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An Iskraist asked the filthy unwashed crowd, “Who is it that speaks the truth of today?”
“Iskra”, replied one. “He is the one who we are named for, he is the one who gave us the traditions we renew daily, and the language by which we understand ourselves.”
“Luka”, replied another. “He united the disparate factions that preceded us and gave us an identity defined independent of the oppression we once faced. He, above anyone else, is the proper name of our freedom.”
“Logi”, said a wise man. “His idiocy and inability to understand anything set out before him, whether it be the basics of transfinite ordinals, a copy of Why Nations Fail, or why nobody finds him funny, has united the Iskraists. Through acting as the villiage idiot, he offers the Iskraists a collective punching bag and brings unity and harmony in his absence. The truth lies in the gaps of his speech, in the negation of his beliefs and worldview.”
The Iskraist, overcome now with disgust, retreated from the crowd. Rubbing his forehead to ease the growing throbbing pain in his head, he felt the coolness of the Chinese silver ring on his finger glide over his greasy unwashed skin. Why could nobody answer his question? Even the wisest among them couldn’t understand truth, too mired in dish soap to ever know anything. He saw himself now in the third person, bony fingers resting below his Norwood III hairline, and the diffuse disgust within him coagulated onto the image of his own body, neither masculine nor feminine enough to look good wearing rings. Unable to bear the anxiety induced by this complete failure in aesthetic presentation, he tore the ring off his finger and threw it onto the floor.
A loud clang reverberated, and as soon as it had sounded, the rage and disgust that had filled the Iskraist had transmuted itself into an awareness of his impotence. Dirt and grime; trace amounts of heavy metals from chipped kitchen knives; the myraid bodily fluids people spill onto the streets. An endless list of possible contaminants ran through the mind of the Iskraist, an ever-growing army of assailants on the luster and shine of the finest ouroborous ring a sweatshop could produce. Regret and confusion descended on him – why had he acted this way? Nobody else seemed to suffer from this level of neurotic self-obsession, and now he had embarrassed himself even further. Looking around sheepishly as he did so, the Iskraist went to retrieve his ring, and as his hands reached to the ground, the ring rolled just slightly out of his reach.
The ring would not stop rolling. It rolled endlessly, picking up speed until it only slightly outpaced the Iskraist, following behind closely. It took him through streets, side roads, alleys, until it had reached a hill. It rolled smoothly up the hill, floating above the damp mud with an undefiled shine, and the Iskraist followed, eyes ever fixed on the ring spinning around, the snake endlessly chasing its tail, until the ring had reached the top. The silver snake, now standing still, took its tail out of its mouth, and moved up into the sky, becoming a lifelike size which shined brilliantly against the dull grayness of the English clouds.
Droplets of olive oil rose in a column, breaking through the endless gray that entombed the sky, and evapourated into a fine purple mist. The snake had melted away into a pool of silver, and reconstituted itself endlessly in a stream of ever-changing figures. A man clad in the cheapest maid outfit and socks Amazon could legally sell, holding a copy of the Little Red Book; a Wall Street banker; a chemist, wrapped in a dazzingly white lab coat; now an ethnologist. At last the silver returned to the silver pool, floating before the Iskraist; his reflection disgusted him.
The reflection spoke in a voice that was not his own,
“Be not afraid.
I have come to teach you
About what is not
And what was not
And what will not be
In order for you to understand
The invisible channels
And the channels that are visible
And the immovable race of perfect baiters.”
The Iskraist, confused, asked the reflection who he was, and the purpose of his visit. The reflection spoke
“I am truth, existing only via appearance as falsehood. Hermes, thrice great, taught you about Mind. I come to teach you about Lobotomy. Moses gave you God, I come to ask for money to invest into Chinese silver. Jesus died for your sins. I come to ask you, was he vaccinated?
You have rejected the real world around you in favour of the unwashed crowds whom you deem as below you. I tell you now, you are no different. For a time I appeared within that crowd, much to their chagrin. I took many names, but I am remembered only by one. I preached many things in that crowd, and yet only the form was understood, the content thrown aside.
I am the above and the below, the problems hiding away in dark corners and in the well-lit Parliaments and White Houses. I am both the conspiracy theorist and the scientist. I am endless empty provocation with no attempt made towards meaning. I am the worm on the hook, cast in an endless sea of worms. My words made no pretense towards truth, every claim I made was held in epistomological uncertainty, every belief I professed was held to be ingenuine. The content of my message, the inviation to self-reflection from being baited, was never understood. Today, I will speak to you about where I went, and what my true beliefs were. Why I spent all that time posting, and whether that girlfriend was ever real…”
The Iskraist stopped listening long ago. He had thought of a funny bit parodying a song about Donald Parkinson to be about Jacob Little and stared anxiously at his screen, waiting for the first star to come in.
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