Conversations with An Echo by Constantine Gochis

Here we all are in the middle of purported or real pandemics and the quiet and civilized outrage of people protesting real, and imagined, evils, both, and looters who likely claim no particular allegiance except themselves. It is all very discouraging, to be certain. And it might even engender considerations of the meaning of life, when meaning seems horribly elusive, as it does right now, as it has for eons before. My late father, gone from this earth over twelve years, would probably be locked and loaded in this very apartment, were he still here. And he might be writing another short story like this one as he tried to deal with another series of life's tragedies. I post this entry full of my own sense of despair at the actions of a depraved, probably sociopathic police officer, who was no doubt protected by his union, and watch the well prepared idle young breaking into stores and taking essential items like digital screens, and cool shoes, and sporting goods--all of this, in my unimportant opinion, orchestrated by those powerful people hiding in the shadows looking for complete and utter control over your life and mine. 

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"Tell me a riddle," you said.

"Life's a riddle."

"That's a platitude. Life is predictable, repetitious. One has only to look backward to see the future.  How's that for an echo?"

"Those are words.  Give me evidence, from life, from literature, from anyplace.  Don't continue to be a redundant sound."

"To begin with, there are no insoluable riddles.  Oedipus did it in a trice.  'What is it,' she asked, as she straddled the road, 'that crawls on all fours in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?''

"Who said that and what is the answer? Before you reply, what's black and white and read all over?"
"Very funny. Laugh this off. The Sphinx, the 'throttler'--that is the meaning of her title, killed herself when the simplicity of her query was solved."

"It is the inevitability of every man.  He crawls in the morning of his birth, walks upright at noon, in the illusion that he has something to do, or say, then in the evening of his stay leans wearily on a cane.  Afterwards it is night, forever."

"It is more complex than that.  There is a spirit, a mind that can say no to Divinity, though many varieties of hell are threateed as consequence, or kneel in the simplicity of a need to believe."

"An ancient stole Fire from the gods.  Though chained to a rock for arrogance, he suffered an Eagle to gnaw at his entrails with great patience.  Such was his faith.  Such was the love of another, who allowed His eternal Substance to be nailed to a tree.  Bounce that off the cavern walls."

"There are no 'Eternal substances'  Another literary fiction.  This is the arrogance of the species which cannot abide his non-meaning.  He did take the original Fire and used it to make tools.  Of course he was 'created' and by an Infinite Power, therefore he too is divine, uniq"ue, in a universe of lifeless masses and congealed atoms.  Even his God needs him.  Who else is there to gather in the holy edifices, the pantheons and bring him tribute and obeisance.  The temples of mutual adoration."

"Pure cynicism.  You know the origin of that word--dog like, contemptuous.  It is the dinner conversation of a deposed Lucifer, a Devil of make-believe urbanity, of denial of life. Man has made tools that can propel him into the beginning of time, and immortality, yes, perhaps to fifteen billion years ago, when it was, "In the beginning.'"

"And back into an eternity of nothingness.  He has thirty thousand tools each of which can obliterate a world.  Man has a flaw, a gene that bars his entry into the Eden of his creation.  He is not only a
creator but a destroyer."

"Yes, this is so. He has made and will again make pyres against his fellows.  He has been seared, consumed, in that stolen Promethean but it is out of the ashes that he is fated to arise a Phoenix."

"But the fire that burns in his soul is in the music of Bach, and the Pietas of Michaelangelo, of creations out of stone that cry out for just a little spark to make them animate, a life force inherent in that little blade of grass that seeks the sun out of that little crack in an unwary concrete sidewalk. 

And a gene is only a gene."