We Know

We weren’t complete idiots, after all. We weren’t utter fools. We wanted something – craved something.

We knew something was Wrong, capital W. Vastly wrong. Magnificently Wrong. And that we were here to … to what?

 

We knew. And it was enough that we Knew. Enough that we held the knowledge in our feeling of utter doom. It was enough that we felt it. That we knew the Disaster.

 

We knew the Death. The Horror. We knew, somehow.

Was it intellect? Some instinct? Some temperament? Something indistinguishable from our severe personal problems? From the extent of our fuckedupness? From the depths of our twistedness? Of our convolutions? Twisted and bent into … whatever it is we were.

 

We’re the ones who Know. Even as Cicero only half knew.

Only stupidity could know. Only we could know, in our stupidity.

Stupidity’s an attunement. It’s a way we were disposed to experience things.

Somehow, stupidity plus philosophy. Stupidity multiplied by philosophy. Shot us ahead of Cicero in our knowledge of the world. We were prodigies, of a sort. Savants.

 

The endless end. The apocalypse forever. We lived it. We Knew it. In what we were. As what we were. In our very way of being. In everything we said and did.

We understood the Conditions. The Limits. We knew how it had to be, how it was going to be.

 

We Saw. We Felt. Even Io, who came to believe in God because of it. Even Sophia, who didn’t want to Know anything at all.

 

What Cicero could only approach from the outside. What she could only experience at a remove.

And you, Shiva, wanted to find a literary form for this. A way it could be written down.

 

Who else Knew? Who else Knew? Ian Curtis, maybe. Jandek, maybe.

Who Knows what we know? No one. Who else knows the full extent of the Destruction? Of the Disaster? No one but us. We’re the only ones. That’s what we’re for. That’s our role. To Know all this.