The Landscape of Thought

The Landscape of Thought

	The dust settles and there lies naught but desolation.  The madman bumbles as the dribble slides down His chin.  What once was a beautiful landscape is now but an afterthought, a bleak wasteland.

	Clouds clear and the rain cedes, He squints at the sun shattering the cloud cover and vision soon adjusts to the new levels of lucidity.  This odd place, this dreamscape, holding every one of His thoughts, past and future, manifests what it holds in the piercing moment passing from dark to light.  Every thought of His precedent lies here, at the landscape of thought.
	From the Surveyors arose this landscape in which He now lives.  What seems epochs ago, an action too rebellious came about from within Him, leading to that burning, blasphemous action that the Surveyors felt to be a step too far from their direction.  So this land they developed, and His thoughts never lay safe from secrecy again.  To entertain His thoughts as one may in relative boredom or exhaustion would be to relinquish the Surveyors upon His thoughts in the landscape so that they could review the true intent behind the personification of his thought whilst He awaits, caged.  So He lays in a mind-numbing throb of thoughtlessness to avoid reprimanding.  This thoughtlessness is not in the selfish sense, but in the literal absence of thought.  He does not sleep either, for to sleep would be to impose dreams, the true embodiment of the subconscious, outlandish and absurd.  He can not risk imprisonment for something as trivial as sleep.
	Self-conditioning so thorough is the origin of His mental absence; an absence so scrupulous even His name is not of remembrance.  Within this place, the throes of unforgiving woe, the Surveyors have left Him unkempt until necessary studies conclude, as his auditory has led Him to hear.  “But what studies?  What torturous and unbeneficial studies can create this impending sorrow?  If the worth of human passion does not secure a sound enough reason not to commit these ‘studies,’ then what will really happen to me when they conclude?”  At the start of the landscape, thoughts and queries such as these were never absent from His mind, and dubiously, the price for this was paid.  Each thought occurrence ends in imprisonment until investigation of the thought ends.  Lo, this imprisonment is much worse than the landscape; for in the landscape, there is evidence of past thought, a break of land on the foggy horizon.  Imprisonment is to be barred with the cold and grey, the end of the incarceration is signaled when the grey breaks.
	Such as today, the sun shatters the grey and elucidates the landscape.  Past thoughts, dreams of what may come, personifications of animalistic instincts, all from the past; all becomes vivid in the sunlight.

	Pacing, pacing, it’s all that He does.  As mindless and depleted as the ground His feet imprint upon.  He ganders at DMT induced dream-thoughts that passed before His oath of thoughtlessness and sleeplessness: the misshapen vehicles, in twist but not in total.  As if they were beasts with one leg longer than the other, these vehicles drive not forward, but in circle.
Birds squabble before Him.  With only one wing, the remaining wing is too weak to thrust from the ground.  Attempt after attempt—always ending in disappointment—the birds flop over into the dirt, their wings becoming all the more grimy.  The unfathomable joy that arises in the second of flight, with plight striking terror into the formerly elated hearts. This moment of ecstasy in flight—unthwarted—is the sole of the single winged creatures’ existence.  Countless trial and error; immeasurable mishap.  Distraught, the birds squabble and grow short-tempered; battles between the overzealous alpha males erupt at the drop of a feather.  He passes their fights and wanders on to other regions of the landscape.

