Nadacephalus & His Craft

The storyteller closed his eyes to make a dark. There it was again, hidden by eye-light and sights seen and moved among. A generative dark larger than the head that contained it. 

Waiting again—like he often had. 

What would a little time spent waiting cost him? 

There were many kinds of storytellers in this great and obscure tradition and as far as he had learned in his years of inhabiting and extending it, modestly, in his own fashion, some did not desire the dark nor need it. Some gathered stories into themselves through the eyes. He’d tried that approach himself initially; didn’t work for him. The news of the day, as much as the news of the past or the future, was already exhausted by editorialism. The dark in his head brightened, which is to say weakened, when he tossed the concerns of the day into it like so many pennies he hoped to drown in order to gain the consummation of wishes. Still, he had to bow at the flair and courage of storytellers who sought to outrun reality, arrive where it already waited for them. 

His path was less discernible; often he envied the clarity and abundance of territory available to news-chasers. Idiosyncratic, unpredictable, never springing from the same inspiration twice. This was his fate in gifts. It would be ungrateful to reject them or demand tailorings to suit some more desirable Weltanschauung. He could not will or choose; could not project the whereabouts of his arrivals. Patience was one of many requirements made on him by this crafting of his own personal allotment of dark-without-eyes. Not the patience of steady making (though there was that too; not initially, but merely after, once story-making was gathered and sent on its way), but a patience of ripening to fruition a nothing-to-say. 

An ageless, ignorant bardo—darkness born of consciousness within but beyond cognition. It was a story of its own, and had never been built or born, but had merely been discovered over time, effort after effort, trying to write lives into existence and failing. A dark that required an incremental estrangement from himself so he might become aware it’d always been there, generative and omniscient to his meager struggles to realize the person he was, survive as an adult in a world. It didn’t need him, he quickly realized, so could afford to be generous. It’s intentions remained unknowable and pure, because it demanded nothing in return for what it gave him. 

One day he would die, as others did—it assured him. He would leave it then or become it and off it would wander again, released from personhood, so it might select another for quiet, low-key possession. His kind were fewer than the many but no more valuable. Ontological wellsprings without mastery or purpose: ones who begin with what isn’t known yet or ever, or capable of rendering it less so. At least this is the feeling the dark fills him with, when he joins with it, fingers on keys on a laptop, pen in hand over blank paper. What he trails behind him, inching then rolling forward through a momentum he hadn’t forced to seize then carry him, though unforeseen had always been intended. Like a life in that way, unremarkable up close, uncanny from a distance. That it might easily have not existed, but did, might easily have not come to pass, but has. 

Here with this last sentence typed, eyes open and there lies threadings alive for the first time in hindsight. Wake up and read over who he isn’t, where he wasn’t. They're as much yours as his, undone by fulfillment so cast beyond it where it might not be found yet, or again.