The History of Writing (III.)

 "Sisyphus, I have warned thou: I will no longer entertain thine appeals!" 

"My dear Queen," he continued, minding each word to carefully avoid conjunctive terms that would certainly prompt her outrage, (lovely as he sometimes found it...) "My dear Queen, I promise ye, thou shalt hear no appeal from my tongue. I desire solely to report a finding from my recent journey." 

"Finding, Sisyphus?! What queer or foul discovery does thou wish to torment my ear and fragile psyche with today? What new deviant behaviour have the humans imagined for themselves?" 

"Persephone, Sweet Persephone, brace thy venerable nerves and muscle, for what I say is neither rumor nor gossip and my heart trembles with cowardly fear at your disbelief: The humans are searching the millennial ruins for that supposed Cup of Christ." 

She withdrew in her hostility toward Sisyphus. Proselytizer of a faith that hardly requires agreement anymore than Cosmological Genesis required permission to violently generate itself, there was no lying in Sisyphus, through childhood and every [?] rebirth to the place of humans, the once-Greek (who walked among the Franks and eventually the Algerians and Americans) sought only the beauty of compositions and the natural facts they engendered and while the profound depths of his own anatomy were eclipsed by their own obviousness, he'd hardwon the reputation of truth-teller in cases as dire as these in spite of his storied past colored in mischief and debauchery and harmless self-indulgence. "Proceed, Sisyphus." 

"Oh, proceed they surely do," he said and noted her demure amusement. "They stalk out from the safe confines of their own cities, forcing their path into every hill and mountain and valley and crevice, through all manner of grief and burden, adding to the score of death in unprecedented numbers. Fondling those sickly ornaments about their necks, clueless to the disgusting irony..." 

She listened in mute appall. 

"They call His bloodsoaked name with every breath they can muster and slaughter those who deny it. They preach Kindness and Harmony through this century and the next while trampling the entirety of it under boots of fear and undeniable shame...." 

He continued for some minutes and Persephone did not interrupt. 

Rapt in the cold desensitization of her own vanishing will, Persephone felt herself delivered equally to gratitude and horror as the ethereal nomad concluded his desperate account to her. 

"Okay," she said. (The word paused him.) "Return to your dorm, [o]ld [p]rince. Be like a benevolent ape in a dense jungle and sleep as though warmly nestled in the womb for a thousand years." 

He obliged her, and like Lot in reverse, liberated Persephone of form in his turning away and he went to opaquely dream of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. 

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