Stillborn To Life: A Novella

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stillborn To Life

A Novella by Valerie Lynn Stephens

 

 

 

 

 

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, transmitted in any form or by any means (including electronic, photocopying, mechanical, manual or otherwise) without the prior express & written permission of the owner of the copyright of this book. Caveat Lector: This is a work of fiction. Any similarities between its content & characters to persons, either live or deceased, or events are entirely coincidental & unintended.

ISBN#: 978-1-387-30021-1

©2013 Valerie Lynn Stephens. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prologue

 

 

 

The infant's cries ring silent throughout the dark, misty alleyway. The woman lies huddled, quivering and broken as her contractions slowly increase in intensity. Her cries for help echo with more morbid reverberation than the infant's non-responsive birthing, as the blood on her hands glows with the red siren pallor of a death still undeclared.

 

 

The woman fumbles, now taking the infant vigorously by the heels, smacking its bottom with the force of mother's instinct-but still, no sound. She cradles the babe in her trembling arms, praying to but even feel the faintest little wisp of breath respired from the mouth of her child upon her tear-streaked, mascara and rouge-mussed face.

 

 

As she attempts for yet another time to grant life animation to this ill-fated child, a voice, disembodied and strangely androgynous, rumbles and sizzles through the alleyway, "Is anybody alive in here?" then just as quickly retreating.

 

 

And it was then that the child began to stir, still for the moment mute, but forevermore crowned very much bright and alive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 1

 

 

 

It was one day last December when I kissed the devil on my shoulder, full on the lips. And as my mind slowly yet savagely split apart, I feared I would never come back together the same again. This shall remain unseen, pass like a shadow in the dark. And it is never to be known, like the soul. It is a flash of perception too swift to sense, known yet unseen, like the face reflected in the mirror here.

 

 

This is the quiet corruption of the estranged. And it all began at the first breath, this mercilessly labyrinthine fate. For the sodomy of the Soul begins for most in the zygotic phase-when it is but an Ideal within an Idea within the faint premonition of an entity we come to loathe with seething contempt.

 

 

And although I know that I writhe not in solitude, I also sense how stupefyingly alone I am in such revelations and confessions, as only the devil may care or feign to bear the blame while I ravage myself in endless shame. For the secret that lies behind these bright eyes is denied expurgation time and time again by a saint in disguise.

 

 

For we are all angels masquerading as devils, despite the longings we toil within. Yet what the forked tongues of our many kindred creatures tell us is rarely what we hear. Yet, they admonish us, our interpretation is unintelligible, is in abominable dissent-is to be renounced or dismissed altogether.

 

 

I am said by the books of chronology to be so young, yet why then does youth's effervescent brogue continually evade my soul's tongue? For like the serpent was for forbidden fruit, the devil's advocate I've become, bearing a countenance of lachrymose seduction-a sad, silent selling out indeed.

 

 

Having taken a vow of supernal poverty, the devil's advocate I've become. And I am such a poor, poor dear, for there is, more often than not, far too much adherence here.

 

 

And like the Fall was for Mortalkind, the Saviour's cause I have shunned, bearing a soul of eternal pilgrimage. Having accepted a barter of apostasy, the Saviour's cause I have repeatedly shunned, and I am such a blind, blind seeker. Ah! You say, but what an eloquent speaker!

 

 

Yet even as my words flow like the font of a universal river of dreams, my heart, I fear, is caught in a dam, a lone piece of firewood that once served its purpose quite well in the making of some nobleman's last supper.

 

 

I will not budge, for the very forces of Nature, it seems, are against me. I suppose I must just wait for some other forlorn soul to come along and set me free with a good swift boot! But must I wait and thus forfeit my fate to the inept hands of yet another as it has been since my first fit and wail?

 

 

For what comparison is to be made between myself and those who covet and seize this feeling of empowerment I proclaim to be in lack of? For like the hunter who is guided to his prey by its mortal sap tracks, so too have I, continuing on a travail back to the same moot point as I foolishly seek the derision of the Past's scourges and wounds, some faintly visible scars and others, vicious, oozing welts all too apparent to this shy naked Soul's eye.

 

 

Yet my heart remains fully clothed within the man-made yet ill-fitted materials of the Mind, as I am sold to the ravening merchants time and again, each new bid recklessly meandering into the red. And in debt I shall remain to the merciless creditors of conscience and self-providence until I have gained back what profit, lost at rebirth to the still, barren womb of Apathy.

 

 

But necessity is a jealous lover and so it goes: Here is my story. And I hope, despite their insufficiency that my words reach you. This is a brief yet scenic sojourn through a mortal mind's eye of gain and loss, of the giving and the taking, of solidarity and disunity, of harmony and of discord, of ecstasy and apathy, of love and of hate.

 

 

This is a story of both the genteel and the barbaric. This is a story of yearning and of evasion, of the sensual and the sexual, of fear of the fear of fear. Yet most humanly of all, this is a story of loneliness, an ache and pang which runs so abysmally deep within us all that it is perhaps the Demiurge behind all happenstance manifested within any human journey and its retelling.

 

 

This is to be a journey through the inner landscape of a mortal human mind, unabridged, unencumbered by facade and convention in all of their glorified rancour and paradoxical absurdities and petty tyrannies. This particular inner world of which I speak came to be played out long before me and is in actuality one which countless others have known of as well. A life lived in jest due to some abstract yet omnipotent and ever omnipresent force which simply cannot be justifiably or adequately summed up with mere surface calculations.

 

 

Is it a fear of losing the soul? Is it a fear of becoming beyond our control? Or is it a fear of just how deific indeed, we already are? Oh me of little faith, in others' heedless, callused hands I have placed-far too much. And for those who have failed me with their lack of what I cannot give to myself, I ask only one thing: Give me Truth. For she has taught me so many things, humbling my wretched, blind soul to continual illumination and blessed absolution. She has also taught me many things that I wish to go back to not knowing.

 

 

For I fear, most of all, God being eternally exiled from the dysphoric halls of this devil-mind as I am left to flounder, a ghost of a shell, nameless but certainly not blameless. What can cause such madness and disintegration in one weary, humble and lone soul? As I now speak, to this question I know of only one answer: Fear. A fear many know of but few dare reveal to themselves or others.

 

 

It is a fear that grits its teeth at me every day in the mirror, threatening to consume mind, body and soul in one gluttonous swallow. Some fear merely taunts. And some fear hides beneath the guise of all things physically-affecting and effecting which we try with an enthusiasm unsurpassed and a willful dexterity unrivaled, to craft into some spurious raison d’être.

 

 

My fear warns. And it warns of a reason-for-being not being enough. My fear is often greater than my love. My hate is lesser than yet oftentimes the direct product of my fear. And what of my joy? My joy is an incalculable integer. It does not commute.

 

 

What shall follow, as with all human stories, is an account of Heaven and an account of Hell. Yet most of all, it is an account of the Hades we so often must descend into, to make way, for that Final Ascension.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 2

 

 

 

My mother, Casvia, had spent most of the years up to my birth in the streets of New Orleans, an orphan-child of the New Gypsies. The New Gypsies were a band of persons ever nomadic, bound by their ancestry to be a volatile, insatiable breed. Perverse longings of every imaginable variance kept them always on the quest, their tainted name keeping them ever alienated and on the lam from their savage deeds, as they were, perhaps justifiably bound by their socially-dissenting creeds.

 

 

They made their living in some ways honorable, but in most, abominable and inhumane. To most they were parasites and monsters, considered lower than even whores, murderers or cannibals. Their long lineage provided them always with a refuge, but also an unending threat. They were both freed and encumbered by their blood ties.

 

 

The New Gypsies were a familial cult, even to those not of their kin, for they were always coveting that newest member to flesh out their clan. As a result of the constant social endangerment of their particular kind, the New Gypsies went by the adage that there was "danger in numbers and safety in nothing." It was this inbred paranoia and distortion of perception which kept them both more vulnerable and yet, more intrepid than any other human group of whatever current milieu reigned and sub-reigned.

 

 

Many lost souls would follow their scent like sharks out of water, hoping to revive their sense of existential fulfillment within the promise seemingly offered in acceptance and immersion into this tight, iron-fisted band of brothers and sisters. Some of the New Gypsies were so adaptable to any social environment that they could take on roles contradictory to their class with a savoir faire and an aplomb which even those of the so-called well-bred classes could not rival.

 

 

These of the New Gypsies came to be referred to as "The Doppelgangers", for they could play the role of anyone else from whatever social caste they chose with more congruency than any seasoned thespian. These of the New Gypsies made imitation a form of insult, indeed, for they could play anyone better than they could play themselves.

 

 

There were also many old legends and myths passed down from ancestral generation to generation about the Doppelgangers also possessing the ability to shape-shift into whatever physical form they needed or wished. And, indeed, the wisdom of their ancestors was greatly revered, and their presence was sensed even in the tiniest spider crawling along the cracks of a worn floorboard.

 

 

The New Gypsies, like any other social order or caste system had assigned ranks among them. The Doppelgangers or "The Imitators" were the second most honored and revered of their society and were of both male and female kind. But by far, the most valued and exalted of them all were the "Theia Mania".

 

 

These of the New Gypsies were said to be the only ones capable of being touched by "The Divine Madness" or "The Sacred Frenzy." They were, in a word, the shamans and priests of their clan. They were possessed of prophetia and status raptus and their gifts were "in id quod est contra naturam", of that which goes against nature. The Theia Mania was also ranked as such for they were by far the most fecund in intellectual procreativity as well as possessive of a depth and breadth of mnemonic absorption and comprehension.

 

 

The Theia Mania also possessed an innate and keen social clairvoyance as well, which definitely served them quite well. But, however blessed they may have been, the Manichean laws of universal dialectics would also exact for them, a curse of equal and opposite force and effect. The Theia Mania were indeed the most gifted of their clan yet were also the most acutely sentient, and hence, were they susceptible to the darkness which was in the world, in themselves and within others.

 

 

They were most attuned as well, to a strange mènima, or old ancestral ignominy. And so would they be deemed by their Grecian forebears, the definition of deinós itself, altogether dreadful and terrible, yet also powerful, efficient and exceptional when their energies were properly sublimated.

 

 

The Theia Mania had worked as Architects, Painters, Sculptors, Poets, Thespians, Dancers, and even as great Orators and Wordsmiths throughout their time. They were the New Gypsies' hard line to the Divine, and the Transcendental. And not unlike any other human social entity, the New Gypsies were not without their own strict moral code and mores. But they would still be hated, feared and exiled for their great hunger, their need, their desperation, their connection to the main vein of all Beauty, Truth, Creation, Passion, Desire and Destruction.

 

 

And so it was into this world that I, the silent, gifted child was born. My mother, though not a New Gypsy by blood inheritance was, by Fate. Born in 1892 to upper-crust New England society, her parents were both old and new money, the deadliest and most cursed sort. It has been told to me that my mother was expected to be the belle of the ball wherever they went.

 

 

The streets of her childhood were lined in red cobblestone, which caught the light of her tear-stained eyes upon those foggy, damp New England evenings, as she cried out for a life purged of all constraint, virtue or societal prudence. Her parents always suspected that my mother was alieni generis, as she would twirl and whirl in rapturous and defiant delight in a world apart, whenever any restraints were forced upon her. And when she cried, it was as if all of the angels in purgatory had been released unt0 the fiery tomb of Hades.

 

 

Her voice and demeanor were always precociously eccentric for a girl of her tender age and social class. My mother often felt completely estranged, ostracized and alienated in her youth. She felt no real bond with her blood relatives. They're blood, but not water, she would often repeat like a soothing mantra to herself as she wandered the New England streets in search of her true kin. This somehow consoled her and got her through.

 

 

Yet when my mother was 8 years old, at a family soiree, her parents were the victims of a cyanide poisoning, no doubt, as my mother and everyone else surmised at that time, a politically-motivated assassination, for those with money and prestige held a lot of power in those circles and thus were perceived as a threat to certain others' agendas. Thus, Mother was left even more disconcerted and in even more disarray than before. Cousins of the family took Mother into their guardianship until she became of age, yet my mother already had a plan. And shortly thereafter, she ran off to claim her new and true life, a way of life, however, that was to become an agent of her slow but sure demise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 3

 

 

 

In the year 1918, when my mother was 26 years old, she had come to know the best and worst of both worlds. All those years of a life lived in quest for all variances of escapism and hedonistic zeal had left her once raven hair prematurely white and her once dark, luminous eyes dulled of any gleam or mystery. But as for Mother's lust? It had grown all the more virile still.

 

 

Her abhorrence for and intolerance of all things fascistic and its agents had culminated in her committal of a heinous murder just two years prior, involving one of many of her lovers. So my mother was further ill-fated to be on the run, as the long arm of the law posed its own egregious threat to Mother's freedom and to her survival. Yet she had learned that there was just as much bondage in freedom as there could be freedom in bondage.

 

 

Mother had grown increasingly embittered and malcontented with life, but most of all, towards herself. All of her life, my mother had lived in dissension and now was beginning to flirt with the possibility of acquiescence to a life more circumscribed and conventional. As a member of the New Gypsies, her crimes had run the gamut from robbery to prostitution to cold-blooded murder. One of the creeds of the New Gypsy clan adhered to very strictly, was that any law not created solely by their own clan was to be regarded with severe skepticism and, even suspicion. They stood by the belief that any idea developed by the majority was ultimately designed to bring about more evil than good, and in this sense, were they, true anarchists of their time.

 

 

Yet despite their seemingly bohemian and savage ways, those of the New Gypsies were exceptionally intelligent, and socially savvy, which is ultimately what aided them in a continued successful evasion of the law. Many common citizens idolized them as demi-gods, and were, although somewhat terrified of and disgusted by them, also in awe of them. They inspired an odd admixture of fear, fascination and reverence in most.

 

 

The citizens of the New Gypsy band had a way of taking what would be deemed perfidious in the eyes of the Divine and demonstrating its underlying virtue and broader truth. This is the environment in which I was conditioned. And, although in many ways, it was a miseducation rampant and unfortunate, it was also informative in ways exalting and indescribably transformative in the end.

 

 

And of the first dynamically scourging events in my young life, the loss of my mother definitely left its eidetic imprint.

 

 

It rained at Mother's funeral, and the sparse group of attendants scurried back to their earthly abodes afterwards, as people often do in such climatic torrents, like wayward children in the midst of the imminent threat of God's wrath. Mother had been murdered at the hands of an officer of the law as she was attempting to fend off his advances and escape what would undoubtedly be, her own hanging after the "gentlemen" had finished with her.

 

 

Yet, in her own odd way, Mother would have preferred to die in this fashion, for it was in the guise of what she would have deemed a much more "natural" death than what those in medical circles commonly refer to. She would often say, "It is more natural to seek the destruction of others, than to seek out the destruction of oneself." She also often quipped that she must have not only been a Stoic in a past life, but a Cynic as well, and with as much zeal and joy at ease as she was an Epicurean in her erstwhile incarnation. Though Mother was, in a darker sense, also a true "Nature" girl, in the sense that she believed it should be allowed to run its course, lest the unnatural run amok.

 

 

In the East, she would have been a "Taoist." The things most unnatural to Mother were enslavement and self-hatred. She believed that we "learn" to hate ourselves and to enslave others. She did not intuit that humankind was inherently destructive, but that one is systematically socially engineered that way. Mother advocated and tenaciously asserted a freedom to be one's whole self in each precious moment. Her militant Taoism was one which employed the principle as she would call it, of "Integration over Dichotomization.”

