What lies hidden behind our great successes? What secret do they conceal? What hoax do they help to cover up? All these questions and more we have to ask. All these questions and more…
Our victories are mighty, no doubt about that. Our victories are always mighty. The sound of bugles is ringing in our ears. The triumphant din of the trumpeteer is never far off. How we love the triumphant din of the trumpeteer – we could quite easily bask in our glory all day long, from morning to night. We could bask in it 24/7. We don’t tire of glory too quickly you see, especially not when it’s our own. Definitely not when it’s our own.
That’s all well and good, that’s all well and good but we shouldn’t let that throw us off the scent! Indeed we shouldn’t. I speak here of the scent of rat. It’s easy to lose the scent of that sneaky old rat when the drums of success are beating so loudly. It’s the easiest thing in the world! Don’t let it happen though. Don’t let yourself lose that very important scent, don’t allow yourself to be hoodwinked and led up – once again – that old, old garden path.
No, my friends. Never let that happen. Inhale the scent of rat deeply as you can – savour it to the full extent which you are able. Exhale it slowly, luxuriantly, never losing its unique and intriguing tang. The rat is smelling especially fine this evening, is it not? You’ve never smelt that particular odour so strongly, so forthrightly. The air is redolent of rodent. Richly redundant of rodent, we might say.
Happy days have come and gone and now we’re back in the misery of it all. The solid, unrelenting misery which we all know so well. That extraordinary sense of anguish, so precariously pushed under the surface. Your trophies fall from your hands onto the floor and you leave them there, unregarded. They mean nothing to you anymore – they are crude, garish and inconsequential. They are symbols of your foolishness. They are trash from the Trash World, the purest effluence of Satan.
We can’t blame anyone but ourselves of course. We did it all ourselves – no one held a gun to our head, after all. No one made us do it. ‘Why did you make the unspeakably vile Trash World?’ they ask you, shaking their heads in sorrow, ‘what did you hope to gain from it?’ You don’t know what to say however. You have no answer – you are numb with shame. All you can do is rock back and forth, babbling away stupidly in the language that you yourself made-up. If you keep rocking back and forth and babbling nonsense you won’t have to contemplate the extent of your folly. You won’t have to think about the consequences of your folly.
Our successes are tremendous, are successes are legendary. A full account of them would run into too many volumes! The trumpeteers are trumpeting and the bugler is bugling. The town crier is crying for all he’s worth. He’s roaring his head off. You can barely hear yourself think; you’ve got a terrible headache and you desperately wish you could go somewhere quieter. People are stopping on the street to look at you; they notice you because of the odd expression on your face. You’re looking distinctly unwell.
No, my friend, the past has finally caught up with you. The past has finally caught up with you and it’s no good hoping to fob off the Lord of Death with your mumbled, incoherent excuses. Now that you look back on it, your whole life has been nothing more than an endless stream of mumbled and confused excuses. You found them all very satisfactory at the time of course. To be sure you did. You found them to be eminently satisfactory until the moment came when you actually had to look at them!
A howling supernatural gale has come upon you. Your frail, scrawny body is being blown this way and that. You’re flying in the face of that unearthly gale; it carries you off like so much chaff. What chance does a handful of chaff have in a hurricane, after all? What are the odds? The winds of karma have found you where you were hiding – you have been driven you out from your squalid refuge. You’ve never seen a wind like it – it’s not really a wind, it is your doom. Your successes count for nothing now, you see. Indeed they don’t.
