MUTSA

Act I: Ozymandias

The arc breaks. The prairie wind blows, carrying on its back dishonest men’s earnest sweat. It is an unforgiving summer, a dying season like no other. Between surviving and surviving, there is little space for longing or rest. The crops cannot be coaxed into maturity, the water bites with metallic poisons, the air is heavy and choking and upset. The horizon’s end stands before me, here at the end of everything. We once were people, with names and lusts and fears and regard. I am besieged with the ever-present dull ache of remembrance, this ancient reflex that is all that remains to a once-people who now simply survive and survive. The pattern unravels. The days grow longer and still, the wind hisses at me, whispering of my nothingness. I take another swig of poison water from the hollowed skull of the one I would have once called father, before this time of devastation. There are no beasts, no birds, no bugs, no one else left to fight the coming end. Not that this can be called a fight. Someday, the rot will consume us too. I must go now – I have tarried too long in contemplation. This is not a place for thinking. This is not a place, but an end – the arc breaks.

I ride the wings of calamity. I am the oncoming storm, the final exhale. I am burning, screaming, writhing in the fiery passions of my disregard. They pray to me. They offer me their sons and daughters, appealing to a mercy that offends me. I will remember them for their shrieks and their wails and their shanty structures and their meagre harvests. From her, I will claim an arm. From them, their eyes. They think me vengeful but that cannot be further from the truth. This is love. Throughout heaven and earth, I am the final embrace, the everlasting ember, the killing adoration. I care not for survival, for faith, for glory or peace – I am pressure itself. I am what comes next and last, until the fervor in my being would consume even me. I cannot wait.

Act II: The Gunslinger

The herald returns. Hunched and marked, he approaches. A murder precedes him, silent and purposeful in the desert sky. They are his vanguard, an omen of sudden and unwelcome change. He plods along the ocean sands, leaving neither footprint nor smile in his wake, only pain – that is his reward. There is much to say and much to do. The light fades and still, he proceeds, afraid of what he might do if he loses momentum. He has run away before, retreating into the bosom of the world as part of his meaningless stand against destiny. He has torn into the fruit of the world and has found it to be sweet and trite. He sought love and good cheer and found himself on the doorstep of despair. As reality crumbled, he thought to rest in the belly of the whale, to abandon duty in the name of freedom, and still Nineveh called to him. He is bound by chains, paraded by a murder of crows that fly toward the end of the world with neither angst nor hesitancy. And he approaches.

“ I denied myself nothing my eyes desired;
I refused my heart no pleasure.
My heart took delight in all my labor,
and this was the reward for all my toil.
Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun.”
~ Ecclesiastes Chapter 2 Verses 10-11

“Above, the stars were unwinking, also constant. Suns and worlds by the million. Dizzying constellations, cold fire in every primary hue. As he watched, the sky washed from violet to ebony. A meteor etched a brief, spectacular arc below Old Mother and winked out. The fire threw strange shadows as the devil-grass burned its slow way down into new patterns—not ideograms but a straightforward crisscross vaguely frightening in its own no-nonsense surety. He had laid his fuel in a pattern that was not artful but only workable. It spoke of blacks and whites. It spoke of a man who might straighten bad pictures in strange hotel rooms. The fire burned its steady, slow flame, and phantoms danced in its incandescent core. The gunslinger did not see. The two patterns, art and craft, were welded together as he slept. The wind moaned, a witch with cancer in her belly. Every now and then a perverse downdraft would make the smoke whirl and puff toward him and he breathed some of it in. It built dreams in the same way that a small irritant may build a pearl in an oyster. The gunslinger occasionally moaned with the wind. The stars were as indifferent to this as they were to wars, crucifixions, resurrections. This also would have pleased him.”
~ Stephen Ling (The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger)

Act III: A New Hope

Act IV: Muad’Dib

I am the culmination of generations. I am time itself, the metronome of existence, the echo in the void that extends beyond the soul. I oscillate between life and death, skating on a weathered precipice. I am power and its principalities. I am vengeance. I feed on mountains and shame. I clutch the handle of a knife whose blade is wet with the blood of my brother. I am buoyed by the life and death of those who claim to love me. I am every moment, superimposed and ever-cascading. I represent the structures I rebel against. I am a never-ending song. I am a party. I am a funeral. I am a beaming supernova. I am the pain I carry and the joy I hoard. I am the desert and the ocean and the heaving earth. I am you, incomplete and marvelous. I am the rock and the mist and the betrayer. I am the herald, a witness to creation.
I am the stall, and I have returned.

“They’ll call me Muad’Dib, ‘The One Who Points the Way’.”
~ Frank Herbert (Dune)