A Voice In The Wilderness

 A voice in the wilderness – the writer studied this expression with which the writer was faced. If a voice was in the wilderness, did that not imply that there was nobody else about, and if so, how could such a voice be heard for anyone to address such a topic, without destroying the wilderness itself by their own presence in it. So, the writer crawled surreptitiously on all fours towards the outer edge of the wilderness, testing each grasp and grapple forward, to see if they had passed through a no-man’s-land and then across an even more human-empty tranche of ground where there could never be a voice that existed unless there was anyone potentially able to use such a voice to prove the writer wrong, and the writer strained their neck backward and searched the sky for clues as to any coordinates to determine their position, but of course, no wilderness worth its wildernessness is truly mapped out by any cartographer, because once visited, it becomes an ex-wilderness. And it was then that the writer heard the bray of some beast, a sound self-evidently that was not a human voice. You see, the word ‘voice’ implies a voice is a human voice, because other animals roar or bleat or indeed, as this one did, bray, with something other than a voice. Do such animals in the wilderness cancel out the wilderness as a wilderness in the manner that a human presence would otherwise manage to do by suddenly entering what was once a wilderness. The writer then heard a quack and an even shriller bray, as if a duck sat on the back of a hyena to laugh at the writer’s rambling thoughts — thoughts as yet unvoiced and not even finished being written down here. The writer could not help but echo the laugh having remembered that, just as they earlier wrote, they were already crawling on all fours, and even their own voice could never pretend actually to be called a voice. And, thus, the wilderness remained as pure as the purest of wildernesses under the soft black stars of a certain form of unseen sky at night — unseen, indeed, by any form of human kind or cruel. And it was as yet unwritten that the writer had somehow passed a crucial test by having already passed a threshold nobody knew was there to be passed at all.