. And he screams again, and again he is observed by the other Assos.
“Do you understand now what it means to be an artist?” – Asks his alter ego
Assos observes him mutely sobbing in tears.
“That state that you are in right now, that is the true nature of the artist. To bleed in the darkness, as one’s screams are devoured by the same. For that the artist was created, and as such he shell depart form this world.” – His alter ego tells him with anger
“Exactly to avoid this pain… this suffering…” – Assos tries to respond, but his words are being lost – “That’s exactly why I buried you. So I would not have to go through all of this…”
“Because you thought that it would be better to die, then to have the whole world turn a deaf ear on you.”
“Yes. Yes, exactly because of that. I can’t take it anymore.” – Assos’ shoulders shook from all the crying
“Blake…”
Assos lifts his head observing his alter ego questioningly.
“A man of the eighteenth century who bled in darkness, without anyone hearing his cries. But in the end, his cries still found ears which they could kiss.”
“But I am not Blake. I am not stupid enough to waste my life in a futile act. What does he get from the fact that everyone knows his name today?”
“He doesn’t, but the world does. You are not Blake, and I should not die just because of that. An artist does not create so he could benefit from his work, but so that the world could benefit from it. Which world shall it be, the present or the future, is not for the artist to decide. For him it is to create, and only to create.” – Assos tries to respond, but his alter ego forestalls him – “The world you create remains forever in the collective consciousness, and you as its creator will live forever through that world, even thou you tasted death a long time ago.”
“I rather die now, then to spend the rest of my life in the subconscious of the collective consciousness.” - Assos opposes his alter ego
His alter ego responds: “The body burns off, but the heart continues to burn in the flames.”
And again Assos is Byron. And again he is on that beach. And again he hears the roaring of the sea, and again the bonfire illuminates the night. Byron observes the heart. It hypnotises him again. Byron slowly reaches for the heart, able to touch it this time. The bonfire collapses and the flames flare up into the sky. And in the sky, a red moon observes that tragic creature.
“To bleed alone in the darkness is a curse and a reward for the artist. An own hell, but an own paradise too. One which the reader can enjoy more than the writer himself. Am I not right, young Stephen?” – Asks the teacher looking at Assos with a gentle smile
“For the writer a hell, and for the reader a paradise. Of course, if the reader even exists. And if doesn’t, then neither exists the writer, nor the world. Only the bleeding, the hell and a shell (in the form of a human being) inside that hell do then exist.” – Assos replies to her
Someone puts a hand on Assos’ shulder, pressing it gently: “If there will be a reader or not, only time can tell. The artist’s duty is to confront himself with the storm of ignorance, and for his bravery he shall be rewarded.”
And again Assos is in the embrace of the fog. In front of him the grave, and in the grave he – his alter ego.
“I don’t want to resist. I can’t resist. Is death not a bigger bliss then the search for immortality which you might never reach?” – Assos asks now desperate, and his words mingle with the fog – become the fog
“The suffering in search of immortality is better than the life of an empty shell whose body will never rot.” – An answer out of the grave
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Welcome to ABCTales
Welcome to ABCTales ProjectAssos. Some great scene setting in this piece. Is it the beginning of something, or a one off?
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