Or the Ogre that ate the Owl

I   Once upon a time, there was a political animal with horns and cloven hoofs, an ass’s head and an elephant’s ass.  He lived alternately in a cave or a hole in the ground.  He was a homely sort, this lad, his physical exterior matching his interior mind, a walking scowl that frightened children and distempered owls.  He was so unpopular that he despaired of succeeding in the normal way and finally, as last resort, alerted by a vulture friend of his of some renown, he went to petition the great Stone Mountain for advice.  He made goatish obeisance to the grey, stony faced behemoth as he approached.
    “Oh great and mighty Stone, oh Granite Grandiosity, what’s truth and why am I so accursed and alone?”
   “You have a need to be needed and a wish to be liked that is repugnant to those who are likeable and well liked on their own.”
   “But who doesn’t want to be liked?”
    “Everyone, it’s true, but you must earn it by not seeking it.  And you my ugly little friend have impediments to popularity.  You believe the wrong things, look the wrong way and are out of temper with your times.  Besides, you are not a nice guy.”
    “Thanks, oh so Great and Stony One, but I already know all too well the symptoms of my malaise, I just need you to tell me what to do to make them go away.”
    “You have two choices.  One, soften and be kinder and more selfless.  Don’t despair of what others may think, don’t care of outcomes as long as what you do is just and fair, believe what you will and do what you must and remain true to yourself.  This will slowly earn respect and invite attention because people will wonder what inner sense of strength you have that accounts for the serenity you possess. They will seek you out not for your looks or despite your faults, but because you transcend your limits and have grown beyond them.  By then you’ll have nurtured a certain capacity that will bring you many friends and secured for you maximum success on a level that is true to your capacity regardless of any perceived infirmity.  But whatever else may occur, you must be moral and strong, brave when challenged, honest when asked, forgiving when wronged, tolerant when pressed and wise above all.”
    “Sounds hard and extreme and long term.  That must be long term and hard.  Haven’t you anything easier I can do, a short cut to the back door?”
    “There is a second way that begins long before the other takes hold.  First, you feign you don’t care what others think while doing all you can do to manipulate events around you insure your own advantage against them.  You continue to believe what you do now without reform and whether wrong or right do exactly as you will.  But you must be cleverer than you are today, and pretend to help and care for others merely as a ruse, to misdirect attention and disguise your true prejudice within and bring all the advantages back to you.  With this in mind always say the opposite of what you really intend, look for opportunity to enhance your own prestige and, above all, work to convince others that homeliness is beauty and beauty not good.”  
    “Good is bad and bad is good!  How can I possibly go about that business?”
    “By the acquisition of power and control and unjust advantage ruthlessly employed to purely selfish ends.”
“But, I repeat my requestion, how do I get power and control over all the rest.”
    “Division, my boy, simply put!  Division is sublime, extremely good.  It is the fastest way to power we possess.  You begin by finding an enemy, preferably one much less strong than you and ideally weaker and heartily disliked by everyone else.  Then you invent a general threat against the public good and pretend to see it personified in and emanating from this witless twit.  You claim that this nonentity and his ilk are out to steal all the money or defile everyone’s daughter or are morally impure or mentally unfit or any combination of these, whatever they may be, as long as you impugn to the culprits very harmful things too vaguely put forward to ever be disproven.  Always work from small to large and exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate their harm; execrate the innocent to monstrousness and castigate each and every one of them in turn in context with all the rest.  Then you cover with ignominy all their acts and condemn with repetition and implication and ridicule their wives, their lives and each and every detail of every little thing they do.”
    “Well, I guess I see how I might be able to do that.  It’s foreign to my good nature and benign temperament but, in fact, there are several people who have tried to be kind to me in the past.  This puzzles me, because if I would never help another why should they wish to be of help to me?  I’m suspicious of why they would do that, so I am suspicious of everything they do and their implied superiority.  To me, such kindness and tolerance only shows to me my low and outcast qualities and brings all my hideous life into higher relief.  And precisely because I know they know they are so much better than me, I’ve slowly come to loathe them especially.”
    “Ah, a bitter manifestation of hate is always a prerequisite for a candidate for division as a means to power to create.  Insecurity is always the first necessary component to create a world of domination through divide and conquest.  Hate and fear are the indispensable handmaidens of subjugation.  People who are predisposed to see people kind enough to try to help as weaklings or to judge their tolerance as insincere, or see their honesty as falsity and their generosity as guile, are perfectly attuned for the fundamentals of the  type of policies of which we are speaking here.  People who imagine everyone else as capable of the awful things they know they are capable of themselves will always act first and think later in order to try to beat them to it and do unto others before they may be done to themselves.  This is the golden rule of fools.”
