Pasysthis

Some things only remain alive through the eye that never closes.

One evening when the desert sky was red as an open oven, the scribe stopped on the crest of a high dune. To his right lay the city—walls of clay and stone, slender towers, palm trees that trembled in the wind like hands raised in prayer. The fire seemed to consume everything there, like a living beast devouring everything: houses, roofs, minarets, gardens. The flames rose like black columns, then reflected in the sky like blood from a fresh wound. The smoke rose thick, greasy, and spread in the shape of giant wings across the entire horizon.

The oasis burned, burned with furious flames, turning night into day. The city he had known well – with its gardens, its fountains, its voices – was turning, as he saw it, into ashes. And yet, the scribe stood on the dune, parchment in his hands and quill ready to write. He didn't run. He didn't cry. He wrote, and that was it. He couldn't do anything else. He had no choice. On his shoulder, the falcon remained motionless, also looking at the flames, like a second witness to the destruction. Some would have said he was crazy, reckless. Others, that he was heartless. But he knew a painful truth that fire could not touch: that what you write at the moment of death becomes immortal.

Burning is not the end, but only the violent transformation of the fleeting form into memory.

People ran past him, screaming, trying to save what could be saved. Children, animals, valuables – everything that could be taken was snatched out of the way of the flames. But the scribe had nothing to save except this empty parchment, waiting to be filled. His mission was not to save things, but to save the city from oblivion. For the meaning of events cannot be carried in arms or hidden in cellars. It must be written, fixed in words, before the wind scatters it along with the ashes.

Can you maintain your dominant position as an act of consciousness, in which the reception and exposure to the intensity of an event gives rise to a revelation producing ultimate meaning?

The falcon on my shoulder was a Falco-Testimonium, the bird of witnesses, the one that sees everything from above and forgets nothing. I had found him wounded in the desert years ago, and he had never left me since. He was practically the eyes of my gaze when my eyes filled with tears, my memory when my mind refused to hold back the pain. Now, in front of the fire, he too looked without blinking, absorbing into himself every flame, every column of smoke, every cry that died away in the night. Sometimes, the silent witness is the most important character in a tragedy.

In Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451," the book-people memorized entire works to save them from burning. But I wasn't memorizing—I was writing. I wasn't copying other people's words, I was recording what I saw: what a city in agony looks like, what the silence between two explosions sounds like, what hope smells like when it turns to smoke. Maybe no one will read these lines. Maybe my parchment will burn too one day, and maybe only the wind will remain in its wake. Or maybe a single line will survive the ages. After all, nothing is truly lost. But the act of writing itself was already a victory—an affirmation that the meaning of humanity exists even when everything collapses.

Flames do not destroy truth, only its temporary form. The writer gives truth a new form, more durable than falling stones. And so, hoping to make myself heard beyond the ruin, I entrusted my words to time. I know that nothing is eternal, I know that oblivion is faster than fire, yet I write as if oblivion could be defeated. At least let a whisper remain, rather than a heavy silence. Because words must burn for truth to be born from the ashes.

Can you transform your helplessness in the face of the experience of loss into an act of creation that survives both you and the inevitable end?

I wondered, watching the last tower collapse in flames, why I felt no fear. Perhaps it was because I had understood, in all those years of wandering through the desert, that death is not an enemy, but only a harsh editor. It cuts out everything insignificant from life and leaves only the essence. And I, writing in front of it, showed it that I understood the lesson: it is not the quantity that counts, but the density of meaning. A single line written at the moment of death is worth more than a library written in the comfort of oblivion. After all, if the universe refuses to offer a meaning, the human mind will manufacture it, and its usefulness will be equal to that of reality.

The sky above me was a Caelum-Igneum, a vault of fire and blood where the stars were barely visible through the smoke. But even in that chaos, I noticed something strange: the flames had a rhythm, the smoke rose in almost regular spirals, the destruction itself seemed to follow an unseen score. Perhaps there is order even in disaster—an order that only those who look closely enough can discover. Or perhaps my mind, desperate to find meaning, was inventing it where there was none. But even invented meaning is still meaning.

One thing is certain: the stars only become visible when the fire below is big enough to make you stop caring about them.

Can you sustain a lucid perspective in the dominant plane of reality, transforming the way you assume your role into an approach of unwavering artistic presence?

The hawk let out a short scream and spread its wings, but it did not fly. It remained on my shoulder, agreeing to be a witness with me until the end. Truth is never the sum of facts, but the average between the gaze of the one who dominates and the compassion of the one who survives. In that moment, I felt a connection deeper than any words – we were two different witnesses to the same tragedy, two eyes looking at the same truth from different angles. He saw from above, with the clarity of the abductor. I saw from below, with the compassion of one who knows that he could have been among those burning. Two different perspectives on the same event do not cancel each other out, but create the only authentic and unbiased image of reality.

I wrote until the ink dried and continued with wet ashes. My words were black on the parchment, like smoke in the sky. The story of the city that burned will remain, even if I do not. This is the only possible victory in the face of fire: to steal its story before it finishes burning.

And so, the desert scribe wrote in his book of ashes:

"I saw a world burn and I chose not to flee. Not out of courage, but out of duty. For someone must remain there, steadfast and lucid, to tell those who will come, with great care, what was here before the flames. The very falcon on my shoulder, steadfast in its silence, is my witness, and I am the witness of the city. In the end, the fire forgets all, but the words I wrote in front of the fire will never be forgotten. They burn too, but in a different way – with a cold, imperishable flame that illuminates without consuming."

In conditions of total collapse, authority does not belong to the one who exposes himself to danger, but to the one who, through discernment, manages to be a manifesto against forgetting.

Pasysthis is the symbol of the scribe who writes while the world burns behind him, representing the triumph of the spirit over material destruction. Nothing compares to the power of the word that survives the pyre. For the scribe's duty is not to stop disasters, but to give them voice – to be there when no one else can be, to write when everyone else flees, to remain a witness when testimony itself is the only thing that can endure.

After all, what burns disappears only for those who did not record it. And writing in front of the fire is not madness, but the most lucid form of hope – the belief that there will be someone, someday, who will want to know what was before everything turned to ashes.