Train whistles echo from north and south, the crying of infernal engines made lonely by domestication. Our metal children band the night, bind it pole to pole in seams of steel and stone, postlapsarian meridians: the moment dawn dares to cross, it is morning. How else would we know for sure? The sun - the obvious - is not enough.
We make these borders, draw these lines because we must: we live in bondage to our need to bind. But the dilemma, the bind of the tracks (the Wrong Side Of The Tracks and our fear that we are somehow there already) stalks the twin rails of myth and history.
A bonded man walks there too. He is not the only walker, but to him the shadowed ditches’ depths are starker, and he has peered beneath the sleepers. That’s not to say that he sees clearly ahead (the view is, after all, rather predictable), but he devours the periphery with a scavenger’s desperation. And when the train does come for him, the deafening roar, the blinding light - the obvious - is not enough.
The whistle feels much realer than the train, the suspicion of a feast much sweeter than the first bite, the thought of touching much more potent than the touch. The shackles of imagination, our most human gift, confine us to our own virtual universes.
8 billion strong, we dwell alone. But when the shadows on the cave wall are more vivid than their casters, who’s to say we’re suffering?
We are (if there is a “we”). We are because we say we are, and that’s just about all anyone can say about suffering: that it is realer than the lips that confess it, and that it does not exist. We only exist because long ago we convinced ourselves that we did, and that’s just about all anyone can say about history.
Memory, self, and history fade like train whistles into darkness.
But you and I, when our eyes first met, already knew all that.
We grinned like wolves and braced ourselves.
And then we whistled back.