    “Well, I’ll try then my exalted Lord of the Stone.  Thank you awfully for your help.  May I return again for advice from time to time?  I am not certain I will be able to get this to work, though I will try my best to achieve the worst of what you suggest.”
    “Sure, why not, by all means return, I have nothing but time and nothing to hide.  Besides I see something of myself in you, something special I deem.  I am always here for all to see, needless to say, for I am the rock of the age and I abide here for all of time.”

II  The political animal had a little trepidation as he didn’t really know what he was going to do with all this solid information, but when he arrived at the village he was immediately approached by some of these do-gooders that he hoped to heap his derision and roundly defame.  There they were, helping poor people not able to fend and feed themselves.  He recoiled in disgust as he always did.   What weakness on both sides, he privately thought, both from those who gave and those who got.  It was unholy ground where need and plenty met.  Some of these good folks greeted the ogre pleasantly but he ignored them, sneering. Instead, seeing a group of ordinary prosperous people walking by averting their eyes from the ugly poverty around them (and ignoring him as usual), he began to speak loudly so all could hear.  
    “Get away from me do-gooders, get thee behind me.  You are stealing from these good people here passing by and diminishing the importance of their hard work by giving it away free to these filthy poor.”  
   With these few words, sure as a net, the passers-by were transfixed and as he caught their attention he stepped over near this group of people and continued in a hoarse whisper. For in truth, he was the original hoarse whisperer. 
   “Don’t you see what’s going on here, friends?  Do you think this sight doesn’t concern you?  Tell me, do any of you have any problems in life, any concerns any uncertainties, any strifes, any gripes?  Any problem whatsoever or where or heretofore or therefore?  If you do stand here and listen to me.”
    They looked at each other and after a questioning moment passed between them, seemed to concur that, yes, as a matter of factuality they all did have certain hidden insecurities and gripes in life, and moved closer to better hear. “How do you know of all our internal concerns,” they inquired of the political animal.
    “Because, as I have discovered the root causes of all your fears, I hold the key to their solution.  It’s these indigent people here and these indignantly nice people there helping them.  Think this activity doesn’t concern you?  Think again.  Just a private display of public good?  No way, this is a trick, a fraud and an abomination.  Where do you think this generosity and kindness comes from?  Out of your pockets, that’s where. Who do you think it harms?  Only the entire nation.  Their miserable kindness speaks to their guilt.  Their honesty is fabricated lies.  Their alleged moral strength comes at the expense of our material weakness.  They are a standing affront to the selfishness of the rest of us. We must rise up against the niceties of niceness they peddle if we are to be a strong people again and if we are to be virile women and men, we must begrudge them this their charity.  We must banish this mutual moral weakness, as sinful as prostitutes, of need and generosity from out our midst, and curse the illicit ground on which these people meet and tryst. To need and receive, to get or give, is like a double murder on our way of life.  I tell you we must first learn to be mean to be nice.  This is the truer kindness.  Kindness is the purest weakness and oldest vice. We must be far tougher than this.”
    He overrode the murmurings and mumblings in the restive crowd which accompanied this tirade, by raising his voice and continuing with his next argument.
    “I swear to you, friends, we must learn to hate again if we are to truly love.  We must hate, not the people, for that would be wrong.  It is not them but their differences from us we detest.  We must despise everything about these people we don’t like until they become just as hollow and hard hearted as us.  If we eliminate the poor people from our concern then we will have eliminated them, as far as we are concerned, from the world of our minds.  I insist they only exist because we are weak and acknowledge their existence.  For our purposes of selfishness and greed, acknowledgement of the problem is the problem.  It’s better and easier, coincidentally, to keep our money and mercy to ourselves and leave them to all their weak-kneed needs and condemn the cruelty of all their insufferable charity.”
    This was such a novel idea that there was murmuring in the crowd.  Then someone among the good people spoke up.  “But isn’t the best way to eliminate poverty is cure its source and alleviate its effects?”
    “No, that’s just what they want you to believe and think.  They are dissemblers and liars.  Poverty is their strength.  Impoverishment is voluntary and preferred by those who are poor.  We must punish them for it and make it worse so they will grow tired of being poor and desire to work hard and grow rich.”
