WHERE I PRESENT MY FASCINATION WITH THE ARCANE





At last, I can describe my momentous discovery to the world. If I do not survive this experience, let it be known that I became lost, not through not daring, not through a lack of courage, but by daring too much. Truly has it been said that certain kinds of knowledge are best left buried, and if unearthed, handled with the utmost delicacy, at times not even whispered to oneself, and managed with the greatest sensitivity within the secret chambers of the self. There is a weapon that can decimate humans but leave physical structures untouched. Even more deadly is the release of energies within the mind that are more than it can bear.

But then, is it not the blood of the martyrs of the quest for knowledge that waters the tree of aspiration? If Mungo Park had not died in the effort to map the course of the Niger, would we then have been able to navigate the waters hidden in the depths of the jungle? If he had not died from the infestations of dreadful insects as he sought that prize, who would have done it? The natives who washed in those waters? Perhaps. But the blood of the explorer made progress quicker.

Yes. I make these allusions because my present predicament, a predicament that emerges from the burden of eagerly sought but dreadfully weighty knowledge, comes from my researches into what was hitherto known as the Dark Continent. In polite speech, it is no longer so referred to but I have learnt that that appellation is no idle one, and its aptness will not dissipate, regardless of how much we wish it away. Yes, that continent, the land mass from which the Leakeys claim that the first humans emerged from, truly is dark. Why? It is dark because it is one of the few places on earth where one may still encounter the authentic unknown and the truly unknowable, not the unfortunate remainder of what is not yet known, but that which transgresses human categories of what is understood to exist, or even to be a possibility of existence. Most other parts of the world have succumbed to the clearing of the earth which is understood as modern civilisation. But in that truly dark land, darkness echoed by the blackness of most of its people, a form of existence is still possible which suggests that there is more to this world than is suspected elsewhere, that the possibilities of existence present here are but whispers in other places or seen as demented dreams

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