Prophet Song

by Paul Lynch

We are both scientists, Eilish, we belong to a tradition but tradition is nothing more than what everyone can agree on – the scientists, the teachers, the institutions, if you change ownership of the institutions then you can change ownership of the facts, you can alter the structure of belief, what is agreed upon, that is what they are doing, Eilish, it is really quite simple, the NAP is trying to change what you and I call reality, they want to muddy it like water, if you say one thing is another thing and you say it enough times, then it must be so, and if you keep saying it over and over people accept it as true – this is an old idea, of course, it really is nothing new, but you’re watching it happen in your own time and not in a book.

The winter rain falls lush and cold, the passing days held numb within the rain so that it seems to mask time’s passing, each day giving to faceless day until the winter is at full bloom.

i beg your pardon?

Watching the light upon the beach, thinking, this time of light, how the days pass by gathering the light and releasing, light into night, and we reach but cannot touch nor take what passes, what seems to pass, time’s dream. And yet these days have given the snowdrops to bloom.

how melodramatic

A Garda prisoner van slows to the entrance but is given no room to pass, camera phones are pressed to the dark glass, a woman in her sixties beats on a window with the base of her fist as her handbag slides down her arm. A man in a rumpled business suit shouts hoarsely at the soldiers, take off your masks, what have you got to hide?

She turns watching the faces that surround her, the faces pained with the vertigo of staring into sudden abyss, all of these people the very same, every one of them clothed yet naked, sullied and pure, proud and shameful, disloyal and faithful, all of them brought here by love. Sooner or later pain becomes too great for fear and when the people’s fear has gone the regime will have to go.

She drops the clothes in the basket and looks down at her hands and does not know why she remains so calm, another door has been opened, she can see this now, it is as though she were looking out upon something she has been waiting for all her life, an atavism awakened in the blood, thinking, how many people across how many lifetimes have watched upon war bearing down on their home, watching and waiting for fate to come, entering into silent negotiation, whispering and then pleading, the mind anticipating all outcomes but for the spectre that cannot be directly looked at.

The news comes on and she turns it off shaking with rage, thinking, this is not the news, this is not the news at all, the news is the civilian watching the soldier outside her home as he lolls on a sandbag playing with his phone, the news is the assault rifle resting against the sandbag, it is the soldier’s laughing mouth, it is the fast-food wrappers and coffee cups strewn about the asphalt, it is the retired couple from up the street who have decided that they want to go, the news is their quarrel in the driveway, it is the woman flapping her hands about what cannot be taken in the car, it is the husband who shuts his face to his wife, it is the black bag the woman holds in her arms like a child, it is what is inside the bag, the news is the entire contents of the car, it is the boot the man has to sit closed, the news is the driveway gated for the last time, the house dark at night, it is the traffic light stuck on red for a week before it goes dark, it is the car that will not be allowed through the checkpoint, the news is the shrinking air on the streets, it is the shuttered shops, the windows ply-boarded, it is the hoarse dogs woofing throughout the night, it is the eldest son who does not call anymore because it’s too risky to call and nobody knows if he is dead or alive.

Why do I feel this way if he’s not dead? she says, why do I feel it in my chest all day, it’s there when I’m asleep, it’s there when I wake in the middle of the night, I feel as though something’s dying inside me, that’s what it is, I’m afraid that what’s dying inside me is the part of Daddy I hold in my heart, that’s what makes me so afraid, I want so very much to keep him in my heart but I don’t know how.

I think what I’m trying to say is that I used to believe in free will, if you had asked me before all this I would have told you I was free as a bird, but now I’m not so sure, now, I don’t see how free will is possible when you are caught up within such a monstrosity, one thing leads to another thing until the damn thing has its own momentum and there is nothing you can do, I can see now that what I thought of as freedom was really just struggle and that there was no freedom all along,

she sees her children delivered into a world of devotion and love and sees them damned to a world of terror, wishing for such a world to end, wishing for the world its destruction, and she looks at her infant son, this child who remains an innocent and she sees how she has fallen afoul of herself and grows aghast, seeing that out of terror comes pity and out of pity comes love and out of love the world can be redeemed again, and she can see that the world does not end, that it is vanity to think the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet raging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight, and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore,