A Sojourn Through the Conscience

A Sojourn Through the Conscience

September 25

Dear self,

Darkness, credulously I danced and frolicked about you in my youth. But in the waxing years of adulthood, your colours and limitedness proved to me to be of inutile service, and anon, I realized that your world was insufficient for a mind like my own. I sought truth, and you gave me doubt and laws of uncertainty in return, and doubly the inspiration hence had augmented into such magnitudes incapable of being sated by the common comprehensions of man.

Sir William Patrick

September 28

Dear self,

I feel passionately that there exists a light - an absolute truth - that if I could perchance discover the reality and meaning of self, this painful silence, this somnolent world that embraces me will bleakly dissipate, and the by-product, a new world synthesized: the true wholeness of reality, will be thenceforward revealed.

Sir William Patrick

I

Dear self,

I performed an experiment, a foray and sojourn through the conscience, an expedition within nuanced universes, dreams, terrors, and thought, hopeful of unveiling the cloud over the truth; the light. Prior these things, as with all new enthusiasms, there came to me an inspiration. I read an article published in a secluded magazine some seven days ago titled, ‘The Vistas of the Conscience’, by Dr. Arthur Hamlet - the singularity of the title alone was enough to goad and inspire my next decision to pore through the short work.

I won’t speak too garrulously about Hamlet’s genius (though the emeritus lad is deserving of a thorough examination), in this case, for the convenience of time, a brief and sound synopsis should suffice. Hamlet begins broken and distressed (his definition of the word makes my condition seem much more harmful!) as he had for many years sought an understanding of his inner self and the utter meaning of existence.

He prayed to the gods, but they foully ignored his genuine venerations. He researched and sought the sympathy and logic of doctors without and within his field, but like myself, was served the common pretence of understanding. Meditation then came to mind, the most ancient practice. Yielding success, he wrote that through this method alone can one find true meaning. But he found something else.

He claimed to have found a new world, what he called ‘the door’, that existed within his mind; plains of shape and startling colours, a balmy, yet insidious atmosphere through which he kindly floated; he beheld a prodigal panorama of indescribable vistas. He closes, disowning the experience and terming it an intense phantasmagoria which he will never forget, and warns practitioners of the dangers of the method. Hamlet, my dear friend. Mustn’t you know a discovery from a dream? A phantasm!

“But what if it wasn’t?” I contested thereafter, deliberating the imagery excellently depicted. “What if this vision was an alternate reality, a door to the sepulchres of lost memories, to meadows of dreams to come, and thoughts unperceived?” Immediately after this thought, I debated the course and method of expenditure, and forthwith, I began to practice.

Performed in an ordinary apartment room, I sat comfortably on the floor and began to deliberate the affairs of life, and gradually transitioned to the finding of ‘the door’ within. I meditated for hours a day without well-nigh success, but it was at the waxing hour of ennui on the seventh day, the duration’s end well-nigh, that I was abruptly transported to a fantastic phantasm, a swift dislodgement into immaterial vistas of super-existence. I was removed from all terrestrial understanding of the mind, placed rudely into a world that I was hapless and ignorant.

The world before me was surreal, and this surrealism had singular yet expected affects in magnitudes I’ve even now yet to comprehend. I saw forms of shapes, colours within colours, myriads of orchards and lustrous greens, and cascades of innumerable spectrums as I blithely glided through this strange place. Defenceless and benign and foreign, I was confound in awesome stupors at what I beheld: to explain in detail all that was in that place, it is unachievable in one sitting. This is all I have time to write. I will return to you tomorrow.

Sir William Patrick

II

Dear self,

At length, I floated on involuntarily through the colour replete walls of space, across vast orchards and shimmering rivers, and there came to me on a sudden a sense of endlessness to my venture, and though interminable suggestions persisted, there wasn’t, in my recollection, a sense of homogeneity to the space. I entered new and more intensely dreamy dimensions.

The feeling of an unbroken flight ebbed away when I was brought to a new world, a bleak and perturbingly amorphous space where no figure or shape dwelled. I floated towards a smooth place and neared it rapidly. Feeling an alleviation of pressure, I wriggled free and feel towards the ground. I landed awkwardly into a weird grey mire, fooled by the smooth and undisturbed surface. It was viscid and cold, and seemed to be slowly digesting me.

I managed under the fleeting inspiration and adrenaline incited by terror to crawl out of the malicious substance and onto solid ground a few dozen yards before me. It left no strange matter or residue upon my clothes. After recuperating, I assessed my position. I was presented with an interminable span of discouraging white, desert plains which bore alien cacti contoured with insidious inspiration and grass which sprouted stiffly in an intersperse.

No creature dwelled in these parts. No lizard, arthropod, no serpent, nor fowl of the sky. And if there were creatures about, they were in occult places, and were doubtfully abiding similar laws of beauty known by men. The land was desolate as far as I could tell - only myself – but I espied a long object in the distance, stretching across the horizon with a beckoning harshness. Without real enthusiasm I made it my point of interest.

I plodded across the macabre plains for an eternity until a terribly magnificent door drew well-nigh; the object in the horizon. The prodigality of its structure cannot be strenuously admired for no human has seen or felt such impeccable immensity as I had when gazing at the humungous frame. It could be seen in full detail from afar: large jolting carvings of uncannily chiselled creatures adorned its surface, a hallmark of alien craftsmanship, and a vague insidious quality tarried about the graven images. From my position, I was a few thousand kilometres away from its threshold, and yet beheld these things.

Anon, I came upon the massive entrance and discovered another but human appropriate door hinged at the threshold of the structure. Curious, I checked the permissibility, and it was unlocked, noiselessly swinging open and revealing unbroken night, a darkness so densely inked it began to escape - spider like appendages noiselessly creeping across the threshold. These things were doubtless mindboggling and produced in me a quality of terror I can’t define, though meanwhile, more the wilder, I acquired a riveting entity of curiosity and a hideous urgency to run into the blindness. The soundless ambience of the world beyond was uncannily beckoning, and as if goaded by a gentle ghost with a mellifluous chant, forthwith I threw myself into the unknown Abaddon, dashing abruptly in hysterics without reason beyond being led by some unintelligible decadent spirit.

Now, as I continued my fervid precipitate flight down into oblivion, I could feel a change in the air, and the deeper I ran the stranger and more salubrious the air became; the efficiency of the pituitary gland, the inner oculus as the old man had defined, was marvellously heightened, and subsequently the iris acquired a vague preternatural sight, and the pageant before me, a dimly lit golden ring, gained more clarity as I drew nigh.

An excitement beyond withholding stirred within me; a fever of enlightenment and well-nigh glory tried to ignite, to birth into its full capacity of infinite splendour, but was too feeble to reach the acme of exposition. I laughed uncontrollably in a hideous succession of demented hysteria; terrified of myself, and though I tried, I was incapable of ceasing the shattering screams of radical elation. I could feel myself falling now. Down, down into unknown.

The curious light below me, still feeble, flickered courageously. Then on a sudden, like the moon panning across the face of the sun, a brilliant, revealing light was given birth, and sliced wildly about the darkness, and all around me was thence revealed. I screamed, I screamed wildly with fervidity and terror I never knew I could produce. My shouting drowned in a profuse hellacious shriek, an ambience of preternatural sonic waves which pitched a frequency incomparable to anything extraneous to its indigenous realm. What I saw…

I’m not sure what to call them, if they were individual things, for they were infused within the sallow fleshy walls, reaching with putrid appendages; viscid, constricted fingers snaring my clothes as I precipitated through this hell. They were all baring an abominable, vindication; a daemonic face contorted with a malignity and shape only capable of being conjured and wrought from the inspiration of the devil. I’m unaware of how many there were; millions, billions? I fell through endlessness of torment which raided me from every side, chanting violently in an incomprehensible tongue.

“Narah, Narah, Narah, Sah. Sadah, Sadah, Muyo Mih!” They concerted, along with wicked laughs, sounds of torture, and orgies. I wanted to return to reality, a miraculous escape from the dream, but my precipitation continued, as well as the height of my fear, but in more prodigal levels of madness. I was mindlessly thrashing now, like a night-crawler shown the sun. Eventually, I was caught by the hive, and they snarled and gnashed at me, elongating their serpentine limbs with unfathomable celerity in expanding, and entangled me in their daemonic clutch, gradually constricting my frame.

