Gnosis 1

"I think the Gnostics were right."

Standing on The Great Bridge beneath the umber sky, the eternal cold undying breeze caresses their faces.

"How so?"

Sandpaper on sandpaper the sound of their shoes as they turn their backs to the breeze, gaze for a while in mutual silence over the empty endless city.

"Is it ever warm here?"

"No." Silence. They look outward, across the expanse of the eternal city. "Somewhere out there is The Street of Books."

"A Library?"

"Yes... No... It's, The Street of Books. Someday... time... how, maybe we'll find ourselves there, then you'll understand."

"Ah." Silence, and the passing of may be time. "There should be trash you know. Blowing down the streets."

"If this were a place of the living."

"So you think we're dead?"

"No. But... Sometimes I wake up back in The World...."

"You what?"

"Wake up in the world. It may happen to you someday. I don't know. Like you woke up here, you'll wake up back there, suddenly, it may not be Earth, or even the time you left. But there will be people... Living things... Life... Warmth... a Sun in the sky."

"But you don't stay?"

"No. There are things I have to do. And I do them. And then I return here."

"The Church got rid of Purgatory years ago, I wonder if this is limbo."

"I doubt it."

Both smile.

"The Gnostics?"

"The world was a mistake."

"What?"

"There was an emanation from Being, the real, the eternal and timeless...."

"God?"

"Not as you understand it. Wisdom made a mistake, and gave birth to a deformed, blind, psychotic being, and that evil being created the world of men."

"That's not what I was taught in sunday school."

The man who is not a priest laughs.

"That's because the Gnostics lost the war..." Quietly, to himself, "and so did Yeshuah." Quiet again, the breeze whispers for a moment, picks up a little to moan softly around the form of The Bridge. "There are some people, not all, just some, who have a spark of the divine wisdom, spirit, something...

"Soul?"

"No, it's not a soul, at least not like you're thinking. And the thing, the mistake... one of the names for it is The Demiurge... anyway, The Demiurge trapped spirit within bodies of flesh. Separated fragments, sparks, of the spirit from wisdom and the great Being."

"And these sparks, their task is to...?"

"Remember."

"Remember?"

"Remember."