The Face Of

One day this world will have on it a face.

The face of a champion.

I wish I could say with you The face of a champion.

Not of someone defeated?  Could the world wear that face?

I wish I could say with you that it couldn’t.

The face of the defeated.

The face of the defeated.

At what was it beaten?

An old game.

Please, be more precise.

A terribly old and wicked game.

Oh, by that, I assume, you mean deception.

No, not deception, though your guess deserves silence.

What?

Silence.

…

…

So…the game, the terrible one, is not deception and nasty tricks?

Gamish though the world is here, it always knew it would be bested at that.

By whom?  By whom else but the world?

The gasp.

(Gasps, then gasps with laughter.)

But we are losing sight of what we were aiming for ourselves.

What (composing himself from his fit) may I ask, is that?

What the game is, the proper game where the world can lose?

Oh, yes!  For reminding me I thank you.

            So…it is not deception?

No, it is not deception; much older, much more painful and terrible.

What, then: my head is empty of sport!

Meditation.  And by that I mean the world tried, for a long time, an awfully long time, to harness its chaos.  But it couldn’t you see: after so long, so terribly long I cannot bother to even recount in paraphrase how long it was, it was ousted from the shrine surrounding it like breath by a gruesome possibility.

Now you have me impatiently wanting to remove every last blanket and mask from the face of the world, to uncover, if I could, if but for an instant, that face defeated in its meditative stance; I want to know how it looks and where it’s looking, what opposes it and how.

Then take off the last shroud, be impatient and rude as you wish, that shroud of deception, because with that talisman the world is capable of dissimulating at anything, even meditation and the struggle to meditate.  But true meditation, that is something else, something the world is long practiced in; you should catch a glimpse of the sides of its face now, now that you are lifting the final curtain; and true meditation can be defeated only by–

–Please, tell me, before I see the world’s face and cry!–

–confusion.  Thoroughgoing, awful-terrible, hard-won because it took so long to achieve, after all, confusion.  Utter and simple confusion.  The world shall have the look of confusion.

Huh?

Look–it does already.