 

 

She believed that we were not born sinners, but are conditioned this way through the pressures of societal protocols and its various shaming methodologies. Mother's spirituality, though it seemed unorthodox to most, was never at odds for reconciliation within her. Many ceremonies were held to honour Mother within the New Gypsy society. Yet no one of her clan tried to fight the powers-that-be concerning her wrongful death, for they were all-too-keen to the worldly wisdom that the officer's jurisprudence would never be brought into question or supersede Mother's lowly caste in the eyes of those powers-that-be nor society at large. Mother was just 29 years old when she was taken from me. I was five. Contrary to how most others must have judged her, she was always a very attentive, nurturing and tender mother to me. Yet I was left now to my father's care.

 

 

My father went by the name John Baron and was associated with the Doppelganger clan of the New Gypsies. Father was in my life from the night of my mysterious, silent, still-birth and raised me, after Mother's murder, for the duration of my childhood and most of my adolescence. I learned much from Father. Along with his commanding presence and his rugged, dark good looks, he was also notorious for being a tried-and-true trickster. But his main passion was for Philosophy and The Arts. He was dubbed, "Renaissance" for his multi-faceted mastery of painting, sculpting, poetry, theatre, song and dance.

 

 

His lineage was full-blooded Theia Mania, yet he had been orphaned at a young age and raised primarily by The Doppelgangers. Father most of all, had an unquenchable fire for experience of all kinds-yet mostly of the highly amoral sort. Experience was his main muse. He put his body, mind and soul into anything he did, including some of his more felonious endeavors. Yet Father did not consider himself the "criminal" that most did. The only true crime he saw being committed was in the cruel indifference he received at the hands of a society so full of fear that fear had become of it. Yet this is where Father's Achilles' heel lay-in his self-righteous cynicism-much like that of Mother's.

 

 

Father was killed when I was 16 years of age by an informant who was seeking him out for the rape and murder of the informant's wife. The informant also sought revenge for Father's extortion, blackmail and torture of some of the informant's kin who were all linked to a subversive government organization. Father was found being predated upon by water rats in a vacant alleyway by another adversary of his. His death was not even reported officially until five years later due to, I'm sure, unsavory political circumstances unknown.

 

 

Until I reached the ripe young age of 10, the gypsy "age of manhood", I was kept by other members of the clan. I was a charming, astute child and won both many false friends and true enemies from a very young age. Once, when I was six, my mother's sister, Contavia, had baked a delicious chocolat pie, and I badly wanted the whole thing to myself. So, after gobbling it all up, I went out back and filled the pie pan back up with some dampened earth. When my aunt Contavia stepped into the kitchen to retrieve the pie for some visiting kin, I was quick to make sure that I would not be found out. So, when someone bit into that first slice, exclaiming in protest, I was ready with a quick reply.

 

 

When Contavia asked me what in the world I had done to the pie, I cleverly replied, "Chocolat is for the birds, but earth is for those without wings." Everyone thought this was just brilliant and from thenceforth I was "the little philosopher." I was also composing music, writing, dancing, acting and singing by a tender age, for I had inherited the gifts of the Theia Mania through my father.

 

 

I thought of Mother and Father often, as if magically somehow thinking thoughts alone could bring them back. Although they might have made what some judged "unfit" members of bourgeoisie society, they were quite exemplary caregivers and teachers. For they were teachers of one of the most tantamount life lessons to be learned: that of Truth and congruency with Nature, that nature and Truth within and that nature and truth without. For although a full embrace of these creeds may have at first encumbered me with a tenacity unrivaled, it was only through these things that I would soon be redeemed, that I would be set free.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4

 

 

 

I did not receive the formal education of most lads my age. The family line was strongly opposed to any strict formalism. I was raised upon the belief that what most considered to be righteous order was actually a crime against Nature, thus, a crime against the Creator of all things. And while those not within our elite circle scoffed at our accused unrefinements of Virtue, we defined our caste and our inward nobility by how little we resisted the naturally inherent entropy of the human condition and experience. Forced “order” to us, was the root of all evil for it was, we felt, most hindering to the naturalistic process & evolution of all things.

 

 

Hence, one can easily see the conflicts which such strict devotion to such a radical philosophy would stir into motion. We came to be known, socio-politically speaking, as "instinctualists." Although this particular classification of our "sub-speciation" came from the mouths of our gentlest, most amiable & docile enemies. But of course we, so vehemently aversive as we were to any labels or confining boundaries of mind or heart, rather preferred not to "call" ourselves anything. Nevertheless, whatever I did manage to learn within such an unstructured setting was strictly in the Aristotelian or rather, very real, hands-on sense.

 

 

I learned the tricks of the trade of subsistence very early on. Indeed I had honed a precocious and quite evolved maturity and shrewdness by the tender age of six and, some of my kin would say that I had perhaps come out of the womb that way. But more so than how to pull off the basic antics of the petty, common criminal, I had especially dexterously crafted my own safe dwelling from within and from without. The art of camouflage and evasion were edification essential for those of us New Gypsies.

 

 

And indeed, the older I grew and my crimes, sophisticated along with my mind, the more vagabond my good conscience had increasingly become and thus, did I really have need for such skills. I committed my first murder when I was nine years of age. It happened on a winter's day in early February. It was a day so overcast that one's shadow, even at high noon could nary be seen, ghosting every movement, deliberate or involuntary.

 

 

In retrospect, I recall at first trying to convince myself that I had killed the boy out of some pure materialistic covetousness and the shallower intent to procure the solid gold pocket watch which the lad had been bragging about having stolen off of some banker fella, but the cold-cutting truth of the matter was, I killed him because I had the hunger and chose to feed it.

 

 

I felled the young scrounger with a pocketknife which I, being a young clip myself, had lifted from the coat pocket of one of my kin as they slept. I remember as I plunged the knife into his chest, how deftly it seemed to sink into his flesh, making no sound but for the lad's astonished, sharp inward gasp and whimpering. Yet, I kept twisting the knife, deeper and deeper, finally leaving the boy writhing in his own, urine, blood, sweat, primal fear and encroaching death.

 

 

I imagine how it must all sound so tiresomely cliché, the poor, neglected gypsy boy dancing gaily with all forms of venary and danger, so forth and so on. Yet however commonplace in the minutiae these things might appear to be upon the surface, one rarely is so objectively far-removed from such things oneself. Subjectivity and Solipsism, what faithful bedfellows they make. Yet still, that small, still voice. And each fall farther from grace, a terrible horror haunting from within the deepest, most primal recesses of the soul, as one is set further and further adrift upon an indescribably isolationist island of acute exposure, vulnerability and unbearable, wrenching paranoia.

 

 

Yet it also seems to be, that when the flames which engulf us in each our own private earthly hell burn long enough, hot enough, and blindingly bright enough, we often mistake malignant mutation for higher adaptation. And such earthly wanderings do indeed age one with far more rapidity than a life lived in pursuit of the wholesome and the upright. And the deterioration of the human soul, once turpitude has been granted full reign for so long, is dizzyingly rapid. And how my humanity managed to survive the horrors of my wretched condition under such squalid circumstances never ceased to strike me as nothing short of some subtly forged, nevertheless, profound miracle.

 

 

Yet perhaps it was Hell which brought me, to Heaven. Perhaps we must lie with the Devil before we can ever truly know God. For with each endurance through that which my wretchedness had wrought upon my body, my mind and my soul, I began to see that I was valuable to some higher force. And with time, it would become clearer and clearer to me, that I was destined for works far above and beyond anything I could have ever envisaged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 5

 

 

 

I am 17 years old and standing upon the precipice of a cliff, looking out upon the churning waters below. It would be all too easy, all too easy, I think to myself as I contemplate surrendering myself to the grim fate of the jagged rocks below. And one often marvels at how so many instead choose Life in such states of existential anguish. Thunder growls rabidly throughout the atmosphere like a mad dog as lightning spears the dense anatomy of an ever-darkening sky into two, converging with the rocky terrain over which I hang like a question mark, the lightning answering me fully with each quickening flash.

 

 

It is times like these that I feel as if I just might have breached the answer to the question of why I stay here, time and again. The storm always brings me home to myself. It is the absence of externally mirroring turmoil and violence which causes unsettling estrangement from myself and all else. For I am what I am, and it is only when I sweetly and softly succumb to this dark unification within myself that I find true peace. Yet, I was about to meet someone who would challenge all of this.

 

 

I met Father Ralph Casperotti when I was 17 years old, shortly after my father had met his brutal demise. I was rummaging the gutter for stray coins outside a church one Sunday evening, and Father Ralph approached me. He asked me what I was in need for, and invited me to come to Mass later that evening. I figured it couldn't hurt anything and that perhaps I could get something in the way of more lowly motives, out of it.

 

 

Father Ralph served me some beef stew afterwards, and I counted the monies that I had pilfered from the tithing plates. I suppose I could have merely asked Father Ralph directly for the money, but I had been raised to be quite xenophobic, and one could even say, hostile towards those not of "my kind."

 

 

I continued to go to Father Ralph's Mass if anything, for the food and the monies I could pilfer up until that day, when I was 17, standing upon the stormy precipice of my own suicidal contemplation. Although, that time was not the first. And as I stood there with all of the anguish and hard-won worldly wisdom of a human being much older in soul than the 17 chronological years that I was, I wrestled again to find remorse and absolution for yet another sin committed as of recent.

 

 

The young woman had Titian hair and a lithe, boyish figure. I had seen her cross my way quite often since she began to attend the church. She always came alone and was rather taciturn, so I found her to be somewhat of a mystery. And like all red-blooded young men, I had a certain libidinous interest in her. She wasn't really desirable in any sort of wanton way, but I was intrigued, nevertheless.

 

 

When she saw me, however, she tried to avoid me, usually rather discreetly and yet, at other times, not so graciously. I surmised that she probably just regarded me as the vagrant gypsy-boy and street urchin that I was. But one evening, after Mass, she approached me rather haughtily. She claimed that she had seen me stealing from the tithing plates and intended to alert the proper authorities at once. And this, I suppose, was the proverbial whip that broke the lion's back. I knocked the girl unconscious and then dragged her into a vacant alleyway where I proceeded to strangle her.

 

 

As she kicked, struggled and pleaded vehemently with me, I became strangely aroused, and tore off her clothing and forced myself upon her. This was not my first experience of the kind, yet it was the first of this perverse kind of erotic variety. After I had emptied myself into her, I knew now what I had to do. She had to be permanently silenced. For you see, we of the New Gypsy breed would literally do anything to preserve our freedom. Thus, I asphyxiated the girl until she went completely limp and ran off into the night before my deed was caught. But, despite however the Grande Facade might have been so masterfully adorned by me, I was always greatly and sentiently disturbed by my actions. And the tight, visor-like grip never loosened upon my conscience, gradually with each venal turn, like so many others experience.

 

 

And yet my inner anguish & dissonance reverberated deafeningly nevertheless. For I also carried deep within, the hidden but pure heart of an Artist and a Poet. So it was that day upon that cliff that I made a vow to myself to become an agent of Creation instead of Destruction. I went to Father Ralph and announced my intention and hopes to go to Art School, where my gifts could best be honed and brought to fruition.

 

 

And since I, of course, had no way of financing such a venture myself, asked Father Ralph to be my benefactor. But, as he himself came from indigent circumstances and indeed, had taken a very vow to them, said that he could not help me but that he might be able to find someone who could.

 

 

I waited eagerly for his news, as I was determined this time to transcend my depravity and bring some Good and Beauty into this world. For once, I wanted to be the "salt and the light" of this earth rather than the grit and the dark. And it was merely two weeks later that Father Ralph came to me with his news. He said that those he had spoken to did not want to invest in me. This news, however, came only as a slight shock to my soul, as I surely had become all too aware of the stigmatic brand which a New Gypsy bore to no end. I hadn't truly expected anything to come of it, yet still, my passion superseded my chagrin, and I continued thereafter with more perseverance than before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 6

 

 

 

At long last, I found my patron in one of the fine arts professors at a university I wished to attend. I accepted with some hesitancy however, as I knew not just at what cost to myself such beneficence on the part of a total stranger would exact. I had not yet decided upon just one major of study, preferring to allow the experience itself to guide me along the way. I began immediately immersing myself in poetry and music composition, also painting, sculpting and performing in the university theatre ensemble in my spare time.

 

 

Despite my lowly gypsy heritage, my artistic and intellectual acumen and my charm came to be quite revered by most. I made a few allies and many enemies along the way, slowly but surely. And one friendly virtue I did possess was a strict sense of loyalty to those that I valued and those who appreciated me. One such person was Kieran. Kieran and I came to be known on the campus for our various antics. One of these pranks was quite pyromaniacal. Our Philosophy professor in particular was the one to arouse our impish ire and was the one towards whom this act of pyromancy was directed.

 

 

Late one evening, Kieran and I set fire to his office, of course, making sure the halls were vacant. Luckily, we were never caught but did enjoy every minute of it. I suppose the old adage would apply, that you can lead a savage out of the wilderness, but never tame the beast in the man himself.

 

 

Nevertheless, despite my occasional minor digressions, I still yearned to refine and cultivate my higher self. I got through my first semester of school with savoir faire and looked forward eagerly to the next. My patron and his wife were very pleased with their earthly investment and assured me of their continuing patronage.

 

 

Thus my journey of higher learning continued. But by far, one of the most epiphanous experiences which I encountered occurred the moment I saw her. We came to each other in the night. There was no hesitancy in our bodies as our weary minds and thundering hearts seeped with the sickeningly sweet molasses of an intense melancholic yearning. Desire perspired through our pores like a slow, tepid and easy grieving of the flesh, bodies unrolling like ancient scrolls reifying and mapping the terrain of some forbidden religion and Dark Eden.

 

 

As we climaxed, our tears formed yokes of silent confession, released to the ministering care of that subliminal priest to the one sin neither cardinal nor venial, yet simply sublime in its poignant inevitability and elegant symmetry of bio-logic. And it was that night that the storm came home, I, the thunder and she, the lightning, in perfect synchrony. I had met my match. But still, I hid like a boy, always revealed a man, cloaked within the silent fury of what I had been denied, and of the webs I had woven with my casual lies. For what lies of omission this heart has told, as it writhes languidly, in ecstatic fervour beneath the black satin sheets of Feigned Indifference.

 

 

For she has come to know me all too well. And so has Faith been forfeited in the grip of Fear's searing Lust. For Fear is a sodomite with no bounds, indiscriminately and serially promiscuous. And it wants you to know, that it does not rape for mere gratification, but for sanctification-for the very meaning and essence of its existence. Hence, the only way to defeat this kind of enemy lies within the cultivation of the metaphysical martial art of turning it against itself, so that it may learn from the inside-out just what it does to its captors.

 

 

Yes, this seems the only way to put Faith back in the battle for good. But that's just it, for Faith, by its very essence can commit no sins against itself. And so again, shall the wicked increase in numbers and the noble be precious and few. And it is perhaps for this reason that the good die and are quickly forgotten, while the vile are idolized and immortalized. For ladies and gents, this is Fear's world, truly home only to those who serve it first. And as for those who resist? They must find a way to serve the unbearded beards of Virtue & Integrity, both requiring of them, a dire detachment from those baser instincts of self-preservation and a staving off the insidious pangs of Fear especially in the face of this Sisyphean task.

 

 

For both tasks coddle a dangerous devotion, for in choosing to either honor the life which the Divine has granted or to serve the corporeality which the Devil goads, fragmentation and madness are soon to set in. One cannot serve two masters, yet one must still somehow, answer to them both. Thus have we, two irreconcilable worlds in constant, catastrophic collision. Yet this is perhaps just the sad fate of Humankind, to dance with fire while treading tranquil waters. The longing to be caressed by the hot, livid tongues of Passion's flames so that we may be brought to that salvation found only within unfettered communion with the primeval. For oftentimes, in order to tame the beast within, we must lie with it.

 

 

At the start of my third semester at the University, still under the gracious tutelage of the professor and his wife, I had gained much knowledge. Yet this knowledge was much more than of that found in books. Many things were being unearthed within me. And I offered much resistance, at first. The dawning occlusion of my true inner savage was bewildering to say the least. I would attend Mass with Father Ralph and slowly began searching the dark, dank depths of my mortal soul not only for a moralistic philosophy, but for a more straight and narrow path. And it was upon one Sunday morning that I experienced a noumenal phenomenon that would change the course of my life.

 

 

Up until then, I had grown all-too accustomed to tickling the dark underbelly of the Beast, but, upon that Sunday morning, in the twinkling of an eye, I was changed. And, as I would continue to learn, the ways of the Spirit move very subtly-almost imperceptibly. I will attempt to describe the experience with mere words, yet most of it will inevitably have to remain a mystery, inscrutable.

I was in my dormitory, lying upon the black, burlap sheets of misery and despair, when lo and behold, a presence seemingly paradoxical appeared where, I lie as a torrent of emotion washed over me, leaving me not with a feeling of depletion, yet with an indescribably blissful sense of completion. And as I then began to ponder upon the existence of a higher power, I began rising up to the peak of some holy, calming tower. And I was blessed with such an ethereal sensation and elation, that I was thus disassociated from any further indignation.

 

 

Instead, throughout my flesh I felt this incredible warmth, weightlessness and serenity, although at the moment, I wasn't aware that I was experiencing His Divinity. And as the hair upon my skin stood on end and my whole meta-physiology was titillated to the point where Body & Soul reunified-were electrified by this metaphysical power that flowed through me, I was born again. And my once ravaged and scarred essence had been miraculously healed and cover-coated with Love and Security, by the intense Light of the Heavenly Father's aura, as He tenderly welcomed me.

 

 

This holy, dynamic light, the reflection of a power unable to fully conceive, bathed and cleansed my impure soul, thus the devil was forced to flee. However, the result of this theophanic rapture and deliverance which had manifested a return to innocence would prove only just how subterranean were the chasms which a life lived in egregious carnality and depravity had grown. Yet when I sat quietly and contemplatively upon those pews of birch every Sunday, reaching out a heart's hand to grasp the intangible, I knew now without a doubt, that my soul's reconciliation with God and gradual ascension towards His Kingdom would be unfathomably redemptive and transcendent both despite and because of my abysmally fallen state.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 7

 

 

 

I am 19, standing upon the beach where once barren earth was desiccate and desolate but if in the womb of God, surrogate Father of a humankind so plagued by bias and the gluttonous bigotry of subjectivity, relativity. I note that there are just as many occasion for song as there are for silent suffering and weeping. But if I dream only while asleep, I am always, sleeping. There is something within me. There has always been something within me that knows that I am greater than the sum of my parts-and even greater than that.

 

 

Yet knowing this merely increases my agony and further stultifies any exultation. They say that angels gather on the shores at sunrise and that they hear music we cannot, and that they dress in flowing robes of black and billowing white, and that they always know the difference between wrong and right. It has also been said that the one thing they cannot understand is how human mortal kind often seeks just as much solace in Hate as we do in Love.

 

 

They say that angels walk the earth without ever feeling it beneath their feet, cool, firm and inviting, instead feeling the "gravitas" of the world only within their hearts. They say that when angels are nigh, we rarely even know it. They also say that angels are among us as we speak, secretly wishing, that they were us. This much, at least, we share in common. But of the demonic? I often think we are better acquainted with this unseen, dark principality.

 

 

I have just committed another murder. The blood still teems upon my hands, my blood lust having grown far more compelling than any divination I can draw upon within my animus. And as I stand here, kissing Fear upon the lips, the tongue of Rage enters, my eager orifice shuddering with douleur exquise, as a primal scream instead escapes, now having found perfect pitch and harmony with the morose choir of a legion of demonic quartets, shattering the fine membrane of the essence.

 

 

Standing here kissing Fear upon the neck, shards of that shattered essence are hurled, piercing the jugular-I, now taking heed, for Fear bleeds, filling the Void to overflowing, a thorough purification, dirtying the means.

 

 

Standing here, kissing Fear upon the collarbone, a trembling boy with the body of a man, the bone and marrow jutting forth, jagged and weary to cut the lower lip of indifference, releasing a gradual drip of bear-hugged release and a loosening of the jaw, as it falls silent, gracious, to rest upon the charged air.

 

 

Standing here kissing Fear upon the breast, the Ultimate Symbiosis with the immortal Earthly Mother, who coaxes all to gluttony upon her fecund loam of rancid milk and love of money, the oozing, eager mind splattering all sooty and black upon the heaving bosoms of all One-Nation-Under-God-Indivisible-Figureheads-On-Standby.

 

 

Standing here, kissing Fear upon the navel, a build-up of fire-hazardous lint clings to the hot, tea-stained incisor, as the ever-livid tongue remains flaccid and imbecilic, and the violent vocal instinct has its say, nonetheless.

 

 

Standing here, kissing Fear upon the knee, exalted through denigration, as the masochists of intangible and endless archives are filed maniacally for past, present and future use en coda upon the amygdala-all limbic systems a-go, sending a mercurial blood rush to the capillaries, pupils now constricting, vessels dilated then broken, as the kneeling rewards only those who feign submission while living in hypodermic anarchy, and it peels away the tender, bruised flesh of the human Soul, a fat feast of substantial portions.

 

 

Standing here, kissing Fear upon the foot, the unopposable hallux, hairy with arrogance, gives one last whiff of this chemical warfare, a solemn truce of passive resistance is made, a callused heel is raised and I am kicked straight-forth into transcendent absolution.

 

 

All of my life it has been the very thing which could have destroyed me that has, in the end, been my Saviour. And yet, it is often the things which I thought would save me that have systematically sought to destroy me. Quod nutrit, me destruit, indeed. And thus have I worshiped, only Paradox. For I have lived religiously by its laws and creeds. And miraculously, am still here to testify to it. And I often ask how much darkness we must let into ourselves before we can see enough to be enlightened for good. For where the Light is brightest, how the shadows do loiter about, screaming out relentlessly for our acknowledgment, traipsing at our heels like mad, stray, starving orphans, until we succumb to some benign sense of perdition for daring to put Joy before Despair and Living before Dying.

 

 

For truly, what is the cure for the human condition? There is none. And this is the remedy. For those who insist upon walking backwards and blind always fall to their deaths. Thus have I sought at all costs to be fully what I am. Yet I, and those like me, have been deemed unfit for public consumption, for the truth is, most choose to dwell in Lies and fear-even abhor Truth. Yet it is only the Truth which sets us free. It is only within the shadow of the light that we are truly seen and fully found. And she was the only one who understood this.

 

 

Hence, did she become my one and only accurate mirror-my soulmate. Hence did she become life itself to me, as I underwent a kenotic dying unto her daily. For Beauty, by its very nature, is indiscreet-it can be no other way. For though the world may loathe Beauty and those who seek it and possess it with a seething Envy and Contempt, it also seeks them with the same urgency. There with her, it was a slow, sweet swaying slaying of Self. Of her, the angels and The Divine spoke without rebuke.

 

 

Oh Soul of emeralds brought forth from the most barren mine, she was the Lost Oblivion. For most of my life, the only faith which I truly knew was a deep and abiding faith in uncertainty. For if the Divine was indeed in reign over my life, then, Fate was even more estranged than I had previously pondered. In essence, my existence was an entity in dissension with its very self.

 

 

And more and more, the need for my own vehement will and earnest search in and of themselves to be sufficient in taming my ennui were proving futile. For Caution may be a cataract in the eye of Fate, but should it suffice to presume, that the only remedy be, by proxy, a removal of the whole damn eye? Although this would, indeed, bring a whole new definition to blind faith.

 

 

And perhaps Ignorance is bliss, at least until one's own folly is brought to reminiscence. And when this occurs, we cannot help but be changed forever. And so we tug upon the tattered, thread-bare sleeves of our idols, wishing and pleading to return to sweet inscience.

 

 

But the mind is far less akin to pardon than the heart. And I found that there truly was no such thing as denial, let alone oblivion. But I knew that I must go on. I knew that I must find faith in something, even if it was merely in my own faithlessness. For I intuited from deep within, that to believe was indeed to be, but that to only believe was the Queen Mother of all Despair and Regret. For I knew that Life was to be nurtured and found first from within, then from without.

 

 

And even if nothing seems to have meaning, even if, in our omniscience-lacking eyes it all amounts to dust in the end, I came to truly see just how Hopes & Dreams may indeed be virtues, but how they can also reveal themselves to be lies of omission. And I resolved that I could have faith, if I could find faith in anything, in the constancy of human venary and vagary.

 

 

I could have faith also, in just as much of an abundance of the sweetbreads of this life and mortal human experience. And above all else, of course, I could have faith in the one who would stop at nothing to preserve such things. Thus, at the tender age of, my lover had left me, and I had become what I had for so long feared. I wanted Reason back, but he had left without so much as an 'Adieu.'

 

 

Hence was I, for awhile, back with Delirium & Shame, and Oh! What a loathsome threesome we indeed made. And I often pondered: What is this mortal mind? At first, it wraps you within a warm, luxurious, satin sanguinity with its faint echo of a faint echo of a whisper-then without warning, becoming a shattering soprano scream. It is the mind, ever clear and ever present in its danger. In its first phase, it is the conscience, amour-propre, and its fruit comes from the majestic tree of all that is Good & Wholesome.

 

 

At its second phase, it is the conscience vagabond, still pondering the possibility of its prodigality and thus is it, still copious with Hope. This phase is most commonly where most dwell in limbo for most of their lives upon this earth. Yet unless the crimes that this phase of mind has been party to are brought to the light of Admonition, Truth & Justice, it will quickly begin its transmogrification into the next phase of Being: the conscience lost.

 

 

And this is the third and final phase. For once the mind has fully committed itself to ignorance & insolence, the Soul is hard to deprogram. Yet, despite this keen insight into all things, I never felt completely lost, despite the heinous crimes I had committed. It was this very sentience which often drove me towards madness, yet would also serve to be my one and only redeeming grace.

 

 

Oftentimes, it is those things which encumber us the most, which have the potential, in the end, of setting us free. Yet we often must descend to Hades, before we find our Valhalla. Why do you think so many waste away their truest, transcendent potential for the deceptive ground-leveling lows of Mediocrity? Because we know all too well, of the costs to be exacted should we rise above that Icarian dread. Yet, it was in me to soar to dangerous heights as much as it was to plumb the depths of precarious lows. Yet I would continue to fight, for I, was one very much hell-bent on Heaven.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 8

 

 

 

For as long as I can remember, I have craved hunger-not the kind that can be fed-but an ever toiling, burning, raw hunger. I wish not to be filled up, for it will be then that I will begin to slowly die from within of a slow abreaction of abysmal Grief, and from a kind of starvation which can be born only out of a gluttonous overabundance of all things malnourishing to the human Body & Spirit.

 

And I will evermore pine for the intractable loss of my appetence-that which drives me ever onward, to truly live. For if I am filled to nimiety with all that I have ever desired for, and, upon that last day of my current incarnation, right before I am to be reborn from the still, barren womb of all of this possessing-all of this knowing-am found unfit for any celestial inheritance, I shall be taken-a sad soul, smug with my own satiety, to my eternal penance: Nullity. And I will never glimpse again, of God's face. True Hell, indeed.

 

 

Nay, I say-leave me empty. Leave me free, to fully be and to become, with infinitude. To yearn. To want. It is the very engine of the mortal human soul. To want too much has been the sin of many, myself included. But to want for nothing at all is perhaps the one blaspheme which even the Devil himself abhors. Apathy, a deadly sin oft untallied. Or perhaps not wanting is, in and of itself, an equally substantial and veritable want. That old yen to feel no more exuberant joy for Life, so that one may let the ravening beasts of Fear, Despair & Disillusionment lie. For only an Existential kind of concupiscence can bring so much anguish.

 

 

Hence, existential indifference is more often than not, an all-too-accessible and ever-potent anesthetic. But soon enough the heart, for want of wanting, begins to atrophy, thus inflicting an even more wrenching, unbearable and inconsolable pain upon mind, body and soul. For right along with shelter, hydration, food and love lies Longing, Conviction, forward flowing movement-but most of all-Hope. For Life is neither given to sentimentality nor is it loyal, and it bats not an eye when we desert it.

 

 

Yet if we are fortunate, we will meet at least one lone soul like ourselves who will not buy in so gullibly when we boast of our newfound despondency and insouciance, and will reveal our so-found nihilistic zeal and fervour for the deception that it really is. And hopefully, we will never get so far as to not be able to find our way back, although some do never return. For faith only in faithlessness is not hearty enough to bear the full brunt of Dreams shunned into silent captivity by an oppressive, hideous constraint so akin to the living dead.

 

 

Desire is our very breath of life. And oh, how I breathed it in. I could not stop desiring to live-even, to die. For the stairway to Heaven is constructed of the detritus of Humankind's highest and lowest aspirations and endeavors, and God wanted for me to have it all. Yet, taking all things hand in hand, so did the Devil. For by my 20th birthday, I had indeed experienced almost all there was to experience. And for while, I lived, as so many must, in a limbo state of neither-nor, neither here nor there.

 

 

I devoted myself to my studies and joined a traveling theatre ensemble which traveled all across the world as time and the budget allowed. I became somewhat of a household name within certain circles. My wide range of talents definitely did not go unappreciated. And it was this particular period of my young life that I can say brought at least a modicum of genuine happiness and contentment for me. In other words, I had never been quite so well-behaved.

 

 

And whatever indiscretions I was guilty of were nothing in comparison to those of my younger days. Although, I was and would always be somewhat haunted by my past, as all of the human species are, and would always also be bound to that of my New Gypsy heritage. One night in particular reminded me of this.

 

 

The night air was warm and damp. The moon hung, crescent, like an afterthought. I could not quite say why I chose him. The bloodlust billowed about my skin like a black, velveteen cloak and I felt whole again in my older, thicker skin. My Shadow merged into me like sweet liquid Night and I breathed in once again, the dense air of primal release like an orphan-child deprived of feed by the negligent Mother of Civility and the insolent Father of Shame.

 

 

As the knife plunged deftly into his flesh, I surrendered myself again to Hate's asphyxiating embrace. For Mother & Father had forsaken me, and now, I walked alone, unhindered, unencumbered. There would be no more Rage left to simmer in rolling boil until its whimpering simper of evaporation and evanescence. There would only be, this dance with Death.

 

 

And as I tasted of his life's blood upon my tongue, tepid and metallic, I feasted upon the delicate, succulent mystery meat of Primeval Catharsis, discarding the bitter broth of Tempered Vindication. For I had so long thrashed within my relentless knowing. And so, did I unleash myself in full upon the dogs of Impulsive Inclination again that dark, warm night, for although I had reigned over them and their vapid, four-clawed and foul-fanged fallacies for a short while, I wanted again to feel what I had been denying myself in playing the role of mere Ringmaster of the Beast, instead becoming the Beast itself, once more.

 

 

And so, like I had done so many times before, I let it tame me. Yet I still raged for the righteous choice which I knew I still possessed yet could not fully trust. And somehow, I always managed to escape the long arm of the Law. And in the public eye, it seemed as if I never had to pay the penance for my sins or the punishment for my crimes, but this was an illusion. For I suffered. I suffered greatly within that prison crafted not from mortar, brick and stone, but from Memory & Time. Yet the convictions composing the Gothic architecture of this self-imposed interment would, by that Divine Judge of Ultimate Mercy, be exonerated. In due time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 9

 

 

 

I have tread where I should not have tread. Yet it is too late, and the Truth has become so tragically distorted that the Lie becomes all too seductive. And oftentimes we come to have danced with lies for so long, they become the only verities we know. And when I open my eyes every morning to greet the day anew, there they hover at the bedside, so diligently, so eager for my command. They say there is no such thing as a Truth which saves and I believe them, even as I lie again to myself. I want to feel unbridled Joy, yet I mistakenly revel in my own enslavement, as the Lies sneer with smug comeuppance at my naiveté.

 

 

Joy, they say, is the only true prevarication. And oh, how I know these entities so well, yet still fail to catch them at their game. And I am saved only when I allow myself to realize that their voices are not my own and are out only to maim, perplex and distract from the pursuit of my nobler goals. And this is when I stop to remember Beauty.

 

 

Pulchrum est id quod visum placet. Beauty is indeed, that which pleases the eye of the beholder. And, of course, there is the beauty of pure aesthetics-that which is concerned with the physical, and beauty of the Soul-that which is of a much more transcendental quality. The ultimate Beauty of the latter kind, I have always thought to be found in Humility-an acquiescence exultant which this wretched, ruminative mind and pitiable Soul have failed countless times to find and hold a tight enough reign upon. For most seemingly have both everything to prove and everything to lose.

 

 

And the greatest of these to lose grasp of is Beauty. For Beauty is both a blessing and an equally taxing vexation when the mind, soul and body once possessed it in its fullest fruition, yet now lie in great wont of. What is Beauty? Some find it in abundance only where Fear lays cohabitant with Lust. How does one put this into words? Yet I must find a way, somehow. The ones who revel in its secrets and its mystery are also the ones who harbour the most Fear & Trembling within their hearts. For Beauty is power, but a power unsurpassed, as it permeates its way languidly throughout the thin membrane of the fragile human essence like soft moonlight after the unbearable radiance of the sun has submitted from a long, hot summer of Mundane Consciousness.

 

 

Here is one of its secrets, Beauty. It whispers yet it rages. It is sly though not in the least bit coy and lets only those who dare enter into its presence. For it is a presence of the most primeval forms of mind, metaphysics and matter. Beauty is in the way that everything in Nature knows its place and is violently corrected when it steps out of line. Yes, Beauty is in grace. Yet Beauty can also be the oldest alibi in the book to abdicate from a variety of crimes, as the mortal human mind sees juts as much eloquence in Hatred as in Love.

 

 

The heart always bleeds while the conceptual, shape-seeking Flesh's Eye knows not. Yet the heart is what determines all in the end. And thus must we learn to condition our minds to the suspension of the disbelief that the ponderance of all things Good & Wholesome are far more meritorious than that search and embrace of all things vile and gratifying only to that staggeringly insolent and arrogant anti-imago divinus that is our stigmatic earthly heritage.

 

 

Yet like dust to dust, the blissful merging, the soft, supple form of this matter at hand pools with the dense, calcified mass of Irony. For the womb of any impulse nourishes and seeks to substantiate not with what we feign to need and believe is our feed, but with that which we have sought to neglect through our covetous obsessions. But necessity harbours neither memory nor knowledge of how the disease and diffidence of this existence insinuates itself malignantly into essence day in & day out. And this sentience of cognition and void synthesis became both fragmented and whole within the roving, quivering eye of Lust's suspension of burgeoning.

 

 

And for a brief moment in time, I saw her, the Lost Oblivion. And all was revealed to me in such resplendent simplicity that Love, Lust and Beauty revealed themselves to be the unholy Trinity of all raison d’être. For there, along with food, sheltering and hydration again lay Longing, an essential of costly omission.

 

 

And as it stretched and retreated, stretched and retreated like the tired arm of God, I learned in that moment a very essential thing: the longed for is merely an objectification of a subjectification of an even greater need. And only after knowing this, can a human soul come face to face with its Creator, a Being who wants us to know that when we begin our final descent and have come to the intersection where we must ask ourselves what we want and can no longer provide the Answer for ourselves, ascension awaits, Home.

 

 

Thus, it was not any rebuke that could not bear on her part after all was said and done. It was her silence, lazy, loathsome and meandering, always choosing to nestle itself invadingly within the already crowded chambers of my mind. Yet she thought that this would bring me relief-cruel to be kind. Yet it was exactly in that moment that she would have given away her comprehension of my need and her part in fulfilling it. For I would often remind her of how silence spoke more vehemently and eloquently than any verbal dissonance. Perhaps my fervency must just have frightened her. But any inanity aches for the sweet, simplifying salve of understanding and acceptance.

 

 

And I would tell her not to write me off just yet, for many of her ways were foreign to me. And although I could not fully empathize, I also knew the necessity of random pseudo-consolation. Yet I held no grudges for her mute, deaf and dumbed-down concern, for through her insouciant evasion was mirrored only her own reflection, so akin to mine. Fear in any form always reveals us. Yet as long as I remained in the state I was in, I could not give without first partaking.

 

 

She was, by far not my ultimate or final solution, yet was a very essential part of the formula for the undoing of my undoing. My need for her was not vital, but it was visceral. My heart had a hollow reverberation when faced with absence of her relation. My blood ran chilled with the rush of toxic yearning. My laughter came from the lungs, wheezy and shallow instead of from the gut-brazen and keen. My bones were silent and stiff as they struggled to move both towards and away from her solemn withdrawal.

 

 

My sweat tasted of impending neurosis. And what of my mind? It wished that it could merge with hers. But the mind is a diffident cell. It lets in many invaders but will not dare enter into another mind which so neglectfully refuses Truth. And what of my soul? It was unfazed but not immune. There simply was no one like her. She could be let go of, but never replaced. I was always filled with utter abandon. My door was always open. No amount of Truth could shut me in as no amount of Truth could shut her out. All I wanted was for her to strip herself away and dive into me like she had done our first night together.

 

 

She was the only one who knew me and could exonerate me of the crimes of such disorderly cognitive conduct that I had wracked myself with all of those years. Yet still, it ended perhaps both despite and because of my intense yen for her. And after I had completed my first year of University, for the summer I had off before returning, the professor and his wife invited me to travel Europe with them. I accepted their gracious offer and we set off. Our first destination was France. I had taught myself a little of the local customs and catchphrases so I figured I could fare pretty well. Our first night there in Paris we all attended the Opera. I had never been one for Opera, but did not want to offend my patrons and so I went. After that, we all went back to the suite, sipped wine and chatted.

 

 

For the next three months we tried to take in all we could of the sights in London, Milan, Brussels and Prague. I had managed so far to keep myself on good behaviour and was feeling more hopeful by the time my first semester of my second year began. But my demons were always toiling beneath the surface and pining for release. For when the light goes out, the shadows may appear that they have vanished, but be not deceived, for this just means that it has morphed into all-encompassing darkness.

 

 

I often became seduced by the Devil, mistaking freedom for redemption. Yet it is not unlike Fate, and is very fragile and if we neglect it, both Light & Shadow may be lost to our sight and henceforth will the darkness be better equipped to deceive us. Shadow & Light must coexist not merely because of their complementarity but because in due time, they will eventually cancel each other out and all that will be left is the Choice and an eager new Void, ever hopeful and infinite.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 10

 

 

 

Let me tell you of Oleander Rose. You are drawn in by her charms, ensnared by her persuasions and her beauty. You are utterly enthralled by her aura of feminine mystique. But she is poison-and a poison all the more insidiously toxic and intoxicatingly potent than any other force known to mankind. Yet, it is a poison which does not altogether kill, scourging and impurifying the Soul's blood, leaving the main vein of the Mind's heart locked in an endless quarantine of obsessive torment and madness.

 

 

And this is an illness most common and most communicable, infectiously borne of that air of man's most venerated weakness and most abused strength. And just one breath inward of her fragrance, is all it takes, until your agony has increased even beyond your longing for the Death which would restore the precious Life she has plundered and pillaged from you. For with each gasping, groping suspiration and moan she bears only smug sneers and jeers of fiendish delight and satisfaction.

 

 

And so, you come to know the curse of Man since his inception, a vex which had brought so many and will no doubt continue in its sadistic quest to leave men with nothing left in their hearts when she is finished with them, but an irreconcilable hatred of that which they love and a masochistic love for that which they hate. And this is that of a beastly-born instinct, the most prolific of afflictions-an endlessly self-debasing pursuit of the systematic slaughter of the only true life-giving dying.

 

 

Yet the mortal human soul I suppose will always be in bondage to such means to our ends. For where the Sublime & the Plebeian collide-we all walk this fine line daily. No one escapes from this. For this epic battle of forces is the driving force behind all things, primeval and forthwith. From the microcosmic to the macrocosmic, from the mundane and concrete to the supramundane and the intangible, Paradox is the fueling, dueling fire and life-energy behind all things.

 

 

Yet all seeming Paradox or contradictions are already reconciled unto themselves-are already one. We are the ones with the myopic vision, fumbling and stumbling blindly around as we try to fix something that is already whole and unbroken. Yet still, no man escapes from Oleander Rose. For this is dealing with another matter altogether-in a league of its own entirely. And he who is wise learns to play dead and dance right along with her. And woe is man alone, for he alone must test her fantasy against her harsh, crude reality daily, or risk a life lived devoid of a very essential part of himself.

 

 

He who wishes to live fruitfully must either cut himself open at his core or slowly atrophy from the inside out, to bear only a withered, rotten fruit-seed to the Gardener of his rebirthing. Yet, in choosing an open mind and heart, although it may very well be a Virtue, more often than not, serves as a chute down which the Devil plies his trade at every impasse. And the deadliest symptom of her intoxification goes right along with this: the paralysis of Body, the wrenching of Heart and the stupor of Mind-the effects of which he who ingests her cyanotic bloom feels almost instantaneously. She is a slow cellular suffocation from the inside out.

 

 

Thus, is there no remedy then? Well, perhaps there is one. But it requires nothing less than a total recall-a complete rewriting of the history of Humankind itself, which is not in the planning of the Divine as of yet. Hence, who or what is to render this remedy? Who or what is to summons the saving graces of Hope to redeem Mankind from her wasting? It is most certainly not the Demon that has you seized by the throat while you are within her enthrallment. Immediate meeting, is the fatal greeting.

 

 

For all throughout history, one thing has always preceded either Man's most triumphant Victory or his most ignoble Defeat. One thing has always played the role of both protagonist and antagonist in the final act of a man's life of triumph or doom. She has bore many a name-even many an alias, yet she is known to all simply, as Woman. And yet, even being wizened to this, I came to her yesterday, a man in mortal sin, veiled in forgetful longing. I came to her today, the boy she always knew, so in need of mothering surrogacy.

 

 

There was a quickened urgency in our bodies, our rapid-fire heartbeats and animalistic eroticisms trying to betray the cumbersome laments of a world we knew we would never fully partake in. Yet this was a world which very much weighed in on our hearts, nonetheless-hers, of sterling silver and mine, of fool's gold.

 

 

And soon Passion becomes subservient to Desperation, thus emptying it of its good, for it is no longer crystalline with that keen luster of Lust and spectral emanation of sincerity. And so, our hearts were time and again sold 'as is' to the lowest possible bidder of Idealist Mercantry. We were out of our depths, perilously channeling a shallow end where all before us had already wept, bled, spat, pissed and shat.

 

 

And now we had become what we had for so long feared-fatally simplified, having failed the ultimate test of keeping even but one secret for ourselves. Yet, we were relieved beyond measure when we, letting go to hold on, feigned no shame and no hesitancy as our bodies and minds merged as one-Unification again, becoming Freedom. At last we were lost, redeemed by the sanative delirium of Love-Lust, and our Earthly Mother was pleased.

 

 

Yet when Heaven lays its bed upon the bosom of Earth, oh! With what agility does Hell rise up in jealous revolt from its grave! Yet we must seek it anyway. We must risk Life at the cost of Death, and Salvation at the price of potential Damnation if we are to fully know ourselves and this strange but beautiful inhabitancy we have been born into. Yet, I knew that she and I had to follow the same ebb and tide of all things and part ways. For eventually, no matter what breed the creature, the flames of our passions would become hot enough that the flesh must learn the art of reflexology or expend its energy too soon.

 

 

As I finished my second year of University, I began to learn how to more deftly manipulate this alchemical formula which weighed Being & Nothingness so tediously, a science indeed so exact and exacting that it is hard to follow. Father Time does not always know best and can become quite abusive and exploitative to this Temporal Child, shattering his hourglass against my weathered, weary cheek, letting it be known just who's in charge. He then positions a scythe down low, to remind me that I have yet many crops of time-grain through which I must sift before I am released from this mortal contract unto a much more tolerable Guardian & Eternity.

 

 

I realize that I have been granted a limited existence upon these here rugged, worldly plains, yet my tolerance of Time's torment seems about spent, making every moment seem as though it will progress in horrific perpetuity. For I lose and yet within the same realm all too keenly perceive the concept of Time moving fatefully forward when I am stuck and sinking fast, beneath the much and mire of the Past.

 

 

I walk with the manic pace of modernity, footsteps thumping the cold, hard earth in time to the flickering, hurried heat of the hell-bent heart. A crowd of festivity seekers weaves this way and that, a mercurial flow of "I"-onized energy, all one massive amalgam of form not yet made fully realized by the Master Sculptor's hand, as they struggle with the Ultimate Question: Oh, how to live as one and One?

 

 

Doomsday sayers exalt themselves upon rusted trash-can barrels, providing ample opportunity for this strict Unity, as they hand out Salvation & Damnation in one heaping helping, letting all whom-excluding themselves have sinned, to cast away their own stones of fire and brim. The streets become a fatal sea of Bible tracts, blotted with little smudges of blood: "Here is my blood, take of it and lick," the paper-cuts of over coercion to rebellion, marching in blind obeisance to the formulaic law of Mortalkind's endless encumbrance, a cup runneth over-under-asunder.

 

 

A young mother nearby strains to the cumbersome burdens of Son & Self, trying to defy her youth as she twists and fidgets in her own skin. She now reaches down to pick up her boy who, sensing Mother's anxiety through the telepathic tendencies of Mother & Child, reaches out a tiny hand, already lined with such willful dependency, to seek out Mother's warm, nourishing breast.

 

 

And so, yet another one latches onto the cycle of redundant instinct in a world still bleeding and sore from the repeat sodomization of Infancy morphing into Death's heyday at the first wailing breath. I am still and silent as I ponder those who ravage themselves with such overpopulation and trial and tribulation, as they bring life after death after life after death into this new-old world, submitting themselves and their progeny as scapegoats of all dire digression, to the altars of the Profane time and time again.

 

 

Yet people will always need people to serve and to serve them, and so we stand amongst the pews with aching feet, bruised knees and itchy hearts, seeking Unity while donning the Grande Facade which has been so assiduously assigned to us by a world spinning endlessly into Vertigo. We are bound by the supermassive gravity of the Void, borne of an Alienation so wrenching that our instincts must become perverted in order to preserve that which is most Sacred. And so Atlas remains on strike, and we remain enslaved by the Master of each our own weighty, solipsistic Fates.

 

 

Yet he is a Master who appears in our Mind's eye's mirror when we dare peer into it, as a mere reflection of a reflection of a phantom apparition, a flash of perception too swift to sense. Thus does our finitude reign as we bear the bloodied crown of the God within we seek to exalt, whirling in Dionysian masquerade and frenzied disassembly, as we watch ourselves eventually crumble into the Masses, persons once known, now estranged.

 

 

And ultimately, we are brought to our tender shins to kiss the cold, clay feet of Unfathomability, and we are forgiven our sins-we are atoned for, we are saved once more from the human Mind's own obsession with its demi-divinity & Selfdom. Yet many nonetheless continue to go forth in their mad quest, only to be tossed aimlessly upon the stormy seas of Identity, as the sharks begin to circle, lured by the stench of one universal imago-bone, flesh, blood, trembling tendon-Greed, the Kindred Hunger.

 

 

But I had not the malady of most-that despoiling love of mere money, which most associate greed with. No, my greed was that of a kind far more deleterious and subterranean. My hunger was for that power wrought by profligacy itself. And I still often wondered whether I would ever tire of the macabre theatre ensemble which I had assembled around myself. I longed for sublimation of an ultimate kind, yet it continued to elude me and thus did I seek Catharsis & Wholeness in the occult.

 

 

Yet, to never risk life's painstaking and crude dissection, I knew that I risked never being put back together just right-perfection through complex dissection. For true Integration thrives upon-and indeed, is born out of, ravaging moments of disintegration. For whatsoever desires Unity must first allow Fragmentation to assert its force and form, so that Psyche, the Master Architect of all Souls, may bring to fruition the actualization of the Being it envisages within the realm of Divine Projections.

 

 

By the start of my third year at University, I had begun to make quite a living as a painter commissioning the occasional portrait or mural. I engaged as much as possible in all other forms of demiurgic expression, but did not fare as well in those, fiscally speaking. I submitted some of my literary endeavors to various periodicals and journals and hoped to find a publisher for one of my poetry collections.

 

 

I was also performing some of my dramaturgic pieces at various theatre gatherings. I had still managed to escape amercement for all of my crimes. And so, the Beast raged on, thrashing its tail and gnashing its teeth upon the steel bars of my Soul's cage, especially whenever I attempted to substitute, through my art, creation for violence and destruction. Occasionally, however, the Beast had to be fed and let loose. It was going to be a long and arduous Journey, indeed.

 

 

I was also furthering my cause of spiritual refinement by continuing to attend Mass at Father Ralph's church, but, as I was commissioned quite well as an artist now, I at least no longer stole from the tithing plates. One minor demon had been quieted-for now. Whenever I was at Mass, I would begin to sense the mystery and wonder of this Life and of the human condition and experience. And for once, I belonged to a community which demonstrated to me those values which had not been a part of my schooling as a child of the New Gypsies. And slowly, the vise around my soul began to loosen and I grew ever more malleable in Mind & Spirit.

 

 

At times, this feeling frightened me and I would awaken in the middle of the night, heart feeling as if it would burst from my chest, sweat transuding from my every titillated pore, mind and heart in tune only with an abidingly ominous and abysmal Terror. Yet, this could only be a sign of my healing and of the depth of the transformation taking place within me. I often asked myself what this life was which smarted in me like a potential funeral pyre? My core essence pulsated erratically to the indefatigable rhythms of unsubstantiated Fate and my dreams seduced me with whispers of unabridged and cataclysmic awakening.

 

 

And I feared one day that I would be reborn again to the degree that I was so severed from the umbilical cord of any former symbiotic enmeshments that I would come to know our secret full well-Fate and I's-that there is no such thing as mortal transcendence, and I would crash to the ground, a feeble twit-it would split open and I would tumble to the depths of grandiose longings and madness, never to see the light again as it was before, soft on the eyes. For the dim and dark that I dwelt within was my home, my fortress. But, was anybody really home? I feared that sooner or later, the cons would catch on that I was and always had been, on extended sabbatical, a leave of absence with tragic implications. I feared that my soul would become prey to the very thievery which I myself had been privy to.

 

 

And to whom would it belong in the end? Therefore, did I continue casting off that old Hell-fire scarred and singed skin to seek the white, satiny robes of Heaven. For I knew that the only flames which I then must begin dancing with, were only those fanned by the anointing breath of the Holy Spirit. He was continuing a great work in me and there was no telling where it would lead me. I only knew that I could sense a change, and that I was beginning to become consumed by a different kind of Passion, one that would bring me home to my true identity, and my everlasting Destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 11

 

 

 

My last semester of my third year at University, I found myself slipping into madness again. Or was it the womb of God, a soft, slow descent? I would often pray to Him that I wouldn't flood out, then to be pulled under by the weighty elements of this mystical undertow in such states of humane extreme. For the mundane senses often merely mocked my cowardly compliance with promises of the supposed absolutes-of words, sights, sounds, scents, over-recited theorems and overrated conceptions.

 

 

And oh how that deviant, imbecilic Tongue tastes of that bitterly-sweet cherry juice, yet eructs that mystery pit with such haste at the slightest feel and texture astray from what it has been lashed to disarray and abstemious paralysis to savour. And oh, how that impulsive, irretractable Arm shuts that window with such irascible scorn to quiet the nagging drone of the wind as its brother Ear fails to hear that it is the soft, whispering murmur of a praying child from across the hall.

 

 

And oh, how that shape-seeking Eye wishes that what it has seen could but only have preceded what it has merely read or heard or watched countless mouths squander away with inadequate, profane annunciation and denunciation. And if only the haphazard Heart knew that what it believes is true.

 

 

And if only the hedonistic Nose & Skin could both begin again anew, unmitigated by convention, perhaps then would the human mortal know where true Madness multiplies, overpopulating the Society of the Soul with its overbearing antics of pseudo-sustenance and rhetoric Rage.

 

 

For it has become all-too-common in this day and age, to see all while sensing nothing but those whims which seek to cultivate feelings of only Nullity & Perplexity. Yes, it is all-too-common in this day and age, to feel the sensate organism ravaged and even enraptured, as the true feeling and experience still remain to be measured at a mere one degree skin-deep.

 

 

This is the cry of the born-yet-unborn: Having everything and yet wanting nothing-and even less than that-for having nothing is having, nonetheless. This is why so many embrace nihilism. For they know of the secret: Freedom can be found only in negation. For they wish not to be awoken, upon the dark side of morn, to find themselves gratified beyond all satiety, yet betrayed by what has been pillaged from them.

 

 

For in daring to find fulfillment, the heart risks all kinds of thievery & impoverishment being wrought upon it. Yet, we also cannot give continual way to a reeling, disconcerted saunter back into womb-reminiscent Oblivion without exacting the costs of that. For here is where the price is much steeper, as the thief of one's wares is one's very self.

 

 

Yet this is how we all used to be, blissfully ignorant, our soft, plasmatic minds ever-flowing like the Fountain of Youth at the callused feet of our Guardians. Yet we all quickly learn to see just how systematically we are drunk dry. And I feared, should I succumb to this yearning to return to Inscience, that I would never achieve that full Prescience which was the truest Life goal of every human soul.

 

 

Yet, as it is written in the equation, Hope, which to most was self-preservatory, for others such as myself, turned easily self-injurious and even potentially annihilative. For the source of my vitality was often mistaken for Hope but was merely derived from my hunger and my deepest dread. And Passion is not always a virtue.

 

 

Yet every metamorphosis is by nature a very painful one. The being throbs in the pit of the bowels, beneath which some long-ago-forgotten fruit toils and spoils, for want of a better place to rest, save upon the castigating bosom of Fear. Then, the total dismemberment of the only fists which exist to pound through the thickened membrane of the battered Soul, freeing it into a body anew, so that one may finally wield fruits to overflowing.

 

 

Hence, Fear had to be tamed by Courage and my inmost personage, tended with due care, so that my entity was not left to rot beneath mere flesh, bone, trembling tendon and an intellect having grown effete and a heart, indifferent. For I had bade the devil to enter and he would not leave.

 

 

Yet for what Love had been lost had Terror been transposed in macabre measure down to the crusty crux of my frail, iniquitous, fleshly ghost, leaving a residue, cruelly and compliantly fixed. And what my Mind failed to grasp, my Soul sweetly demystified through the slow but sure abreaction of implosive transgression, as I fell into a stunning trance of unruly lucidity and extra-sensory intuition. The Shadow followed me wherever I went-I needed no light to grant it substantiality or form. And yet, despite my breach of such higher Integration, I still felt on the verge of psychotic immersion and frenzy, as the complex architecture of Hypocrisy & Self-Loathing began to construct itself, housing the time-space causation of an endless Void, echoing remnants of Humanity lost.

 

 

And as I floated about, rising and falling with languid stupidity through the cold, damp air of the confines of this human experience, I found Truth again only when I realized that this waking life was merely a lucid dream to which we all must learn to fall asleep. And I would try to find this same so-called madness in others' eyes and wondered just how many could see the actual cogency in mine.

 

 

Maintaining my jeopardy, I enjoyed hating as much as loving to love and to be loved in return. And I often saw just how irreconcilable was this condition of the human heart, and that it could never be pure or at rest within the contaminant dissonance of such contradiction. And I came to see, how oftentimes, the only mercy we can find in ourselves, is in the possessive, lulling embrace of Apathy. For here, it is almost bearable, to the point where Mind, Body & Soul become whole, feel at home at last. Yet this was the main concern: The darkness frees. We see not. We are not seen. But what of the Light? Oh, the light binds with questions all too answer-ready. For here, we are, inescapably seen.

 

 

For the road less travailed is not even a road, but a rail, with much less margin for error-though definitely not injury. The path which I followed was both my mediocre triumph and my terror. Life was so much harder after I began to believe in Heaven & Hell. And I often railed against my faith and against my Creator like a child to its earthly parents: I did not ask to be born a creature of such Fire & Sadism. I did not ask to be born the only creature exalted, and given a Choice, yet who will still not go unscathed and undamned by rebuke and disowning at the hands of this Creator.

 

 

So, what was the way out? The way out, was the way in. What was the way in? The way in, was always no way out. And so would I continue to find both a way in and a way out through the only means at my disposal: Truth and Passion.

 

 

Most would prefer to die of "natural" causes, yet we all live irredeemably encumbered by unnatural clauses. Severed from the umbilical cord of the mother, child flourishes, yet all that truly nourishes, is prophesied to be cut off from the self by the very self time and time again. Accountability is shifted, as Mother & Child further and further drift, to beach the weathering shores of Individuation, where they will both learn of Nature, discovering their own nakedness and becoming well-schooled in the esoteric codex of their own solipsism.

 

 

Yet they will then frantically try to re-dress one another with these newfound, separately seeing eyes, only to find that they no longer recognize one another, flustering at the breach of a newfound stranger's autonomy. Yet the tides of Mother & Child shall come and go, ebb and flow, and their moons will wax and wane, gibbous, to the formulaic law and pull of dissimilar poles denying their dichotomy. And thus may the cycle of birth+weaning+severance+death=rebirth continue on ad infinitum and ad nauseum, again failing to bring to fathomable fruition, a more keen figuration and final order and equilibrium.

 

 

Yet the greatest tragedy is how such an equation, by its very nature, abhors the Irrational and the Chaotic, and will always be in direct opposition to them both. Yet I knew somehow that what most deemed chaos was the most logical pattern to follow, for to those of my kind, chaos was order-The Ultimate Order. It merely could not be grasped in its infinite complexities and intricacies with the merely mortal Intellect.

 

 

And thus, so many become the Scapegoats of strict homogeneity and cheap artifice. They slowly allow themselves to become accomplices to Life's many crimes, those justified through Eyes of skewered perception, made cataractic by the diseased Soul, once crystalline and pure, now all-too-opaque and clouded. And this is yet another further shadowing of that dark essence, fragmenting what was once whole, as it goads the libido of Virtue to remain somnolent and impotent, further obfuscating the inner light of unifying and mollifying depth introspection.

 

And so does the mortal organism become laden with infection, as the promiscuities of Life's rough, bare intercourse wreak their consequence-the human experience becoming a little too experienced. Meanwhile, Innocence clings to the cold, dry breast of Ignorance, who remains a virgin, oppressed and pining away within her whorish chastity, as she yearns to be raped by the engorged phallus of Truth, uncensored.

 

 

And when her hymen is finally penetrated and torn, how the blood does coagulate & curdle on the inside, eventually bleeding itself out to drip that last stain upon the black burlap sheets of necessary corruption. Yet Innocence then begs for more, and more and more, until Truth is spent and abandons her like a forlorn lover. Yet she then gives a come-hither wink and nod to Deception, waiting his turn in the wings to possess and ravish her.

 

 

Yet he, too, flees the scene, when she tells him she didn't mean, to become leaven with Reason's essence and immortal seed. The child to be bore, a child of integration, existent forevermore, ever evolving and revolving within the realm of the homo sapiens generation. This child, a new life form to breathe while we heave-our faithful Child-Mother, Logic, who will need resuscitation from Life only after we have bore Death, unnaturally.

 

 

I had learned of this Child-Mother, Logic and her saving graces at University. I was doing a double-major of Art & Philosophy, now in my fourth year after a long, hot summer of attending various cultural events held throughout the provinces of New England. I performed in a few of them and got my share of applause. Performing was like nothing else I had known and it seemed to keep my baser instincts at bay.

 

 

My lover and I spent most of the summer together. She was going to be going away at the start of my fourth year. And we still, after all of this time, enjoyed a romance of mythic proportions. She was an artist like me, as well as a fine dancer and wordsmith and we communicated with one another most meaningfully through our artistic and intellectual inclinations. Kieran and I were also still friends, although we had mellowed over the years and did not engage in nearly as many fiendish, trickster-esque activities. And as always, I still lived somewhat of a double-life, as the idiom goes. No one really knew me, including my lover.

 

 

Yet I not only preferred to act alone, but also preferred to bear the knowledge of my sins and the brunt of Life's vagaries privately. I knew that I would no doubt be executed if my crimes were found out. Yet my upbringing had conditioned me to put that of my own survival above all else, including those things of a higher calling. Yet there was always a boundless, indescribable sorrow sensed within me that no joy could seemingly abolish. And as long as I remained unrepentant for my deeds, the stain would remain and my heart could never be free.

 

 

I felt that I was everything and yet nothing, everyone and yet no-one, everywhere and yet nowhere all at once. And no mirror could adequately validate, with its play upon light and optical nerve, that I was truly there-or ever had been. I tried to transcend my quiet hysteria and rise to a roaring, existential crescendo of glorious, harmonious opus, yet it had grown too dim and hushed within my soul. And too, the world without seemed arrested in its vertiginous inertia, which even the loyal persistence of all of the heavenly bodies in their succinct, elegant dance of numbers could not rouse to long, purposeful stride and waltz towards Heaven's gate.

