I Know His Name

Time passes for me in this body. I age and change. Stories I left off telling years ago still exist in my memory, or worse, in printed words. Or more than printed words--I have committed worlds into the digital realm, the code (for which my native English is the simple cypher) backed up on servers and disks and drives, some of them wildly independent of my intentions. A name I have not spoken aloud in years, and which belongs to nothing more than a shadow in my head, may suddenly resurface with great insistence, breathing an air in time to my own respiration.

I am thinking about the Jester tonight. That great and mysterious figure, that guardian of the tube that connects my soul to my corporeal body--maybe the gatekeeper of all my secrets, all my power. To my other phantoms, my little protagonists and villains, he is a kind of god. Only a very few have seen that wild grin's ebb and flow, or heard the dire jingling of the bells on the cap. Fewer still have stood in the Jester's Court and witnessed the sad, mad, strange shape of the Green Jester (oddly named, for he wears both red and green at once) sitting upon his crystal throne.

If anyone has the keys, it is the Jester. If anyone knows the road, or the places where it all began and will end, it is the Jester.

And I wonder, will I someday be 100 years old, a well-worn and well worn-out house of living flesh, closing my eyes and looking into his painted-on mask. Will I see my own face staring back, the smooth model from which this disintegrating form was cast? It truly doesn't matter. The Jester is chaos one moment, and placid chaos the next. His spirit is the one I channel when I make a piece of art, when I conduct a faith-rite of my own devising, when I talk to myself in solitude.

When I feel the urge to tear it all down and build from scratch, that is the blood of the Jester running high in me. When I succumb to the need to dash every rule upon the floor, and dance it down into sand for the wind to whisk away... well, that is also the great Fool's aspect flowing through my skin, and I do not regret his passion. He is, after all, the part of me that is most alive, and the only part which holds back death.