The brief notion of escape flutters through His mind—imprisoned man jumping from a wall, shattering the bars, slipping through maximum security—breaching his thoughtless plight.  Moments pass, Surveyors arrive, due punishment comes forth.  Clouds cover, colour comes colourless, and the cage closes in on Him as the metamorphosis from mindless freeman to incarcerated embodiment of wrongdoing transpires.
Bittersweet.  It is only in this place where He can think without unheeding punishment, for he is already receiving the punishment.  The cage does not personify the thoughts, thoughts solely but flicker in the shabby lighting of a mind trained not to think.  Unbound by the confines of the landscape’s conspicuousness, He is free to think.
Discipline pays, the wondrous glow of thought-process gifts Him as the rain soaks Him.  Questions race.  Pondering His life before the landscape.  Wishing to be out of the cage.  Albeit caged thought it is thought nonetheless, and this is the only success he has seen of hiding His thoughts from the Surveyors.  The sole “flaw” of the landscape is where He now resides, but this freedom was not in the strictest sense of the word.  Pleasure comes with price.  Distasteful colourblindness and a freezing, soaking wet accompanies the euphoric bliss of His contemplation.
He thinks with every brain cell that the mind can access.  He thinks of sorrow, of passion, of instinct, of logic, of pain, of pleasure; things that would surely have Him imprisoned until the end of days if they became real through the landscape.  He attempts to think of life before the landscape, not His childhood, adolescence, but of the years, months, minutes, seconds before the landscape.  The action too unsightly that landed him in the landscape is absent from His memory, no trace of recollection in His mind vague enough to dramatically play it out in the forefront of His memory as if it were happening at that very moment.  He spans the entirety of his memory, unfolding past Christmases, happy events, tragedies befallen to Him before the landscape, and then neatly folding them back up and placing them back where they were found.  The cloth of His memory is stained with the foul liquid that the Surveyors have poured upon it; the stain of the landscape’s torturous plague of thoughtlessness rests like a brand upon the brain.
Time drags on, progressing more slowly as the end of the sentence nears.  Though His thoughts serve as viable entertainment, the mind can only dance so far away from the brutal realities of the cold and harsh cage, when the body battles the unpleasantries that it is faced with.  Shivers rattle His body as He curls into a ball, sopping wet, as patiently awaits the end to this catastrophe.  Must this leash strangle His neck so?  When will thought come at no price, when will surveillance of thought vanish?  Torment rages in His terror stricken mind as He attempts to think once again, but thoughts of warmth are rained upon, frozen, and the sole thought dancing in His mind is a prayer for warmth.

Ceding rain, obliterating sunshine, constricting pupils adjusting to the light—the confinement is over.  Off to pace in the warmth of the landscape.  The landscape is his friend after the rains of confinement fall off of the horizon, for it restricts thought but not comfort.  He loves the landscape; it protects the nonintellectual side of Him in that there is an almost purgatorial quality of life about it: neither physical pain nor pleasure resides in this place.  Raw emotion with no thought to follow it—as He has conditioned Himself to do—radiates about him, and the colors of the landscape and the colors of all within it brighten.  In the glow of His affection, the landscape becomes a surreal homage to psychadelica with its vivid display of fluorescence and the spectacular hallucinations within the objects that emit acidic imagery.
He paces once again, looking over what lies in the landscape.  The more recent thoughts in the east, the older in the west.  West He heads.  Pacing, pacing.  Onward He goes, but lo the ground gives way and in post of the fall He becomes unconscious because the fall is unbearably far.

Dazed.  Dark.  He looks about and sees the innards of the massive hole in the landscape that He has fallen into.  He sees the slight slope, not too steep to climb.  He climbs, pulls himself up on the ledge.  Out of the hole, a choice is begotten: leave the hole exposed, where the Surveyors will certainly see it; or leave it hidden, creating a region of secrecy.  Will the Surveyors see?  They only seem to attend to new things, and this hole is too desolate and far to the West to have been seen for ages.  He paces further west, the ground behind him without fissure or chasm of any sort.
Time later (there is no specific number of days or minutes because the landscape has no realistic tracking devices of time) He returns to the hole.  Could it possibly hide thoughts?  He climbs inside the hole, and thinks of a rock, then leaves.  Unsure as to His success, He returns but a moment later, in His absence the rock pictured in His mind appeared in the centre of the hole.  He waits, wondering how soon until the Surveyors come to provide punishment.  Minutes pass and there is no response whatsoever.
Secrecy has been discovered.

He goes to this place, beneath the landscape, to think, since there are no repercussions for thought in the hole. The darkness of the hole serves as no problem, for the thought of needing a light engenders some unknown light source within moments.  Utopian in the upmost, His hole has become the highlight of His life.  There is nobody watching, just Him and silence in the plethoric self-indulgence and pleasure of freedom.  Every thought personifies only by choice beneath the landscape, not by default as is with the landscape.  But here, beneath the landscape, He coddles Himself with every conceivable delight.  Returning frequently, His time in the landscape decreases evermore by the day.

Time later, the hole progresses to become commonplace to Him.  What was once the cream of His crop has browned and wilted, fading to normality.  There needs to be something new, something exciting and revitalizing.  He needs a project.

