The Ouroboros Never Rests – 2011.07.23(b)

Kronos slowly swallows Thysia… As it has for over a century, so it will–indefinitely? Thysia, the town the Kronos Mine bore, peopled by the miners who sustain Kronos, the miners that Kronos sustains. If not for history, the telling of truth might be lost to the tailings of time: Thysia doesn’t stand in its first footprints. Indeed, over the over-a-century, it has been displaced at least once, is where it hadn’t been. And where it was–as it was–is no more, has been either excavated or entombed. Given another hundred, Thysia mightn’t be where it is, and where it is mightn’t be.

They are an ouroboros of treasure booms and busts; an amalgam ouroboros–Kronos heads the Thysia tail, and the miners course as blood; an ouroboros not of hopeful infinitude, but of insatiety, which is want, presumed need, and a grain of greed at least; an ouroboros likely to swallow itself to its tightest possible constriction… Then what?

Surtch Pherther straddled Escape Artist parked on a rise outside of town and safely opposite the Kronos tali while through Thysia sped a jacked pickup, its stereo blaring, “But it was not your fault, but mine. And it was your heart on the line. I really fucked it up this time. Didn’t I, my dear? Didn’t I, my dear?”

Surtch wanted to control time: not to usher its passing, for that would be unfair to others aboard this absurd conveyance, but to slow his own so that he could witness ad infinitum Kronos’s consumption. For witnesses, however broadly “witness” can be defined; witnesses not as judges; witnesses impartial and incorruptible… Dammit, there MUST be witnesses! Otherwise, there is no possible testimony.

There must be witnesses to the indications of the existence: of man, of florae and faunae, of the natural world and the unnatural, of the universe, of possible infinity, of possible God. There must be witnesses to the indications of the existence of existence. Otherwise, it’s as though nothing exists, as though nothing occurs. So, NO! HELL no! If a tree falls in a forest and no one’s around to hear it, it does NOT make a sound! In fact, without witnesses, the tree and its forest don’t exist!

The sun lowered on the drama, and Surtch turned over Escape Artist and rode off, returned to high desert Saxton for Chinese food and then to the Saxton Hotel for an amber ale, reclined on a warm and quiet twilit bench on the sidewalk for a slow cigar, retired to the tub in his room for a late, hot bath with a cold Guinness and then, finally, to bed for rest. Outside, Saxton was still; up the canyon, Thysia surely was still; but Kronos… Kronos was hungry, and slowly, ever so slowly, it continued to eat.