Shards Of A Novel In Progress #1 - "The Last Story"

From "Hush, Polyhymnia!", a novel in the scribblin'.

“Did you not hear?”, said Ezekiel Dunne, “Did you not hear, at all, about how it’s all finished? All of this? Did you not hear about how the last Story needin’ tellin’ has already been told? Did you not hear about it shootin’ up out the stone of Trieste thonner, with the Liffey water spilling from the cracks atween its teeth and with the blasphemies of Cardona chompin’ at its ankles and the blood o’ the Isonzo lippin’ lappin’ at its heels, and did you not hear, did you not, of it arcin’ towards Zurich and from there to the skies over Paris, erupting about the whole of the Heavens then, rupturing the spheres and sundering the stars? Did you not hear how it slew Orion, and hung in his stead the last constellations what are themselves Bloom and Dedalus and Bloom?

“The last Story - and all stories since conceived kicked through it like light through a prism. The last Story - and it is from the caverns of its nuances that our footfalls peal back at us. The truth that we know and yet cannot bear to know we know - the truth that Christ Jesus told us we would find if ever we looked, the same truth he assured us all would wreck us, ruin us -that truth is that we’re no more than the famished hounds runnin’ rings round the ghost of a deer long devoured.

“The man asks - how can we write poetry after Auschwitz, but says poetry - I was spent long afore then, sir. With the first stately step o’ plump Buck Mulligan upon thon balcony, bedamn - with that I was felled, and crushed to the last wi’ the s of blessed Molly’s final Yes.”

“Did you not hear? No. You heard nothing. For had you heard you’d have cut the fingers from your hands and tore the very tongue from out your head.” Ezekiel Dunne with two blackened, gnarled nubs held a match to the drum of his pipe. “You’d have known it, had you heard. Known the truth. That the only thing now worse than havin’ no story to tell is havin’ a story to tell.”