He has found it, the thing He shall work on whilst underneath the landscape: He shall scour His mind for reasons why He has been thrust into the landscape.
The more He thinks while underneath the landscape, the more He remembers of what put him there in the landscape.  Snippets of memory fall into place as He pieces together the magnanimous puzzle.  There was great tragedy, death of a close one, happiness when there should have been shame, violence, sadness, fingers pointed, guilt, then the sentence.  What could these mean?
He dives deeper into His memory, finding fewer yet more significant morsels of information.  She is the one who died.  The violence was on His part, animalistic and savage.  Pleas of insanity.  But what more?  There has to be something more.  He thinks, thinks, thinks, but nothing else does He find.

Dazed.  Dark.  He wonders where He is.
A jolt surges through His body and He realizes that He has fallen asleep inside the hole.  The Surveyors have not seen a trace of Him all day; they must be out searching for Him.  Should He stay and risk His secrecy?  Should He go out to the landscape and risk questioning?  He stays, because to be inquired upon would require thinking, the act that (at least in regards to the Surveyors) almost always leads to confinement.  The urge to piece together the actions that transgressed before the appearance of the landscape strikes Him more fervently in his fear of the Surveyors, so investigation of the faded image of His memory furthers.
Screams, the death was not of natural causes, fear of being discovered, a horrible secret masked by public displays of sadness.  What could it be?  But He asks this of Himself in vain, for He knows all too well now that it was indeed Him who killed Her.

Dazed.  Dark secrets hidden in his memory that He never would wish to learn have come forth, heralding the sorrowful response to this dissonant truth.  He attempts to distance Himself from the horrendous thought but every time He tries to escape, the truth imposes all the more strongly.  Liquid sorrow falls from His eyes when He realizes that this truth is inescapable, that He cannot face the Surveyors without the thought barging into the trained serenity of His thoughts.  Inevitability is cast upon the chance of the Surveyors discovering him.

Dazed.  Dark.  Fear pulses through His veins.  How long has He slept?  Have the Surveyors found Him yet?  Unanswered queries only add to the jolts of terror that cause Him to seize up in discomfort.  Every thought is either of the tragic crime that He committed or of the atrocities that the Surveyors shall commit upon Him when He is found.
The footsteps, they are growing louder.  He preemptively shields His face to protect it from the sunlight when the Surveyor walks on top of the cover and inevitably falls through.  Waiting, agonizing suspense.  Light peeks in from the right side of the cover and He inexplicably begins to fall asleep.

“Such a shame.  I knew him; he used to be such a normal and friendly person.”  The first voice says as he slowly comes out of the fog.
“I would have never thought that he went off of the tangent of insanity the way that he did, no one would.”  The second voice responds.
“A person such as him seemed too warm to become the disturbed and dangerous patient that he is.  To think that he killed the person dearest to him…so out of his nature.”  The First.
“He was such a smart man, the way that he transgressed into the delusional introvert that he is today…it’s, it’s unimaginable.”  The Second.
“And as stable as he seemed, it’s utterly shocking that he became so emotionally reliant to the extent to where he was bent on inane bipolarism.”
“Always muttering about some ‘landscape,’ yelping in fear about ‘surveyors.’  It’s really a shame that we have to carry out this lobotomy.”
“Yeah, but the psychiatrist said that it would be one of the sole things that can silence the vicious nature that he’s developed, and all else has been attempted with no success.”
“True, but I just don’t feel right about this.”
“Me neither, but we have to follow orders.”
“Okay then, let’s get started.”

The thoughts of the landscape harmed him, the thoughts underneath the landscape gave him the greatest joy he ever experienced.  Everything of conceivability dashed through his mind.  He thought of attractive atrocities, of belittled brilliance, of desirable death.  But there was one thing that he could not do, however.  He could do anything he yearned for, but he could not think of how to save his mind.  As the end to the surgery nears, the landscape fades into oblivion.  The palate of brilliance that once was his mind, shattered by the virus of insanity.  Thought now neither comes with or without punishment, for now thought doesn’t come at all.

The dust settles and there lies naught but desolation.  The madman bumbles as the dribble slides down his chin.  What once was a beautiful landscape is now but an afterthought, a bleak wasteland.