The White Road

memory of an old story

‘This world passes- or seems to pass- from moment to moment as an endless, beginningless water column of repetition. Newness is simply forgetfulness and novelty is a fever-born phantasm, life’s lost leader for the mind. There is nothing new under the sun, beyond the stars, between generation and dissolution, between the lights. What bangs, bounces, inflates, or rips is a mirage. What presents it is amnesia. What persists is the will. What does not persist is nothing at all.

But- every so often, once or twice in a hundred million aeons of a hundred million millennia, ever and anon- there appears a true miracle; a white road that runs in through the eddying current of life, counter-wise to the perpetual wheel of being and time. It shimmers briefly for the fortunate in the midst of this maelstrom of living, dying, forgetting, living, returning. This white road rises and leads to the centre of all things, where nothing is ever lost in memory, all is ever present, and the sore cycles are done with- forever.

But this is only a story; I heard it long ago when life was unwearied and newness seemed a constant blessing. I heard it then when the story’s promise of a place of unchanging fullness and peace had no appeal. The sun and my blood were warmer then, the air brighter, and sleep was just a burden of interruption. If the white road had appeared, I would have turned away and let it pass for another hundred million eternities. And not because I am, or I was (or ever could I be) extraordinary, but rather the very opposite. Where and when is the white road now? Where indeed, if ever it was, beyond the storyteller’s craft, beneath the heavy, whirling doom of dreams and time.

All will ever be water in a fathomless, wall-less womb.’