Saga-city

I read those words now and I weep. How could I not? I should have known that the outcome would be ...... awful - I did not know just how awful: how cataclysmic. My eyes burn as I write this, salty tears course down my cheeks, my old wrinkled cheeks. I have seen things with these old rheumy eyes that I would not share with you but this I must share: you are entitled. You have earned this much. You have invested that much.

Did Gilbert himself know what was coming? I suspect that he may have done and if he did then he was a genuinely brave man. A hero for literature. A martyr for modernism and a paragon for postmodernism.

Did Papalazarou (for that , we now know, is (or was?) his full pronomon) know what was coming? We have to assume, from the eventuality, that he did. The evidence points that way. But if he did, then why would he have acted as he did? Bitten by the agenbite of inwit? There is a mystery there but one that we shall not unravel not untangle nor understand.

Could it be the case that both of them knew exactly how it would all turn out and still went ahead? A fatal fatalism? Perhaps it really was ineluctable. A renegade reality running on rails? And only those brutal buffers waiting for them at the terminus?

How prescient now seems Gilbert's recurring use of the word annihilation in recent days. How tragedic. How stoic and Zen-like the laissez faire of the Laz. A match, it was, fit for the sagas and eddas.

Enough though now of introspection and self recrimination. Too much procrastination. Enough prevarication. All that is left is to relate the "facts" as we know them, as they have come through to us as the ripples in time and space abate and the continuum stabilizes.


(to be continued ... )