    “You mean we must attack the effects of poverty by making the poor poorer?”
    “Yes, exactly.”
    “But didn’t you just say that we were not wealthy because of the poor?  How can both these things be held true?”
    “Precisely because these do-gooders here give all your money to the poor, that’s how.  They are draining the treasury of all the money that taxes take from you.  The root cause of all the grief in the world is that the poor are becoming too rich for their own good by impoverishing the rest of us to our detriment.  These churchy do-gooders are enablers of the poor and it’s a fact that without their good work the poor would soon disappear from the world.”
    “I don’t suppose it matters to you that everything you have just said is complete rubbish?” asked one of the exasperated bystanders who had run across demagogues like this political ogre before.  “No?  Somehow I thought not.  For actually when analyzed the money redirected to the benefit of the poor is not only of disproportionate benefit to society but is actually a tiny, miniscule, even shameless and embarrassingly small proportion of our national wealth as it is. And who has ever accused the well to do of such an excess of generosity that they would be impoverishing themselves?  Besides if poor people were actually acquiring too much money against all our knowledge and against our will, how could they still be poor?  Doesn’t wealth preclude and cure the poor of poverty?  I mean seriously, by definition, how can this even be possible, what you suggest?  Don’t your own predictions contain unbridgeable contradictions?  How can it be then, that unbeknownst to all we here, that poor people are secretly rich and rich people secretly poor?”
    “See, here’s what I mean, people, illustrated graphically.  This is exactly the kind of worthless doubletalk scam and plays on words these people thrive on.  They blind us with facts, figures, ethics, numbers, intelligence and twenty-five dollar words.  But we know what we know subliminally.  We know that these impoverished people are geniuses at taking and hoarding the money the rest of us work so hard for.  And we know that do-gooders like this are the ones that help them do it.  These are just a bunch of insufferably lazy wretches portending to be poor to disguise how immorally rich they are getting at our expense.  They are the real hoarders. There is a method to their sadness. They are immoral and weak and the root cause of all the problems and insecurities that are threatening the health and well being of the nation.”
    This was all too much for some of the compassionate few who felt compelled to chime in, “But this is ridiculous, thin, contemptuously counterintuitive to all the logic and truth that has ever been.  Throughout history the richest hoard and the poor are forced to scrape along after them looking for scraps and room and board.”
    “There you see it again, these are exactly the lies that the secretly prosperous poor want you to believe in.  How long are you going to assault the freedoms and right thinking of these good, middlingly well to do people here with your cynical disinformation?  It’s easy for you to attack the poor helpless rich people isn’t it?  That’s their entire diabolical scheme.  What an easy target these weak and wealthy are though, the minority rich, living high on the hog, misunderstood, powerless to resist the hoards of poor hoarding people and their intrepid helpers, these pseudo good women and men.  
   “No, listen to me, it’s not the wealthy we need fear, they are truly generous and good, but the unhealthily stealthy intentions of this rolling indigency, the poor and weak willed, they’re the ones who are guilty of the crime of poverty, hunger and ill health.  It’s the sheer discipline of their alleged penury that should really frighten you and leave you in awe.  They’re like insects and mice that continually multiply and breed despite our continual tries at the extermination of the disease they are spreading through society.  I beg you, please, note how even with all their accumulated wealth how uncommonly careful they are never to flaunt it or even spend it on themselves.  Is this not proof of consciousness of guilt?  This is not a coincidence, it is a conspiracy.  Imagine if you had all their money, wouldn’t you spend some of it on yourself?  You don’t see the well to do reluctant to share their wealth with the rest of you do you by spending it on themselves? The wealthy unconsciously spend their money on themselves extravagantly.  They are free of the very guilt and complicity that drives the poor to hide their wealth, afraid to spend their millions on themselves, for all to see.
   “The poor are mad geniuses, see?  Nobody could be as accidentally poor as they pretend to be, except intentionally.  That’s what makes them so divisive, duplicitous, contentious, furtive and unpatriotic and turns each and every one of them into every honest person’s sworn enemy.  Even with all their money, each of them having so much more than you and me, they choose to still live in squalor in perpetuity.  I call this infamy.  Have you ever seen anyone so dangerously driven to undercut the values that have made our society what it’s come to be?  Don’t fall for these insidious beliefs, we must rise up and unite in insurrection against the tyranny of the power of the poor if we are to ever again be free.” 
