Volume XI, Issue II, Spring 2018

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THE AGONIST
A Sage Approaches
A Creative Reinterpretation of The Madman, [125] GS.
Alec Ontiveros
[342]
A Sage ApproachesThere I see it happening in the dark moonlight, just
now as the sun begins to rise again from its valley, a sage solemnly walks into
the town. Few remain awake—except for the thief and the jester commiserating
with each other beneath the old clock tower—that garrulous relic of the golden
age, built proud with its byzantine facade that only seemed to obscure its
labyrinthine interior—that cold truth that time is bottomless and thus it is in all
ways unbecoming. From the shadow of this truth emerges the sage, asking
peacefully, “What is time? Do you know what is time?” As the jester did not
long to know the hour any longer, for time is only confusion, it was confusion
that wrang out, “Perhaps it is just past midnight, for I somehow feel the urge to
do this all over again.” Through a sieve of reason, the thief aptly rhymes,
“Morning sun, if midnight is past felt, the day is now dealt, your first conscious
memory, will be time’s soliloquy, it is One.” Gleeful by the easiness of having
believed a transvaluation occurred, the sage rests calmly next to the
companions.
“Why have you emerged from the night, do you not know that god is
dead?” the jester cries out, unsettled by the cold brought by the sage’s arrival.
“There are no morning sacraments for you to declare, all that is left to till from
the earth is that which falls off, unrooted in its accelerating spin, for with no
god any longer the earth is not fixed to itself, for nothing holds it back from
accelerating to its end, for we have nothing left to confirm, you and your
wisdom, perhaps, arrived too late,” the thief promptly chants. “Too late? I
thought you said that time is One!” reflected the sage. “One?” the thief said, no
longer hiding behind the guise of stolen phrases. For which the pride of the
jester so gallantly emerged, “I have heard this statement before, that time is
One, I have heard it so many different ways that I almost forgot what it means,
the ‘new’ historicists used to say before the moment arrived when god was
killed, the wise and the pious all agreed, that there was only one time, but now
we know that to be an illocutionary fable, you surely have arrived far too late!”
Immediately the statement vanished within itself for at that moment the
clock bellowed as it called again the bells of midnight, and with it the thief and
the jester began to kneel before the sage, for they too far strung from the