Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, vol. 3

Against Odds Against

AGAINST ODDS AGAINST There's nothing you can do, After Life, to stanch the passage of time, or the wrack it leavesbehind, a wound for which all tourniquets areuseless. Everyone is forced to navigate the river of the dead alone. It's futile to excisea good twelve-hundred pound prize steer in offering (from the herd rented at $10 a head even when theyjust grazed while Hawks was dying for RainValley to stop living up to its name so he could get Red River shot before the cast mutinied) to Pluto—who in this inferno restrains tri-sexual Geryon on a leash of tricyclics..., or an empire builder like Tom Dunson, Matthew Garth's foster father. There is no getting the better of a beast who when you yell "go fuck yourself" just asks for its hands to be unclasped; and never a way to escape the brackish waters of backed-up Cocytos, the infamous Danae and the all-too-famous Sisyphus: thanks to one concise, timelyessay by twenty-nine year old Albert Camus. Maybe pushing a boulder uphill forever isn't quite as onerous when the wind is your father? There are more things on earth than making the best of the worst. 19 Wage war on war? Why not? So long as everything comes to nothing. And the wave-roar grows hoarse from breaking the news to the deluded multitudes who go on "wishing and hoping and hoping and dreaming ..." for Miracle Incorporated to rid the sirocco of the germs it strews cruelly, indifferently, on everyone open to the wind, from tower-hidden kings to ragged beggars. All that you have loved best will fall away. The land you worked. The house youbuilt. The wife you loved. (The immense tenderness that grew between you.) Alone, the invidious cypress will cast shadows on your harvest's golden glow; then in no time at all it will be time to set the field on fire: so the grain can die. Why are time's prisoners in their meager tenure on earth so often inured to the giant strides that occurred in the quality of life while they lived. Take heart that someone like yourselfonly— (dare I sayit?)—more ... evolved .. . will depart the site where your physical body decomposes underneath the humped mound, determined to alter future legislation as regards cremation. He knows what wines are ready to be opened and where they are within the labyrinthine 20 cellar and, jangling the keys, descends. Rest content. Youwere an experiment. To what end "man is only beginning" to glean a direction. (after Horace, Odes, Book II, 14) 21 ...