PSPECIASTES
OR, THE PROGNOSTICATOR
All is inanityThe names of the wise
Pspec 2
I called out with the words from my own mouth for the bbnames of the wise, who would come in their time to ccilluminate the ways of men; and they were writ large for me on the wall of my cell; and they glowed like fire.
2And I read them with burning eyes, and in my vision I knew that all of them were ddinane, from the least to the most, without exception.
3I besought the names to give me laughter, but the eecomedians hid themselves inside the cabinet of ffDr. Caligari, and only ggthe imp of the perverse came forth, grinning with black mischief, to play hhcat and mouse with iicannibals and jjchristians.
4Thereupon kkI fled the house of mirth, and prayed the names for wisdom, lland knelt in dread of answered prayers.
5Then there aarose up bhollow men, who tipped their hats to show cbrain damage in the dburnt-out cases of their minds; they spoke, but their speech was as the ebeating of a tin drum inside a fbell jar, a muffled gecho from the hheart of darkness.
6I shrank back in fear, but the names massed into iarmies of the night and marched from somewhere jeast of Eden, tracking the sunset as it fled from kthis side of paradise to the lwasteland, where the mfour feathers visited a nplague upon the osanctuary.
7They fed the pnaked and the dead to the qlord of the flies; they put the rnatural on trial, and buried the fixer sin the penal colony.
8With tdark laughter, they uput out more flags to celebrate their vcrucible of whuman bondage; then they hunted down the xpainted bird and cursed it with the yfear of flying, until zall was quiet on the western front.
9I called upon the name of aaUlysses, who piloted a bbship of fools from the ccTropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, but the sea rose before us like a ddmagic mountain; the eesound and the fury of the ffwaves made us fear the ggcall of the wild, and turned our hopes of safe passage to the source into terror of the hhcruel sea.
10Then I cried out in my anguish, saying: O great names, you have failed me, for the heroes are all iidead souls, and their trumpets play nought but a few jjnotes from underground.
11And then my own mouth spoke back to me, saying: kk“Names are inane, as all things are inane, and all that you may rely upon is the constancy of inanity.
12“The day of the lllocust cannot wake mmFinnegan; the nnglass menagerie cannot hear the oocomplaint of Portnoy over the cacophony of ppcity life; the qqarrowsmith cannot rearm rrthe idiot who’s afraid of ssVirginia Woolf.
13“The ttdecline and fall of the house of Usher cannot ungrow the uugrapes of wrath; the vvdeath of a salesman cannot reinvigorate the wwdream life of Balso Snell; xxhomage to Catalonia cannot repair the broken battlements of yythe castle.
14zz“All my sons, and all of you who come after me, know that the names of the wise cannot save you, for the wise have covered your home with inanity, and aaayou can’t go home again.”
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Pspec 2 / 4