LSD in the Wind

[Dave Monroe]

1.  Genesis

Wasteland.
    Total, glaring, absolute.
    Stark, terrible.
    Nothing growing.
    Nothing moving.
    Ageless, perpetual silence.  Eternal solitude.  Only the piercing
whine of the dry nameless wind blowing in from a distantly heard sea.
    Desolation.  A universe of nakedness and nil.
    Utter, supreme.  Everlasting.
    Nothing of Life.  Only the unrelenting deathly stillness.  The
infinity of zero, emptiness, nothingness.
    This is the planet where Man has lost his supreme position in the
scheme of things.  Listen to the Wind.
    If it could speak [...]  The scorching, chilling breath of the
wind's passage would carry the terrible tale to the walls of Infinity,
down the endless corridors of the vast timelessness which seems to be
the core of the land itself ...
    Listen, the Wind ...
    "This is the truth eternal: whatever thinks, can speak.  And
whatever speaks can murder.
    "But what is there to murder in this dead place?"
    There is no answer for the Wind.
    [...]
    The Wind whines higher and louder, scoring over a dead landscape.
Weird lambent lights suffuse the terrain.  There is a vast unearthly
brilliance invested in a panorama of Nothingness.
    [...]
    The dead snads remained unmoving, the wind prowled over the
monolithic expanse of desert-like desolation.  And isolation.  The
unknown lights bathed the wasteland with a dull, inflexible glow.
    [...]
    A long-dead lady of stone eyes, stone ears and stone senses--whose
only companion for an eon had been--
    --the Wind.
    [...]
    "Goddamn you all to hell!"
    [...]
    The Statue of Liberty could not hear Taylor weeping.
    Stone has no heart.
    Or soul.
    It does not even hear the wind.

Avallone, Michael.  Beneath the Planet of the Apes.
    New York: Bantam, 1970.  pp. 1-3

... "based upon characters created by Pierre Boulle."  Well, there was
something in the wind ca. the turn of the decade, at any rate.  And note
the echo of Thomas stearns Eliot's "The Waste-land" there as well.  By
the way, I've been reliably informed that, alchemically, April is,
indeed, "the cruelest month" ....