Archival Request, Office of Student Affairs
The following is an excerpt of a journal recovered from the deceased body of one of our novice Enphelomancers. He was found near the edge of an ancient burial site, face down in a shallow pool of water, seemingly drowned, though the cause of death remains unknown.
The problem with thinking symbolically is the ever-present underlying reminder of this vast and overwhelming knowledge that dwarfs the intellect. This superstructure somehow gives way to an assumption that revelations of the symbolic kind are meant to be kept quiet so as for one, not to ruin them, and for two, not to humiliate oneself by exposing the infinite extent of one’s own ignorance. The thought is that this observation now occurring to me and that I find so profound is in fact so obvious that everyone else already knows it and has already known it for as long as they’ve been conscious. If I were to spell it out in explicit terms, so doing would not only be an attempt to carve the divine with the implements of vulgarity, but also to signal that I am just now realizing this terribly obvious and elementary thing.
This is an inevitable property of the symbol. On one hand, it is the most stimulating and edifying object of intellect, deeply bound up in reality and suprareality. It exists in the overreach of consciousness and is dredged up only through experience, pure intent, and divine luck. On the other, it is such a simple thing, so deeply and intuitively known, that even a child understands it plainly, easily, and without being taught. To enter the world of symbols is to put on a serious face, don a deep-sea diving suit, attune to sophisticated equipment and apparati for this most dangerous endeavor, and then to jump into the kiddie pool amongst the floaties and colorful innertubes and lost bandages. What’s more, it’s to somehow discover, just under the surface, the vast treasures of the deep, to have the suit and apparati ripped away in a torrent, and to come up, gasping for air, clutching at your prize, face all the sterner.
And when you open your hand, what do you see? A clump of sand and broken shells? A mere memory? To show these to any self-respecting deep sea diver is at best to receive an acknowledgment that there may be some small, quantifiable benefit to the sample you’ve collected. But perhaps, to the toddler with snorkel-bound face and waist squeezed into a purple flamingo innertube, you open your hand to reveal sand and broken shells, and the eyes widen beneath the goggles, the ears pull back. The mouthpiece is bitten in a smile, radiating joy, perfect joy.