The Styx and the Rubicon

Steven Scricca

Originally Published in Inkspots-GCHS 2023

It has taken me some time to realize that I am you. John Cole*. An american child, raised by images and legends to realize his calling and talents, and just as his chest brims with light and energy, enraptured by a crystalline vocation, he finds his dreams are a century overripe. Yes I was nursed by Chomsky and not Gary Cooper, but we are, both of us, men out of time. ​

​

You dream of Wyatt Earp, I of Lenin, but who is more ridiculous? And what do we inherit? You are off to Mexico, I to the capitol; romantics in nature, eyes turned skywards and forwards with snakes afoot. We embark with unconvicted comrades, meet with enmity and violence, and we return alone, and we never return. Our past? We have no past. We have our fictions, and we have everyone else's to weigh them against. we must learn that it is not for us to inhabit the cameras and clamoring eyes, that we are of the few who race against the spirit of history and cannot break from its current. Yes, you fly backwards and I strain to drag sinister the rushing waters of the present, but neither of us have hopes for the quiet life ashore. We both of us know more than we seem to; but it is not for us to delight in knowledge. What is left? Bodies of fathers. The Styx and the Rubicon.

​

Bodies of fathers. Fathers which come apart inside, fathers which shrink in sunlight. The mother was never your own. It seems, though, that no one's mother is their own. The mother contains all the evil desperation of a whole life, and must choose to protect the child or herself. She always fails.

​

No one is known to us. Nothing is alien to us- how could it be? We are what is alien. There must be of course pass a chance, a single chance to know another soul, but the train doesn't stop at that station, and Jesus Christ is not walking through that door. What gets darker the more it's lit?

​

So we cross our rivers. They are not the same river, for you return empty handed, and I can cross mine but once. But for all we do, we will only ever serve to remind people of the better men before us.

​

​

*Of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses