As I lay beneath this ragged tarpaulin after a hard day’s destruction I struggle to find the strength to keep writing this account but someone has to do something and though I know that they will shoot me when they catch me I have to keep writing so that maybe someone one day will find it and read about the time that the world still had hope.

Because all the while that I can write then all is not lost.

And all the while that all is not lost then the whole world can still wait and hope and pray (if that is your thing) for that time when it may well be that all this waiting and hoping (and praying) will bring about an upturn in this planet’s fortunes.

End of Book I

Amidst the chaos and the screaming and the suffering and the hatred and the horror and the hopelessness and the gunfire and the pleading and the taunting and the sheer futility of it all a small child works alone in Front Square. A small child with a broken nose who works all day, using a household hammer to smash bricks until her arm burns and she cannot lift it any more. Spent and close to collapse, this small child then falls asleep near where I am laying. No one pays her any mind.

And yet existence can live alongside the very destruction of the same and though the notion of life here is clearly finite in its duration it is the same life that resolves to sing as the firing squad takes aim or signal eternal defiance with a shout from the scaffold and until there is no-one left to hear the song or hear the shout then there is always the hope that even songs and shouting might actually signal something more than simple silent resignation. And even in the darkest darkness ever to have descended from way beyond on-high there are still voices to be heard. They may be single. They may be strangled. They may be shortened. But they are voices all the same.

The evil of the NotBeSpeak would make great art, were both things possible of existing in the same space. Which, of course, in this instance, they are not.

New and dizzying depictions of Hell and human suffering to be captured with oil and gauche and mechanical reproduction.

Images capturing earthly contortions and the agony of existence with a clarity and ferocity not witnessed since the Renaissance.

But much like an invisible ink designed to disappear during the very act of writing any recording is doomed and must likely die in the same second that it is born.

None of this is to suggest or even suppose that the evil of the NotBeSpeak is founded on coffee, committee and conversation. This evil is very different altogether.

It is of the random.

The indifferent.

The deliberate.

Mechanical.

And other words now.

Cold.

Impassive.

Indurated.

Wholly detached from reason and emotion and therefore alive in the heart of other words.

Unfathomable.

Bottomless.

Abysmal.

Illimitable.

Alternatively, these explorers might just leave this planet and cross it off as ‘dead’ on their maps and never wonder how Humanity lost its light. After all, the universe is scattered with countless stars all vying for the attention of anyone capable of exploring them.

So in this way why should the Earth be any more privileged than any other dead rock floating in the endless void?

Imagine a list complied somewhere and then put before a committee and each item on the list was a planet being considered for further investigation.

What claim the Earth over any other?

Once the pride of the city centre, Stephens Green Shopping Centre is now a festering pile of broken glass and looted shops. Pulled to the ground by a frenzied mob while shots were fired over their heads and water cannons set upon them, this site of civic consumerism now resembles a Renaissance painting depicting Hell in all its profane glory.

In millennia to come when brave explorers from another solar system land upon a non-responsive planet and start to look around they will find the Shopping Centre long-buried and over-grown and perhaps marvel at the possibility that a significant battle was fought at such an important-looking archaeological site.

The simple song of the NotBeSpeak is not something they will likely ever hear.

With the Provost’s House in front of you turn right and head up Grafton Street itself towards Stephens Green and all along the way there are now the shells of the shops that lined this prestigious thoroughfare.

Once smug Brown Thomas, the department store of choice, is now a battered, beaten, broken shell – four hundred and seventy-eight people are still unaccounted for when the foundations gave way and the walls fell inward.

Grafton Street was once lined with public entertainers seeking money for their performances now it is simply choked by the dead and the dying and the spectacle that they offer is of a very different kind.

The Provost’s House sits at No.1 Grafton Street, where the city’s main shopping thoroughfare meets College Green and Nassau Street. Built in 1789 this splendid piece of Georgian urban architecture has hosted the visits from countless dignitaries from all around the world.

Now, however, this once proud building has suffered the utter indignity of being pulled apart pilaster after cornice after Venetian window after round-headed arch.

Where parties once gathered in the grounds for receptions and celebrations these same grounds are now filled with the scattered detritus of the three thousand people charged with the building’s destruction.

The demolition of Trinity College also continued apace. The bronze globe that has sat outside Trinity’s Berkeley Library since 1982, Arnaldo Pomodoro’s ‘Sphere with Sphere,’ was worked loosed from its plinth and rolled across Front Square where it was then used as a wrecking ball to demolish Front Gate and splinter the wooden doors into firewood, crushing twelve people along the way.

The fact that different versions of this same sculpture can also be found in the Vatican and the Headquarters of the United Nations was a wonderful irony not lost on the NotBeSpeak as they oversaw this perverse transformation from an existing artistic statement to a new statement of an altogether very different kind.