Having trained prior to the dull lad in his wake seven Apprentices to undertake the job of sweeping after closing-hours these marble floors of the Museum of Night, of dusting its frames & fixtures, but especially to rectify the malevolent work of those former protégés of his whom, by some perverse pride & counterfeit inversion of the metaphysics he’d once taught them, had released themselves from his tutelage to, every night & without fail, switch around the labels of the exhibits within this Hallowed Museum of Night, a brazen act by which the rascals negated its classificatory schemes (whose perfect order stood in relation to human civilization as a synecdoche of God’s grace & whose disarrangement posed a threat not only to curatorial propriety but also, to his custodial mind, threatened the existence of the entire Kosmos outside the Museum, this fear being a product of his obsession with tidiness as the single staunch guardian of the building’s palatial grottos & artifacts, being all the splendrous heritage of humanity that only heretical minds could believe “evolutionary principles” had somehow hiccupped blindly into the Kosmos & whose enclosing walls he’d come to believe as less a feat of engineering than an Ark on the Sea of Time, endowed by its Curatorial Bureaucracy to traffic in the relics of what time had not yet winnowed), and that without the completion of his desperate nightly contest to pair each & every label back with its proper object in the galleries before dawn, the destruction of this cherished vessel of human heritage would be assured, to this end, having gone about composing a mnemonic poem to describe in fine detail through nested sestinas not only the great catacombs of galleries & their contents down to the last painting’s camel-hair brushstroke, but also the histories of each represented civilization as well, condensing through crafty principles a description of the Museum into a single sentence-poem he could chant to the child all night long as he worked & thus inculcate in the latest young lad not only the recursive patterns inherent in human history but the place of mnemonic poesy in the very creation of consciousness of that history, he did attempt to enlighten this latest eighth Apprentice by implanting the story of humankind in verse an account of the one True Myth that mattered, viz., the tale of a galactic sun-ship whose inhabitants, having repeated variations on the same basic 108 metaphysical situations all ensouled beings were prone to and, instead of living in the ecstasy that should have been their birthrights, witnessed repeatedly by their peculiar, “tri-chronocentric” consciousness their great palaces and cities exist long enough to become their own tombs, struggled to realize the nature & purpose of the space vessel within which they were trapped, set out upon a great journey within their sun-ship to find the womb from which their race originated, but only encountered previous representations of civilization after civilization, era after era, (traveling from place to place within this sun-ship being equivalent to moving backwards in time to earlier versions of themselves), never came upon that one singular Origin of Origins that would explain it all, suddenly understood that the divine loop between their minds & the material of which the sun-ship was made was a holy living presence that through spiritual disciplines they could intervene upon at any time--that by some Fall long past, they had condemned themselves to forgetting this power that had existed within them to free themselves from history; further, the realization that the triad “past-present-future” were akin to three facets of the same jewel that, if they but possessed a certain humility & grace regarding their Creator they could thus open for themselves a circuit directly to the Source of this Universe & could becomes co-terminus Authors of both themselves & their future--did the janitor pontificate that the exhibits within the Hallowed Museum of Night thus embodied examples of how each human people had Reimagined both this Power of Authorship, and its Forgetting, and its Rediscovery, the relics the museum curators had found & gathered here being signatures of how each human tribe & nation had negotiated a living relationship with their allotted space upon this earth, how each people had Fallen Behind & Ran Ahead in entropy & hubris this thing called Time—to this latest Apprentice, the eighth, lolling about in his wake, a work of God’s folly if he ever saw one, patently irredeemable in intelligence & thus possibly signaling the Kosmos' end as he trailed behind & perhaps only pretended to listen to his condensed mnemonic poem on the circularity of human affairs, the janitor, Leroy Alexander Vanderbloode, held only scorn but was not altogether surprised to discover that in his own verbal zeal & woefully under-articulated method of rectifying the mischievous work of his former seven unders, the latest Apprentice had—like those prior orphans, born in learned arrogance—somehow already ran ahead of him into the halls & so would inevitably overtake the previous seven in some now-disordered gallery ahead, joining them with glee to see their master janitor’s work destroyed, irreversibly undoing the hitherto stable network of relations between signifier & signified, name & noumenon, God & Man, quark & spark, established from the beginning of time & charged to him singly as guardian of this microcosm against the entropy embodied now by those seven scamps, with this realization did desperately quicken his pace of restoration, yet, suspecting it was futile, knowing he could never establish again the synchrony of a label & its meaning, a word & its unfaithful spouse, he would have no further understudy, no apprentice to pass along the unenviable task of underwriting the order of the Kosmos, and had become, along with every artifact, just another signifier within its walls, just another exhibit of Time's ceaseless march.