    “Besides,” up someone else piped, “as proof of this, wasn’t there an infamous story once about one or two poor people actually gaming the system to receive more money from the state than they should have received?   Poverty kings or welfare queens or something, weren’t they called?”
    “Yes, yes that’s right,” someone from this same class of semi-prosperity shouted, “I knew there was something nagging at me but I couldn’t put my finger on it until you mentioned it.  This proves it, if proof you need.  It’s a wrap.  If there is one example of theft there must be many and if one is proved then they must all be guilty.  They are all cut of one cloth swath, all cheaters, lay-abouts and liars and theives.  I knew it.  Here they are taking our money, hoarding our wealth, drying up capital that keeps us all from being as rich as we’d like.  It’s true, what the political animal is saying.  That’s it, the poor really are too rich.  Why didn’t we ever before see this?  Well, oh wise ogre that once ate the owl, oh Prophet of Profits, what should we do about them now?”
    “First, obviously, we must give less and deny more to the poor. Instead we’ll take those resources that the poor and do-gooders have been storing and hoarding surreptitiously and donate them to the wealthiest among us because they are the ones who have been infamously libeled by all these do-gooders for all these eons for their greed.  Because they are the ones with the most to gain in an economic free for all, they are the ones who have lost the most by being deprived of all the wealth they would have otherwise obtained by all this misguided societal generosity.  So, it’s only fair, I’m sure you’ll agree, to confiscate both bread and money from the poor and lard it on the rich liberally as we please.  Because, don’t you see, they’re the ones who are blessed by the Almighty.  Why else do you think they’ve deserved to be so well born and perfectly bred, it’s because they are the most deserving, just like they’ve always said.”
    “You mean people like us, don’t you?”  One of the moderately well off spoke up, optimistically enough, because the ogre hadn’t mentioned his group at all.
    “Uh, yes, uh, perhaps, I wouldn’t deny it in public.  It’s possible that it might work out that way, and you may benefit too.  We’ll have to see.  But the main thing is to stop the rise of the rich poor and give it to the poor rich.  Otherwise the world is in imbalance and disharmony, and that is the root cause of all our angst, this is what I truly believe.”
     To the political animal’s large surprise, the crowd actually murmured their approval at this wild pack of lies.  Many people had started to set up and take notice of him, especially those who were likely to profit the most from his demagoguery.  But even those who were only moderately well off, and believe it or not, some who were actually themselves poor, being insecure and afraid of asking for too much more than they deserved, became masochistically subservient to this strange man.  They seemed hardly aware that pandering to the worst instincts of the crowd would invariably eventually leave them impoverished too.  
    The true inner beauty of the plan was its collective ease.  It asked nothing hard of anyone who followed it but only that they actively choose to wallow in prejudice and greed.  They didn’t need to improve themselves or worry about helping others or deprive themselves of necessities or even be kind and sweet and yet were promised that their avarice would be rewarded exponentially and the only truth and need which they needed to achieve this was their own heightened ability to hate and discriminate.  And, of course, as was the ogre’s ogrish plan, by the time they figured it out it would already be too late.
   By turning political partisanship to prejudice the political animal turned politics to a stark and vivid  animus.  Soon this ogre with his novel, share the wealth only among the wealthy plan, was the most famous politician in the land. As his most avid supporters were quite lushly larded with a great deal of disposable income this worked out quite nicely for the apish ogre, as he found himself invited to all the most stylish parties and finest clubs.  He was suddenly awash in cash and the temporary toast of a certain segment of society that had previously shunned him as a beast.  He was so impressed with himself and his sudden success, he couldn’t wait to get back to the Great Rocky Mountain to report his triumph and thank it for its sagacious advice.

III  “Oh, High and Mighty Master of shale and igneous, your Highness of lofty peak and tor,” he began his spiel with real feeling, “you who I humbly beg and implore.  I am your slave and servant.  I wanted to humbly come to tell you what wonders your advice has wrought in my miserable existence.  I can’t begin to tell you how well your advice worked for me. I did everything you said and I was decisively divisive and collegially ill bred and it worked like a charm on a nest of snakes.”
    “Yes, it’s a tried and true path to quick success.  It is a variant on the old adage, “where there’s smoke there must be fire,” except in this case the more you shout and scream you the more adherents you acquire, because no one can ever believe that you would cry so loudly and persistently, only for a disingenuous opportunity for greed.  Therefore they believe the cause you espouse must be dire.”