“Narah, Narah, Narah, Sah!” They rejoined, “Sadah, Sadah, Muyo, Mih!”

And again, and again, until I was driven into insanity. I cried, I laughed, rejoiced hideously in an almost unrecognizable series of howls, and had found myself rejoining, “Narah, Narah, Narah, Sah! Yum Bi, Yum bi, Muyo Mih!” The hell began to shake, and bellow I saw another terrible thing. A huge devilish creature with premature horns and insidious, globular eyes protruding from a massive and amorphous head. His visage held the likeness of a satyr, but the nature and air was far from benign. He scaled the walls like a huge dragon, reaching my face within a few strides. He carried a damnable smell, having climbed from the unknown depths of the unfathomable crypt. He looked at me with equivocal intent. The monstrosities seizing me had ceased their invocations at the acme of his accent.

A foul grin furrowed in his loathsome expression, and he spoke terrifically, saying, “I am Narah! Thou have found me.” I was a helpless idiot, but his balmy, sonorous tone of voice partially revived me. He continued. “Thou have found thy self, mortal! Thou have discovered Zuthyung, one of many unfathomable, billion vistas beyond thou puny comprehension. I doubted thou from the moment I was assigned to thy egg in thy mother’s womb - I held thou with great pity. But at last, thou have found me!

“This is mine kingdom! Thou hast saw my palace; every shape and every color, every vista of unfathomable imagination, every orchard reaching beyond and before the rivers, and lustrous green, every iota, even that which inhabits the intricate interstices of mine world, all is commanded unto my authority. Thoust aren’t no trespasser, after all; in a sense it is your world too. But there can only be one king. I control the laws of this world, suspend them at mine disposal - I encourage even that which is extraneous - if granted approbation, even the cosmos will bend.”

Dazed, I muttered stupidly, I could feel a numbing sensation spread through my being. Narah frowned, taking my face softly into his hand, and said, “You are helplessly ignorant, all of you. Too ignorant to pity.” His mouth, suddenly agape with an amazing elasticity, revealed an effulgent ball of light. I revelled at the incredible capacity, and then all was suddenly night.

That is all I remember. I found myself on the floor of my apartment in severe tremors, a hideous state between an imbalance of body temperature and utter terror. I laid there until I recuperated. I can’t pen an exact duration – perhaps many days had passed, for I recall many moons ascending to its zenith and the horrifying touch of sunrises. No singular dreams or nightmares accosted me.

When I had come to my right mind, I was haggard and feeble - fear of dreaming deprived me of rest thus I haven’t ventured into to sleep; even the idea of closing my eyes seems ludicrous. The dreams and terrors that await me, of their nature I can only conjecture the morbidity and weirdness that’s accursed my mind, and even contemplating it my imagination is infantile to that of Narah’s.

What I experienced is terrible without a shadow of doubt. These things, the abominations of Zuthyung, and the terrible Narah, are doubtless minute in consequence when in comparison with the most essential theme. What did I find? And was it am intense phantasmagoria as Dr Hamlet had claimed? Or did I leap through time and space; suspended laws, and tore down the invisible walls which imprisons our minds to this limited peel of reality? No! I deem I’ve transcended the known world of the homunculus, the transcendental creature abiding our inherited cesspool we call our conscience and physical body! Darkness hasn’t me for a prisoner! I’ve discovered the true essence of mankind. The very thing that whispers evil at the height of our darkest contemplation, the thing that distils and poisons the human condition, responsible for avarice, sadism, vanity.

This knowledge, I admit, is unbearably frightening. This sort of catalyst leaves the beholder in an indispensable stupor from which no partial contemplation or solace could bring him back to his normal self; now, I know not what to think of the world, of these infinitely vast planes and the illusion they induce on the innately credulous human perception; what abominable, hideously sadistic engineer would mould humanity with an immutable curse whilst also knowing that mankind cannot conquer or eschew the inner terrors that swell within him?

I feel myself drifting from all reason, and I have been susceptible to fear and delusion. I am not prepared for what egregious themes lie in wait of me. If I continue to deprive myself of sleep, I’m sure to fall into insanity. If I fall asleep, an execrable doom awaits me at the end of this tunnel. What tortures me incessantly at night is the notion of immortality after death, and a life manacled to the pernicious dominion of Zuthyung.

Sir William Patrick