 

 

Thus, I remained a Child of God, but a brother of Evil. And I wondered how I could choose a side without betraying my very own flesh and blood, and incurring the wrath of both Nature and the Almighty. For only when armoured within the comprehension of them both was I whole. But, as a devout servant of just one or the other-I was dangerously split down to the core of one who was always met only halfway by the world. For me, feigned civility and self-abnegation were merely curses disguised as blessings-but most of all, lethal vulnerabilities disguised as safeguards.

 

 

Father Ralph would often tell me that I could choose either that which comforts yet corrupts the flesh or that which frees, preserves and fulfills the Spirit. He said that I must live in the moment but for Eternity. Yet this was a tricky task indeed when one was called both to survive and to live just as spontaneously and religiously in a world that would not let the lion lie peaceably with the lamb. But Father Ralph would also teach me of true love, true freedom, true fulfillment and true life in the years to come.

 

 

I finished my fourth year and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in both Art & Philosophy. I then decided to go on to Graduate school and obtain a Master's, also in both subjects. And even though I was making enough money to pay for my full tuition, the Professor and his wife still extended their gracious patronage to me if I so wished to receive it. Yet I wanted to remain as free from any societal obligations to anyone as I could, and so I politely declined their offer. Yet we still agreed to keep in touch and to also travel occasionally together as we had done.

 

 

Thus began yet another chapter of my life as I continued to climb my way up from the Hell that I had always known, to the Heaven I had also always known awaited me. My heart was cold and tired, but by far not terminally malaised. It still beat steady and strong to its own hell-bent-or shall I say, Heaven-bent rhythms. It was young, in many ways still unsung, though by far already well-schooled in the contra-dictatorial curriculum of the human multi-lemma and condition.

 

 

Yet due to the very essence of mortal life which is both fickle and vain, there seemed to be no graduation from this arduous education-although I would always hold myself to the same standard of advancement, nonetheless. And it was Conceit with whom I knew I must sever all ties, for she would only lead me further into dualistic temptation, hence, the provocation of never-ending disillusionment and self-estrangement. And I made a note not to mistake her for Integrity or Righteous Lamentation or Indignation, for my sorrow was just as legitimate as my Optimism, for sanguine nonchalance so often missed the main point in the long-winded lectures of personal refinery. Melancholia is, in actuality, quite a utilitarian state of mind in a world where Justice so tirelessly seeks ministration. To everything there was indeed a time, a place and a calling. And for now, I knew mine. Yes, for now, to everything good & wholesome would I turn towards, not away.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 12

 

 

 

Fear resides in Rage in its purest, most concentrated form. Rage becomes annihilative only through Fear's refusal to be acknowledged. All must be fully seen and known for what it is and for what it is not. Joy is often a mere premonition of Despair. An embrace of internal Chaos and Conflict is often masked contempt for inner tranquility and contemplation and their less visceral experience.

 

 

And, just as a numbing down can signify an attempt to safeguard the essence from a dumbing-down, Passion which merely springs from a dread of Stagnation is more likely than not, an artifice constructed out of the flimsy detritus and holonomic geometry of the Death-sure blueprint of Time. Loneliness, though shunned as a desirable state of being, is often sought with just as much deliberation to fill that hollow, aching resonance struck into tune by the cruel yet usual rebuke of Alienation in its droning, intractable score. Envy is the mother lode of all social dissension, yet if properly sublimated, can lead one to heights Icarian, but depths quite frightfully Dantean.

 

 

But of all the mortal phases of Psyche, Fear, both despite and because of its tenacity and omnipresence, is the most needless. It is most persuasive and most invasive, which is why triumph over it is most meritorious and heroic. Yet it is not Fear's absence which we must strive for, but rather, our unshakable presence in the face of it. For we cannot seek to be fearless so that we may live, but we must fully live so that we may draw our strength and stoicism from those things which conquer all Fear.

 

 

I have lived without Fear a few times in my life, yet knew at the same time that I would never be free of it. For in the throes of Love Organic, I was met with only a spurious kind of unencumbrance, for many more fears than ever before came to reside in the places where the old ones had fled. Yet matched with the Love Divine, the only fear left was that fear of Fear's wrathful, spurned return, lest that Love Divine be snatched away by the Herculean hand of an ambivalent heart and a ruminative mind.

 

 

Love is by nature formative and not wont to destruction, even in the highest places where it abides. Yet by nature, we are seemingly much more enamored with destructive Longing than constructive Surrender. Thus, we taketh away before we are taken from, self-subversion's covert and crafty creed. Love is the Demiurge of our world, constant and unchanging in a time of irrelevant matters and fertile Ideas. The Love Divine is a Master Sculptor working diligently to bring all defective masses to perfection time and time again.

 

 

Yet the nature of the masterpiece is to continually refuse to remain malleable, pliant-to allow its form to totally surrender to its Creator, a Creator who knows that the only way towards perfection is through complex Deconstruction & Dissection. And even when a tree clings to its last leaf before surrendering its former bloom and incarnation to the tomb of Winter, it eventually lets go, knowing that it can be reborn only from the weeping womb of the Erstwhile.

 

 

I say, bleed me until I replenish, for this blood runs swift as the rivers, ever returning to the same Source. But this Soul's hands so strong-willed are my bane, for the one thing they cannot hold onto is the one thing which they crave to cradle the most. For my lovers may long to hold my hand, but like a deluded amputee, they will become convinced that it still remains in theirs, long after I have gone, for I am gone from the very beginning. Others would never have me at anything but 'Goodbye', for these were all I knew-and perhaps all I cared to know. And I simply could not give my heart away to just anyone, for most recipients would reject a heart coming from a lachrymose and ill-matched donor.

 

 

This is why, when she came to see me one cold December evening, that it would be our last meeting. I was at the private indoor pool which I had been able to get installed for myself with some of the royalties I had earned off of a collection of my poems, which had done surprisingly quite well within certain shrewdly targeted points of sale. Since I had complete privacy, I swam and then lounged in the nude on a chair by the poolside near a wooded area by my flat. And then, she emerged from the woods.

 

 

As she approached me, I could see that she, too, was nude, having discarded of her clothing behind some foliage as she watched me from afar. She walked with an air of delicate self-possession, her slight but well-rounded form swaying in cadence with an almost regal bearing. The supple buds of her ample breasts were piquant with anticipation and prowess as they swayed like the lazy pendulums of time to the heavy gravity surrounding her unearthing, the physics of feminine dynamics, kinetics mesmerizing and enthralling me. Her waxen, dark hair sprawled about her shoulders like the wetted feathers of a raven, longing to be loosed, freed and set a'flight and a'ruffle by my plundering caress. As she drew nearer and nearer, her lips, following the same soft, sensuous curvature of her anatomy, set into a mysterious, sly smile, as her dark eyes sparked and lept with the fire and rushing tepidity of erotic enigma and promised sensual subjugation.

 

 

I now stood, erect and transfixed, my eyes filling with a kind of luminous madness. My tongue flitted nervously about my teeth and dry lips, Adam's apple nodding up and down in unconscious affirmation as I swallowed, struggling to catch my breath and regain my bearings. My whole body pulsated and vibrated with a cool, mercurial, electric sensibility and yet felt completely paralyzed as my Soul too, began to swell with an odd mixture of animalian desire and ominous terror. I could not move.

 

 

And then she spoke, and my whole animus stirred with a sweet, covetous yen and primeval turmoil. My breath now came in ragged gasps, my muscles tensed and coiled like a serpent lying in ravenous wait and the booming thrum of my heart coupled with a mad rush of blood quickening in my veins made a roar like a raging sea in my head. It was as though I was being born for the very first time. Only this time, it wasn't my Father Creator who was breathing life and spirit into me, but this woman, as we dissolved into one another, the function of this bio-logical equation now commuted through its consummation.

 

 

And suddenly, time-space knew no bounds, and all of the life-energy of the Universe, no discreteness. We cleaved unto one another in a desperation born of that hylozoic paroxysm of wanton rapture and procreational providence, as our bodies glistened with the alchemical secretions of our exertions, all the world seeming to convulse in ecstatic fervour with us. As I climaxed, I cried out, head thrown back, face bearing a grimace of contorted euphoria and pleasure, she fervently dug her fingers into the taut, rippling flesh of my back, her own back arching in galvanic response to this highly charged affair as she moaned and gasped sharply inward at the awakening we had found together.

 

 

As Venus aligned in inept exactitude with the earth, we revolved around each other, her alien eyes fluttering, now fully open, probing me like the mean mystical binary stars they are. When I let myself be pulled into their glorious gravity, how I would wonder where I was, a lost lion cub traipsing the star-guided lamb. For down beneath my world so low were her kinetic laws of east, west, north, south elliptical glow. My meteor showers reined over her sky thrice in a pinkish-red moon. And soon, the sun passed over my meandering orb, a strange, illusive eclipse of foreseen doom and boyish gloom casting its shadow, as she tells me the next one might not come for the next seventy days.

 

 

She closes her eyes, a blessing in disguise, our come-hither, go-thither atoms of mortal cosmic matter now splitting and separating, spinning and whirling, boying and girling, the ever altering alchemic haze and maze fooling us into believing that we just might have mastered its maddening, enigmatic complexities and eternally exited its boundless bounds of time-space causation. Yet how quickly it would come again, that we would implode and explode, shatter flatter and flatter into the weathered walls of our bond and need, rocketed by Love-lust's creed, its wily, sharp turns and intricate patterns forgetting us time and again.

 

 

Yet we still kept thinking that we were found, having come full revolution only to lose our way, universally. And as our movements became more languid and satiated, it was as if a new, Halcyon dawn was burgeoning. We sighed, nestling contentedly with each other’s arms, fluttering back down to earth like the spent ashes of some great apocalyptic fire. We lie together afterwards for what seemed both an eternity and an all-too-ephemeral, fleeting moment in time. And soon, we slept and dreamt, and the Universe, deeply and restoratively with us. Then I told her that she could not stay any longer and that this would be our last time together. I could not explain everything to her, for it was not all clear to me. All I knew is that I was what I was, and revered all things natural and unconfined. She left me later that day as I requested, keeping the memory of our time spent well-preserved within the amber of Temporality attempting yet another feat of immortalization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 13

 

 

 

I dreamt of Purgatory, where the most primal fears of Humankind tested even the most fearless of souls. Some passed through, but most were left behind, never to escape the perpetual torment of their earthly transgressions. One man lost his mind and bargained for Hell, where at least the fire would burn only so hot and for so long before the flesh learned to admit defeat. And the penance here in this place was for those crimes committed more against Self than Other, although its absolving influence, I'm afraid was still all too slow and subtle. For the Self can never escape the Self.

 

 

This is the Gehenna in which souls in this dream gnashed their teeth and toiled-a Hell not unlike that in which they had dwelt while alive upon the earth. No rest for the wicked, perhaps? No, no rest for anyone, really. For oftentimes, especially the upright and righteous face the same torment-and even worse. As the dreamscape continued to unfold before my eyes, suddenly, I became lucid and commanded myself to rise up past any known sky. Momentum was gaining and an exhilarating euphoria was about to bubble up and froth forth from my essence, yet I then felt the dead weight of some insurmountable Melancholia & great Anguish level itself upon me. I began to howl like some caged, depraved Beast gone quadruply mad as I plummeted back to the ground from whence I had risen. As this was happening, I felt not only a sense of impending damnation and intractable doom, but a sense of total exile from all beings, as if I was even more abhorrent than the devil himself.

 

 

Then, with deft concentration of mind and sleight gesture of hand, I incited the Apocalypse. And as the waters rose in cresting revolt and the earth exhaled her last gasp of shuddered indignation, all of creation burst forth into a redeeming and purifying inferno, as it finally learned how to see, as it finally learned how to bleed. And as the weeping and gnashing of the world reached synchronous pentameter and my soul was gently lulled to sweet sleep, I became no longer eminent or perched vertiginously above it all, instead finding myself standing, totally unscathed and alone. And I knew of only a vacuous emptiness and deafening silence as my fellow human kin ran about, screaming in cathartic pandemonium. All the while I stood, so stoic, so arrogant, so totally unaffected by all but the actual depth and force of my Rage.

 

 

Dreamtime is when the conscience screams, asserting its need and right to be heard. Our dreams are our ally, keeping us pure and straight, never sparing the Psyche their introspective rod, bringing us up in the admonition of inner Truth and outer Justice.

 

 

We attend the nightly Mass of sweet somnolence, confessing it all to our subliminal Priest, keeping vigilant watch within the Mind's abysmal well, where the water is so cold and so restorative, that lucidity grips us time and time again and we discover the concept of unconsciousness to be truly an illusory construct.

 

 

For only when we sleep and dream are we, fully awake. And so I awoke, trembling and sweating in sheer Terror, for deep down I sensed that this had not been merely a dream, or a purely imaginal chimera of my own fabrication, but the portent of something to someday, in the Light of Divine Reasoning, become very real.

 

 

For should I continue to shun the Saviour's good Cause and disown the Virtuous transcendence inherent in my own essence, this indeed would become of me. A lot of people dance with fire. A lot even play with it. And then some like me become the fire. Some are not satisfied with anything short of a complete immersion into The Experience. Some must feel the burn to the core of every cell and atom in their physiognomy. Some must smell the sulfurous singe and putrefaction of hair, flesh, bone and trembling tendon. Some must feel their whole being consumed by the Fire, before they feel they can reach that place of final release, in that their Souls may whirl above them in Dionysian ecstasy, the cool, ameliorative air seeping into every membrane as the fiery furnace of the Body and the cryogenic burn of the Mind are finally quieted.

 

 

Most merely dance around the flames. And then again, most completely spend countless energy evading them at all costs. All throughout my first year of Graduate school I had managed to adopt at least the affectation of this tentative stance, but for awhile, during my months off, I underwent yet another grotesque metamorphosis. Yet I knew somehow, that I was experiencing a phenomenon which all artists undergo at some point in their development. Yet this time around still just felt different and more violent. I couldn't write. I couldn't paint. I couldn't perform or create anything for that matter.

 

 

My cathartic outlets were completely closed off from me. All of the life was slowly being squeezed from my soul. And as I suffocated in my own paranormal paranoia, ghosts of remorse, disillusionment and shame threatened to brand and completely break my Spirit. Yet this made it all the more evident to me just how strongly I had to fight this, lest I become possessed of that most immortal and depraved demon of all-the one which the Self creates solely for its own ravaging, punitive, masochistic edification.

 

 

To create to destroy? Or to destroy to create? Which "master" would I allow myself to apprentice for? For both creation for the sole purpose of destruction or destruction for the sole purpose of creation are justified means to the end of cathartic absolution and spiritual refinement. But even better, I knew that destruction for destruction's sake would be ontological purity at its peak, for that which lays the foundation for the Cathedral of Nature in its true design of Byzantium, anti-Manichean manifestations is the only Church undivided and thus, indestructible.

 

 

And to create merely for creation's sake, although something is always destroyed in any such act, would be destruction at most subversive acuity, in a world where the birth of Death is ever ordained and ever immanent. Yet the absurd tragi-comedy of the human condition is rarely unmasked for that which it truly is: the same rusty cog in the same tireless and tiresome wheel of every man's mental machinery-the need to transcend that irony-bricked barrier, which houses on every side, that which is natural and essential to thrivance and that which is unnatural and yet just as essential to survival & thrivance.