    “I know, the scam is absolutely magical.  The wonder is that more don’t do this.  Apparently they don’t know the secret you have imparted to me. Even the do-gooders who knew everything I said was a lie were slow to react.  To them the simple argument of the poor having too much money was too absurd and bizarre to be maintained.  They have grown so arrogant with the truth that they just passively assumed everyone must be as smart as they think they are and would soon see through all the errant nonsense I was sputtering.”
   “Yes, that’s the trouble with mild and temperate and fair people, tending to books and contemplation, they’ve grown too weak for a bad fight.  They assume everyone will be as fair and reasonable and reluctant to argumentation as they are.  This is the advantage of lies over truth and demagoguery over logic. The intelligentsia confidently believes that the truth will arise like a magic wand on its own and wave away lies like a bad dream.” 
   “Boy were they ever wrong.”
    “Yes, it’s sad but quite true.  It’s not intelligence that’s eternal as they believe but ignorance is the bedrock of the world lying just beneath the surface of civilization.  It’s that that mankind reverts to whenever the chance presents itself, in the form of a clarion charlatan like you.  Knowledge is the baton of life, it must be passed and relearned anew every generation, or risk that the eternal race against ignorance will be lost. It cannot exist in a vacuum, it must be sold and defended as vigorously as any lie if it is to survive.”
    “Still oh mighty Stone Face of rock unhewn, it’s hard to blame them entirely I was awfully good at telling them a pack of lies.  I know now it works, but I still don’t quite see how.  How can so many people pretend to believe such a patent lie?” 
    “Yes, from what I heard of your exploits you did well.  You grasped the core fact of the well known enigma that the bigger a lie is the harder it is disprove.  A lie must be big enough to reside comfortably inside and from the middle of it an adherent to it should not be able to see either end or through it to the other side.  Of course, it works especially well when it plays to the prejudices and self interests of the masses.  And here is the heart of the matter.  To succeed, a big lie must turn the whole system of existing thought and meandering belief upside down and inside out. In its place a new complex system must be erected complete with new terminology and a new verve and feel, combining both the pseudo literacy of phony erudition with the crudest degree of hate mongering and unnamed fears, while making extravagant promises and damning all who disagree.  
   “This will succeed due to its comprehensiveness which allows no internal contradiction to its irrational convictions where a shallower system is more easily disproven.  Therefore, the statements that the poor are too rich and the rich are too poor; or the poor and weak are conniving bullies while the wealthy helpless are mild and meek; or that innocence is devious and power innocent and put upon; or kindness is mean and meanness really kind; all these can make perfect sense to a truly delusional believer only when they presented as whole not just of a piece. 
   “And faith, faith fits shocking well with corrupt politics and is surprisingly easy to transfer to greed and self-interest, personal superiority and flat out stupidity.  Because you need your followers to suspend the questioning faculty of their consciences and subserviently follow their leaders like sheep to their own slaughter.  Faith, where faith is blind, and the time is right, is so abstract that it may mold itself comfortably to absurdity of almost any kind.”
   The political animal went back to the village reenergized, thinking he had the key to domination in his pocket.  The Rock had convinced him that he was on the right path and doing precisely the right things to secure his immortality.
    But then he began to run into trouble.  Seeking to increase his domination even further and achieve greater penetration and expand his advantages beyond the point where they could be increased, he began to overplay his hand.  He had fallen in love with the rush of energy and sense of power and innate satisfaction that the constant creation of divisions provides its adherents. But since all his former enemies had already been vanquished, to expand his power further he found he had to begin to seek divisions among his former supporters and friends.  
   Shocked at this turnaround in fortune for them, when his believers didn’t all immediately fall in line, he began to abuse them verbally too, and claim they weren’t true believers in all he was trying to do.  In a technique tried and true he tried to overtly set them against themselves.
    But rather than acquiesce, they began to murmur at this and then rebel.  Every sign of insolence so enraged him, so addicted to the power of division had he become, that it only encouraged him to crack down harder. And the more he tried to control his followers the more, knowing only one way, he kept trying to divide and subdivide and then divide even more.  Employing all his tricks, all his menacing words and threats, for all his fearful exertions in the end he only succeeded in uniting everyone against himself.  
   Eventually, in the classic mistake of those who generate power through division, he had started to divide into his own base.  What once was firm support underfoot became filled with crags and crevasses, fractures, fissures and splits.
