It’s a long road from dust to dust, and our restless hero, so often distracted by the next extraction, so quickly forgets. Besides, it’s not extraction, he would say, but acceptance of what is freely given––to those with the knowhow to harvest. And what fun, what wonder, what delight! And he’s not forgetting, not really, when there was nothing to remember in the first place, nothing he saw or knew beyond his shadow, how dramatically it would drape across the hills as the sun moved west, as if to affirm the fated nature of his progress, manifesting a destiny of unquestioned portent.
How often destruction looks like nothing more than the repetition of what is easy and familiar, especially with a hero onstage. How often the bodies long buried, though silent in their active vigil, are missed, such that if anyone were to ask about the presence of a place, an answer, if there were one, might be simply, nothing.
Not until it is dust again, or desert, will the dramatic music cue his memory back to what he always knew, himself at the center of so many adventures––and then to take his place in the most dramatic lighting, on the craggiest-looking rock it is still possible to sit on comfortably, elbows on knees and head in hands, to emit the hero’s cry, ragged with disbelief at such sudden and terrible misfortune.