 

 

So, what would I choose? I made my choice on another humid, misty summer evening after I had finished my studies. As I walked with reluctant command through the dense night air, the atmosphere thick with an abysmal loneliness and grief for the loss of things which cannot be regained, I fully realized how now was a moment so precious and unlike any other. For I had changed, yet still remained somehow the same, what with the inescapable neuro-physiology of mnemonics haunting every mortal human soul.

 

 

Yet one cannot remember to forget the wasteful and trivial pursuit of a balm that can soothe and heal a pain no longer being inflicted, independent of the mind's redundant recycling of it. And so does the future remain definite yet trapped within the titanium constructs of the Past, and with every step forward, two or more seemingly follow, mocking our every futile move. And so does Patience and Endurance become the most coveted traits of character to cultivate in the wake of this unruly former-self-child. For the true battle takes place in the act of becoming, not in the finality of being. And so Felicity becomes shrouded in Mystery, and the adventures of a mind, compulsive with incendiary contempt even become painfully redundant.

 

 

Not known, yet presumed to be known by so many strange faces and non-kindred souls. The mask is adorned again. And as the Sphinx utters the riddle of me I know all too well still, how only I, alone have the means to decipher it. Others can fully know only of their own answers voiced deep from within their own solipsistic recesses. The material substance of me may indeed exist within the same time-space realm as theirs, but the rest? The rest, is mine, and mine alone.

 

 

Which is why so many discard the Grande Facade only to quickly become slaves to the Master of Fear and Loneliness reigning like a corrupt King or Queen within their hearts. But Alone is not to be feared, it is to be tongue-kissed. For the individual's Fate resents the cold, steel confines of pseudo-unification, instead dancing merrily to Harmonic Dissonance & Discord. For true Destiny can be born only from the Womb of Chaos. And without a leader from within, many ill-intentioned leaders from without shall force one to follow in blind obeisance. For the one with only one leader, one Master, one King, or one Queen, shall survive and thrive. These possess a leader from within themselves. Yes, the sages of true Freedom always work from the inside-out.

 

 

I pass a small cafe and enter. Everyone looks up as I enter, but I pretend I don't notice, still ensconced comfortably within my own thoughts. I take a seat at a corner table. I do not order anything. I just sit and finish dining upon the feast of my intellections. Soon, I have reached the Utopian destination of a quieted mind of inert and total receptivity and a heart filled to overflowing with relatively righteous wrath, the weaponry of so-called Reality's loaded gun, ever cocked to implosive suicide.

 

 

The leagues of my mind converge, arriving only upon disembodied truths, comprehended but not fully understood. Sound and Sight pass from their thorned-crowned glory into the Crucifixion of the Profane, masquerading as The Absurd. For this Being and its modes of expression are truly only seasoned for the Arts & Techné of Comedy, Tragedy being a concept we perhaps have invented merely to lend ourselves credibility and deification. And so it seems, that the Art in and of all things which one must cultivate within ourselves, lies in the Trickery inherent in the concept of Need vs. Want, and how we must trick ourselves into believing that we want what we need but do not need that which we want.

 

 

If only the most pertinent information could exist, we say. Ah! But then we would invent Tragedy on even grander and more catastrophic scales. And soon enough, the Comedic just might become our God and nothing, save the profane, would be sacred. Nihilo sanctum estne? Why must we shoot popcorn kernels at the moon when we know that Salvation is truly, a slow taming of Inertia by an inside force? For what is at rest remains at rest only through our own will. And this is so, too, when formulating loneliness and the insurmountable solipsistic gravity we are all irredeemably encumbered by.

 

 

Yet still, we seek a kindred galaxy though we are repeatedly reminded of our lone star status. And when we come to grips with this existence, we cry out-Shall Eternity be thicker than Time, why must I feel so betrayed? And when there is no tangible seed with which to fertilize the Soul, a kind of spiritual parthenogenesis occurs and thus is born from this barren egg, The Separate Self, the miracle offspring of the Disunified Essence and Unus Mundi.

 

 

And then, knowing of the fragility of the Time-Space Continuum, which some call Fate, we neglect it and it soon abandons us, as our lives are possessed by the laws of Life's Asymmetry, all nonetheless continuing to revolve around a 360 degree axis, as what goes 'round, comes 'round can only possibly continue to meet at a moot point.

 

 

And thus the synthesis of Realism & Idealism fail to be brought to fathomable fruition in the condition of a Universal Mind passively perceiving and dreaming while its Body remains kinesthetically indisposed. For only when the taming of inertia from within, breached in a state of critical mass occurs, can all be brought to full-revolution, so that the grieving of the loss of our former Incarnation may be completed and the loss of our grief, no longer lamented, also find common ground.

 

 

And the laws of Nature and the Meta-Physics of the Mortal Human Experiment will cause the Organism to undergo Gradualism, as old traits no longer self-preservatory will be phased out day by day by the inevitable phasing of Spiritual Evolution. This, an evolution that will defy all Logic, as it proves someday, that what goes up, cannot ever come back down again.

 

 

I finally leave the cafeteria feeling possessed of more uncommon wisdom and calm than when I entered. I step out into the night air which is not so thick or concentrated anymore. I can breathe again. I have quelled the storm within myself. It is an unfamiliar feeling, and hence, a little unsettling, but I was learning to grow into it. And slowly, but surely over the next year, I would continue to evolve into the person God always meant for me to be.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 14

 

 

 

What is it about the darkness which makes me feel so free? Or, perhaps, what is it about me? Why do I seem to be so crippled by the contradictatorial commands of my day while others seem to be so empowered by them? Or perhaps they are merely fulfilling an equivalence principle of their own, and thus must their petty torments and fascistic entrapments also be felt equally commensurate to the Dantean depths and Icarian heights of a need and hope for Life's final recompense and absolution?

 

 

And yet still, I am also all too sentiently aware of the dictatorships forged in the absence of vagary yet the full presence of Freedom. But as is the course of most human affairs, whatever nature of orders are given, I respond with thrice more, feeling that any authority not rightfully granted to that of my own self-governance is the very means by which I must follow my own internal dictates. For blind obeisance requires its own massive reserves of energy, leaving very little for those pursuits truly Noble & Courageous.

 

 

Yet so often, I am left with nothing to show for my valiant struggles, making revolt thus seem abashedly dull & arbitrary. Hence, the problems and questions posed were very clear to me, despite the faithful ambiguity of their solutions and answers. And the main dilemma was: How to surrender without giving in?

 

 

Again, the age-old epic battle between Survival & Thrivance, Growth vs. Stagnation. For Life and its failure or success are directly commensurate, it seems, with a trick of constant measure, its scales reading like some dyscryptic, enticingly but painfully facile codex-more being less, less being more, and still, the spaces therein between, determining Fortune or Catastrophe.

 

 

For in truth, Equitability is abomination, a perversity born of the acidic, hostile Womb and writhing limbs of that malleable yet fallible entity of all human vitiation and puerile imaginings. For oh! What terrible webs our minds do weave, when first we practice to believe. For belief is soon revealed to be merely the portent of assured incredulity and repudiation. Thus perhaps, only the nihilists of any culture are truly christened for greatness. For at least, despite how contrarian or even depraved they might be, they know enough to leave a light on for those kinds of epiphanous revelation parthenogenically born from the barren yet fertile egg of a "know nothing" mind.

 

 

And the Nihilist also bears just enough objective indifference to favour neither Question nor Answer, and, in their aimlessness, finds clearer direction and more steadfast resolve. And paradoxically so, it is in their wealth of Despair that they can afford to buy out the indigence of that Inscience smugly masquerading as Prescience, thus finding true Exaltation & Enlightenment.

 

 

And The Nihilist, through his artless godlessness and apostasy finds true Salvation, and through his atheistic zeal, may even come closer to God. He finds with such abundance because he does not seek. For he knows all too well that he already possesses everything he needs within himself. And the self-professed 'man of God', filled with blind piety, who seeks so desperately for that which he never lost to begin with, an even greater loss finds him, paralyzing him with a cataclysmic Grief unlike anything he has ever known, until the end of his days.

 

 

And the more he tries to remember, the more slowly and painfully, he forgets. And it is past this very point that he, the self-righteous 'believer', has become that dreaded 'world without meaning.' Implosion soon occurs, the force of which neither the deepest nor loftiest dwellings could offer reprieve. And once again, that thing least expected to grant his Salvation from complete self-annihilation manifests itself-and it turns out to be none other than, the crafty but wise counsel of The Nihilist. Yet still, even after all this, remains that hunger for hunger, that thirst for thirst, that hunger for thirst and thirst for hunger. And it is this very hunger which taunts and persecutes man with the most acute, unceasing pangs.

 

 

Perhaps the Eastern mystics are right about desire being at the root of all suffering. But I would dare posit even further and declare that it is not desire in and of itself which inflicts, but a world which denies its satiety. This is some of the wisdom I had gained upon entering my second year of Graduate school. And once I began to reawaken intellectually, did my creativity soon return with prolific flourish. I began some sculpting and, as my name had become well-respected in certain circles due to some art shows I had put on, I sold my first sculpture to a bank for them to display in their lobby. My studies were flowing just as naturally as always due to my inborn scholarly nature, and my grades were above average.

 

 

The only mark below an A that I had been given was on an end-term paper, which I will admit was a bit too radical even for my free-thinking Anthropology Professor. He jokingly referred to this paper as an "Anarchist Manifesto." I found that rather amusing myself, as I had not intended this. In the paper, I argued how nonresistance to the natural way of all things, including human nature, would ultimately contribute to the higher good of any society and the world at large.

 

 

I also strongly included in this hypothesis, how resistance and an unnaturally imposed order is one of the purest and most insidious roots of Evil. I, however, meant the paper to be more spiritual in exegesis, as in the philosophy of the Taoists, whereby the freedom of every sentient being is nurtured and allowed to come to its gradual & organic actualization when left to the devices of that which comes most compassionately and naturally to it.

 

 

To attend to the scholarly merit of the paper, I researched indigenous cultures across the globe, making comparisons to so-called "civilized" societies. I suppose I was largely inspired by Rousseau and Voltaire's notion of the "noble savage", as I had always, in accordance to my libertarian upbringing, felt a natural affinity and reverence for anything rejected or deemed unworthy of bourgeoisie, conformant, so-called "polite" society. I was a free bird and wished the same for everyone else, within a context which supported the promotion and honoring of human dignity and individuality, of course.

 

 

My main thesis for the paper was, that it is only when human beings are granted their fullness of being and actualization that this directly fosters not anarchy, as is the prevailing concern, but a more enlightened, naturalistic and sincere, hence efficacious law & order within any given society. In other words, people are kind, industrious and helpful to others because they want to be, not because it had been 'socially engineered' in them since birth. For this was the kind of higher self that I had been cultivating within myself since the start of my edification in more meta-physical matters.

 

 

Hence did it seem, due to the choice of inquiry in this particular paper, that I was coming full circle faster than I had ever thought possible. I was attending Mass regularly now. And on one particular Sunday, Father Ralph approached me and said he had something he would like to discuss with me. At first I thought that some of the purloining antics of my yesteryears had finally been found out and had caught up with me. Yet as we sat down finally in his back office, he instead just wanted to express his pleasure at seeing me attend Mass more regularly. He assured me that The Lord was doing a great work in me and to not lose heart. Then, he asked me something completely unexpected, but flattering nonetheless.

 

 

He had been taking diligent, almost fatherly notice of my activities in the writerly and artistic community and had become well-acquainted with some of my exceptional intellectual and linguistic abilities. Therefore, he asked me if I would be interested in participating a little more in some of the church services. I then asked him what specifically he had in mind and he told me, as he was soon going to be going on a missions trip, would I be interested in assisting the substitute clergy in editing some of his sermons that he had prepared. I sat back for a minute and pondered this offer.

 

 

Father Ralph then, sensing my hesitation, told me that perhaps I should pray to God about it and then get back to him, even as late as the Sunday of his soon-to-be departure, with my final answer. But something struck a chord of such resonant, deep and rich timbre in me that my initial reticence faded just as quickly as it had crept up upon me and I assented. He was overjoyed and assured me that this would prove to be a very blessed and worthwhile endeavour. I then left with a feeling of profound peace and bliss which did indeed surpasseth all mortal understanding and felt possessed of a clarity of mind which I had never experienced before. Now, finally, I was beginning to see just what it felt like to hear my very own name called out by God Himself. And this indeed, was nothing short of a miracle. Yes, a choir of angels rejoiced in Heaven, and for once, I could truly believe, that it was for me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 15

 

 

 

I awoke one night, a shrouded moon of Doubt, Fear & Loathing waxing and waning once more within me. In my dreams I had been a wolf, howling and thrashing, as another upsetting of gravity within my mammalian self played itself out both from within and without. Yet knowing my cycle like the wolf knows those of the moon, I gave into them every time, knowing full well that there was no point in resistance. For I knew that I would always be mastered by them, despite my attempts to deny this to myself, until the wolf was no longer mastered by his instinctual full moon urges. Until then, there was to be, no quarter.

 

 

And this is why everyone needs a secret kept hidden from the rest of the world. For the autonomous Eye sees not only of its own, although it very well may try to force a solipsistic astigmatism and myopia upon itself. Yet this soon becomes a demented focus, perhaps lending 20/20 vision to depth introspection, but blinding that of any essential clarity of extrospection. Yet the chalice, therein containing the blood, sweat, tear and trembling tendon of Mortalkind's encumbrance, however acrid or pungent it might taste, can offer up many medicinal properties. For it is a cup runneth over, under, over, asunder, as questions fume at a point of unfathomable degrees, and the incendiary yet undying passion of Love-Hate helter-skelter toils on, as the leagues of the one-nation-under-God-indivisible-minded march militantly on.

 

 

And soon, it all becomes a blur, we all become One, as is proven that whatsoever is deaf, dumb and blind has reached the infinity of finity, thus enabling fulfillment of the prophesy of divine potentiation within every mortal soul. Yet it often seemed that only I carried the weight of this knowledge within myself, and I felt so alone. Yet were others really estranged or was it just myself? And it was then, that I would hear a collective sigh of commiseration respired from the fecund womb of the world's lament, thus making me feel both overly complicated and overly simplified by selfish Pride.

 

 

Yet still, the core human Essence, so in need of the amoralistic redemption of unadulterated Desire & Fulfillment, opens itself with quivering austerity, afraid that if what it takes in is not the gentle emanations and offerings of the homely beauty of Hope, that it will ever open unto anything again.

 

 

The wind whispered my name. Sometimes I still hear it on the shabby outskirts of recollection. My dreams scream the voice of some unknown girl and I am jolted from this disorienting somnolence into the dense, stale air of wakeful consciousness.

 

 

And the intangibles of the purely mnemonic, and perhaps merely imaginary flash before the mind in panoramic splendour, a variant ensemble of images gyrating with cunning allure to the arrhythmic doubt-beat of Reality vs. Fabrication. And the mind, trembling with confusion, longs for the saving grace of Logic, while its Father, Reason stands militant guard at the door of a strange, iridescently grey room, lit by filaments always on the verge of eternal sleep.

 

 

It is a windy day. I walk through a dead grass field, hearing nothing but that of the echo of my own footsteps stalking me. I glance back to see if anyone else is there, but it is just me and my shadow, which turns whenever I do, stops whenever I do, raises its fists to the sky whenever I do, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

 

 

Although I cannot tell if it blinks out tears, or if it cries or laughs or speaks when I do. It seems to imitate me, but does it inhabit me?