    At last, only a step ahead of the mob that was coming after him to string him up, he tried to sneak away from the town at night.  He didn’t succeed.  They hung him up on the tallest tree.  Thus concluded the true tyrant’s typical trajectory.

 IV  He came to, as if from a deep sleep, very confused on the same cliff where the Great Stone lived.  Seeing the Mighty Rock he threw himself on the ground at the very foot of the imposing rock face reaching high above him.  Oh Master, I don’t understand how I got here.  Thank god I’m alive.  It was like a horrible dream. I have failed, I did exactly what I had done before, what you told me to do, but it still ended in horror for me.”
    “No, I told you nothing.  You chose what to do yourself.  I gave you options and you picked the one that appealed to you as I knew you would.  In fact, I hate to be the one to tell you that that was no dream, this is.  You are as dead as dead can be.  Still, I couldn’t be more pleased.  Come stand up and let me get a look at you.  No, not there, move over to the north, this way, yes, fine just a little bit more.  There, there, perfect, that’ll work just fine.  Just as I suspected.”
    “But hey, I don’t understand what you mean.  My life is ruined, ended prematurely and ignominiously, why are you pleased?  Uh, wait a second, hold on, I seem to be stuck.  I can’t move.  My legs are numb, now my arms are weak. What is happening to me?”
    “You have succeeded marvelously at what you sought, that’s what.  You aren’t the first to believe what you wanted to believe and turned what you wanted into a false prophecy. We are material beings who through leavening our material needs with spirituality, progress to higher understanding.  But you, you have achieved precisely what you wanted, perfect materiality.  You have made a mockery of your life.  You have so freed your actions of all sense of human kindness and compassion and humanity that your soul has starved itself of its spiritual nourishment. By consuming yourself in the pursuit of crass material pleasures and vengeance, your true animating spirit, whatever circulation of blood of life surrounds our souls, has slowly atrophied and withered and wasted away, and turned your heart to stone.  
   “Congratulations, your material desire has won out over heart and mind that combined constitute soul.  Since our spirituality is all that separates us from pure materiality, you will return to the dust from which you have come and to which you have always really aspired. 
   “You see, each human has a spark of divinity inspired, we call soul.  This is the pilot light which shines through the darkness of life and directs us the long way home.  How you exist on earth determines whether this glow augments or is dying, is in surfeit or deficit, and totals up either its worldly diminishment or how it has grown.  You stand in forfeit, so empty and material that the pilot light’s gone out, extinguished.  You’ve regressed from an animate being to an inanimate stone.”
   “But no that can’t be.  There are others worse than me… It’s not as if I… I’m not as bad as this, I…”  But it was with increasing difficult that he was able to get these last words out, garbled, as if he were speaking with rocks in his mouth.  “Oh Great Stone tell me what this means.  My tongue is growing thick, my eyelids are heavy as lead and I can barely hear you when you speak?”  These were the last words he ever said. 
   “Yes. You are growing deaf and dumb so I will be brief.  It’s true what you said, there are others who have been worse.  And in the grand scheme of things, a stone is not the worst thing you could become.  It has its own nobility.  Look at me.  Murders, rapists, terrorists, are worse, and they become the decaying stuff, the scum, the serpents and insects that live under rocks like us.
   “So slowly you will turn to granite like me, my son.  You won’t be able to speak, you have squandered that ability with your untruths.   That is reserved for old foot soldiers, unrepentant, disreputable stones like me that can impart truth to pebbles like you.  Would you be surprised to know I was once like you?  I too, rejected the glory of life for its fleeting reflections, that evaporate like the dew in the morning sun.  For my lack of spirit and circumspection I have resided as this mountain for an eon.  Real souls rise alone and above us like clouds drift above the sea, pure beings, seeking harmony.  We who choose the lower roads stay below and live out our afterlives as inanimately as stones.
   “This may seem bleak to you now, but you can do me a service.  I have placed you where I have because there was a slight earth tremor a few years back that caused a small avalanche where you are.  I needed a new stone to grow here to keep the northern cold from off my back as I continue to grow old.  As soon as I saw you I thought you just might be thick enough at life to fit the spot.  I thank you for that.  And thank god for fools like you, you are the sediment of the future, the ground on which future generations will stand.  Ignorance is the true structure of the material world and the matter of the universe is composed of nothing more than failed souls.
And that was that. Though he could no longer speak the animals in the region were temporarily startled, though it was faint to human ears, to hear one last heavy groan from the ogre that shook the foundation of the world after which the dead silence of the stones returned.