 

 

The sounds around me echo within my head as if I am in some vacuum of complete desolation and isolation. And sometimes, upon seeing myself in a mirror's reflection, I declare that it must be lying, for I can so clearly see the exact anatomy and genetic structure of an actual individual human form. Yet the outside world seems to acknowledge this form merely when it is agreeing with them on the state of the nation, or on the weather, or on some other seemingly superficial artifice of dialectic.

 

 

Up until today, this was okay-it did not bother me. Yet as I walk through this dead grass field today, it begins to pierce through, and Melancholia begins to take hold once more. And as I walk, just me and my shadow, I realize how odd it is that this facsimile, or splitting of self never seems to occur in the total absence of light. Yet the darkness, however freeing and integrating it might be or feel, must not be completely surrendered to. For refraction and reflection are the only means by which our sins might be fully revealed, and in this exposure, find true repentance and absolution.

 

 

And if I failed to do this, someday even my own shadow would abandon me in its flattering mockery. Yet I wondered exactly how much light one must let into themselves before one could see enough to be blind?

 

 

But where the light shines brightest, oh how those shadows do loiter about with even more nagging persistence, traipsing at our heels like starving, stray orphans that we have neglected and abandoned, until we succumb to some benign yet compelling sense of Shame for daring to put Resignation before Strivance, Joy before Despair, Living before Dying. For truly, what is the cure for the human condition? There is none and this, is the remedy.

 

 

After my meeting with the substitute clergy with whom I was to work while Father Ralph was away on his missions trip, I threw myself diligently into sermon editing and schoolwork. I had never felt so free and yet, all at once, afflicted with so much conflict. How could I, a murderer, rapist, thief and all-around apostate be comfortable with such blessings as I had been granted by the hand of The Divine? Was it right for me to expect and accept from God, that which I had never given of sufficiently myself?

 

 

Yet oftentimes, the human need for love and deeper understanding supersedes our grasp of the common wisdom that one must first give if they are to rightfully receive. And so was my soul petrified and my outward countenance I would imagine, even harder still. For although I may have mastered the art of disingenuity and incongruence during my darker days enough to present a reverent, even pious image to the parishioners, I always felt on the verge of being found out. For no doubt after all these years of naturalistic living, I had collected enough seed for the sowing of boundlessly self-perpetuating groves of oleander, whose flora might indeed be exquisite to the eye, but whose tonic was lethal to the system.

 

 

And oftentimes I wondered why our Creator did not just go back to the sculpting of landscapes with his fabled clay. Yet deep down, I knew that there had to be something in myself worth loving and even, worth forgiving. And I thought that surely there must hide a saint in disguise within each and every self-professed devil, as there must hide a devil in disguise within each and every self-professed saint. There was, all in all, hope, however that I would be restored to my true glory.

 

 

Yet in the beginning, I became that wild animal that never bites, even when cornered. And for the first time in my life, I had managed to become tamed by the fear of my own destructive potential. Yet I remained held captive by Freedom, in a jungle where survival always came before thrivance, hence the ways of evolution also being arrested in their dynamism. Thus, for my kind, my newfound "civility" became somewhat of a liability and I was perpetually endangered, without the benefit, however, of extinction. As a matter of fact, I felt most visible in this state, completely uncamouflaged by propriety & the quotidian.

 

 

For I was learning to live in opposition to all that was first nature to me. I followed the harshest path, though always coming out clean on the other side, much like when I lived lawlessly. And so it came to evidence that I had, indeed, fallen prey to my fellow man and his obsession with law and order. I had allowed myself to bow to the temptations of convenience and common impulse and thus felt, albeit more acknowledged by others, more estranged from myself. For conformity had indeed bred within me all that I had always known it would, which was why I had avoided it so diligently and so craftily in the first place.

 

 

For it seemed to breed only more contempt, confusion, doubt, self-loathing and even corruption within me than I had ever previously wrestled with. Before all of this, I had lived only for the higher causes of Truth, Freedom & Authenticity. For I believed that it was Unity first within the Self which brought true honour and was the only righteous and effective solution for the ills of any society. For my deeds may not have been morally sound, but at least, I figured, they were honest in their coarseness of naturality. And I had always intuited that Truth should exist for its own sake, even within the individual. For I did not wish to exist merely for causes which had already been won, to have to then also answer to Death and to God of my meager, ignoble triumphs and inutile redundancies.

 

 

For the ultimate challenge of mortal human life for me was not in winning the battles, but in maintaining that canonical counsel which I had managed to salvage from their ruins. For true Victory lies in surrender to what is and cannot be altered. I never saw wildness as an inciting or an invocation of any sort of applied will. I knew it for its purest nature and essence, and that it required a giving in to more than anything. I believed that it was a denial of the so-called inner "savage" which turned men, women and children into savages, not a shunning of so-called "socialization" or "acculturation", or any of the fancy phraseology we invent to lend credence to half-baked ideologies.

 

 

For when we point the finger instead at those crude methodologies of communal refinement and cosmopolitan acculturation as the cause of humankind's deepest afflictions and evils, only then have we become enlightened. Fanatical homogeneity, I was raised to believe, was at the root of all human ills. Yet most still to this day, project these "evils" upon some inferior yet benign "prehistoric" entity. For although they might do this out of a seemingly reasonable motive to preserve society and its efficiency and sufficiency, they are castigating the wrong enemy, and merely succeed at donning the facade of civility while still no less, prostrating themselves before the shrine of their primordial leanings in ways both blasphemous & perfidious.

 

 

And this perverts things thus further, for now, whenever that archaic, esoteric, occult entity which they have fabricated, cries out and manages to surface from its dank, dark depths, oh how they must go to even sicker lengths to silence it. But they fail to see that even the Darkness is born of the Light, and they have nothing to fear. And, if they manage to do this, they will be brought into a world of experience which shines with a special light all its own. And once they have surrendered to this Light, will they crave nothing more than to remain a part of it.

 

 

For the lights beneath which contemporary man gleans his esteem are not only harsh, glaring and superficial, but are, in the end, extremely unflattering to his true visage and imago. And while man basks in the sickly glow of this light, how he always transports with him, a mirror into which he can gaze with smug conceit, upon his so-called "superior" self.

 

 

Yet when the light of The Shadow shines down upon him, revealing the true form which he has unknowingly all of this time, reflected to others, God and even himself, he feels a fool. And in his embarrassment, he forgets that he still must make a choice, every moment of every precious day, between the two images of himself. For if he continues to pummel his fists upon the glass, attempting to murder the image of the "other" self, he will merely end up with injurious shards of glass embedded deeply within his third eye, and no doubt, seven years of bad luck to boot.

 

 

Yet this cycle of sleep and awakening has played itself out since humankind's first earthen birth. Yet I had always been mindful to choose both The Shadow and The Light and thus was I Whole, thus did I feel substantial, real. As the weeks and months progressed I would struggle however, to come to terms with the newer, less familiar roles I had taken on. For I feared that they might engulf my other self to the point of annihilation. The next few years of my life would be fruitful in different ways than I had previously become accustomed, but they would also go by in somewhat of a blur. I existed in a kind of existential haze, and I would soon be unable to recall them at all. Yet, despite this fact, one thing I would remember is the day that I would have to make the hardest decision of my life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 16

 

 

 

I was at my final graduation where I would receive my Doctorates, one in Art, the other, in Philosophy. It seemed only yesterday that I had been a freshman. And yet sometimes I felt as if my body, mind and soul had lived far longer than a mere 27 years would have otherwise suggested. I searched the crowd for her face but could not find it. I would always search for her, perhaps even after I found her again in someone else.

 

 

Although I had taken on an assistant clergy position at Father Ralph's church years previous and had access to all of the warmth and love of God and that of my church community, I still felt a little empty. Yet I wondered if anything was indeed missing, or if perhaps it was more a matter of not being accustomed to having so much in such abundance. Yet still, there was something always nagging at my conscience. But I wasn't yet ready to fully examine or confront that. Therefore I concluded after my graduation that I would take some time off from my church duties and put myself full-scale into some painting.

 

 

For the first few days, I began to feel like my old self again. Yet on one of these days a revelation had been unearthed. I realized that since I had taken a vow to myself to live only for the Good Cause all those years back, I always felt somewhat disingenuous-as if I was vapidly just going through the motions. Furthermore, it was also upon that day that I decided to re-adorn the old skin and begin living again, for blood.

 

 

And so did primal projection and violent catharsis again become the rule and not the exception as a mind covetous only of unequal balances of power dominated my soul in its most wretched, godless state. It became an obsession even more labyrinthine and twisted than any Nietzschean fantasy. For it was, after all, the purist philosophy of a creature in constant, writhing agony, at a loss for any true or everlasting gratification, as all became null and void but to this Cimmerian quest.

 

 

And soon again, I knew of no more mystical wonderment or rapture and their seductive ménage, and only of an endlessly futile search for something strongly pined for but completely unattainable. I was the very mortal human embodiment of Tantalus himself. Every time I even wondered if maybe I had possessed it years prior, there was no way of verifying this. Perhaps it was mere delusion that I had ever found this elusive thing that I now longed for yet could not seem to find. Yet even if I had possessed it once before, would I ever have it or feel it again?

 

 

For every time I pondered the possibility of its eternal loss to my fathoming, everything would suddenly drop like a leaden weight to the epicenter of all Perplexity, and I would long for something to set me right again. Even my own dreams began to seem foreign to me. I did not know what to believe in save my own gradual deterioration, despite the advances that I might indeed have made over the years. And all that had at one time felt so vivid, lucid and real had also been proven illusion.

 

 

Had I relied too much upon my own eyes and selectively self-serving perceptions? For I feared, yet at the same time eagerly anticipated the moment when I would know, beyond the shadow of any light, that I was, irretrievably insane. Yet I always secretly welcomed this, for I knew that it was only in madness & disintegration that we could feel truly free, whole, blissfully unified. For here, within its dark womb, no separation could occur between the faculties, and the self was free to be whatever it wished.

 

 

Would I soon resign myself to this? For the concern was not what would become of me should I acquiesce, but how could I truly survive and thrive without doing so? For surrender to this fate no longer softly coaxed-it warned. And it had always been the only dictator which I felt true and loyal reverence for and which I did not mind regarding with blind obedience. And sometimes I feared and hated those who did not understand my language of aberrance. I hated them most for their Joy, their simplicity, the seeming ease of their bodies, the quicksilver surety of their laughter, the unceasing clarity of their minds. Or was this all too, a trick of mood and perception?

 

 

Yet the problem with my brand of insanity was never cogency or a lack thereof, but too much. In other words, it was not a matter of: Could I separate fact from so-called fiction, but had I the will to? It is an oftentimes irresistible force, the giving of oneself to self-contained and maintained delirium. And the seduction is at first subtle, gentle and very gradual. But once you have totally succumbed, it quickly drags you under, drawing you into its rough, cold, scaly flesh to rape you repeatedly from within until you begin to like it. For soon, what was once uninvited assault becomes a vehement lust for enmeshment. When Narcissus fell in love with his reflection, the sun grieved. It still weeps today.

 

 

We all secretly yearn to go insane, falling with a finality of release into that blissful abyss of Oblivion. We all yearn to lose control of the unnatural selection barricading the earthen church of all that is truly evolutionary for Body, Mind & Spirit, as Life is thus lived in masked revolt against all of the wrong angels & demons. Hence, did I know again, what I must become. I wished to be mocked viciously no more from without and from within by any saboteur of any name or minion. And for the ones who would seek to mock and systematically destroy me because I now fought to be my truest self, would I at least be equipped to face with my newer skin of impenetrable elasticity.

 

 

I could no longer oppose the monstrosity within me, for its sicknesses festered in part, through my neglect and evasion of it. I too, also thrived in part, upon its sadistic persistence. For must we select just one face, one name and one station to display to the world? I was everything and everyone. This extreme diffusion of identity was paradoxically the only way I could know with certainty who I was. It had been raining in my head for the past fifteen years and my back was still up against the same metal pole. The storm now seemed many miles away, for there was no lightning, just thunder rumbling at various intervals. The thunder was in the hearts of those of us who sought out the storm, only to then just as quickly seek shelter beneath the shabby, dilapidated barracks of Indifference.

 

 

My main dilemma, however a Paranoiac's paradisio it may have made, was how to both survive & thrive in a world which must always be regarded as a potential enemy and destroyer. Yet the answer was: How could I not live in a world which sought to destroy me? For those like me, screamed on the inside, yet were nary granted the voice which others were, hence, the reinforcement of our outcast position through the seeking of other means of purgation. It had always been all about survival, survival of the misfittest. Yet I was coming to see how only love, gentleness, kindness and virtue were the things which truly preserved, while aiding in the full actualization of each human entity.

 

 

But night after night, I would awaken in some solemn stratosphere, where Reason would become the Loathsome Lie, the Figurehead of The Raging's vast enterprise. For such sapience and impartiality had required of my human heart, far more than they themselves, had to compensate with. And I wondered if the human essentia could either survive or fully live without the safeguarding of such damning dialectics. This was the world we were all forced to abide by, and I wondered how humankind would keep its Spirit alive. Or, would it too, be soon subjected to the gross rigours of artificial sustainment, only to be sacrificed before the altars of secular Science and its ever-multiplicating gods?

 

 

For this was just it. I could not stand the deceit which I was admonished I must commit, to be deemed legit. My main hope was that I could find a way to reconcile, without compromise, the primitive hunger with the neoterically-prone thirst, and thus reach true sublimity and freedom. However, I sensed that perhaps this task would never be achieved in my lifespan. Yet I still felt as if I was awaiting my true life most of the time, although I came to see how this was not an altogether uncommon phenomenon amongst humans. A life, that whispering apprehension which we all cohabit with daily, as it tickles the soft, pink underbelly of the animalian heart.

 

 

And then, would our ragged respiration enliven that dualistically instinctual, pulsating organic engine of human navigation and circumambulation, relaying to the amygdala, that old familiar feeling from our reptilian past, that dark, hovering cloud which we so often allude to, as it brews up its bothersome ho-hum drumming thunder and toxic rain. But first-yes! First! That fine flash of electric light so indescribably white, illuminating all neuronal pathways if but even for a nanosecond. Yet still, this nanosecond proving more than enough for the ever-eidetic Soul to retain the imprint of yet another enticingly facile, dys-cryptic labyrinth.

 

 

For we are perhaps merely betraying ourselves when we hide beneath the overdress of tedious and specious politesse. I wondered how much longer we would escape the dire consequences of our sins as a human race, let alone those of every individual soul. But those sins do seem to always get the most attention, as my conscience kept attempting to rouse mine. Yet I concluded that I must have made some progress with God, as my conscience at least now, could be heard. Yet my hands would always bear the stain of their deeds, let alone that of my mortal Soul. Yet I knew some action had to be taken eventually on my part.

 

 

For every day I peered into the mirror I saw nothing but the shocking, uncensored image of my own Hypocrisy, as my eyes roved with nervous agitation up and down my reflection and I sought, to no avail, to find all usual ruses and guises in their place. I wanted to see them as they used to be, standing guard with such militant cowardice at that base of the bridge where nose meets lips, housing a tongue which had oft succeeded more than any other utterance with an eloquence unsurpassed, at cunning deception. For it had crafted more lies than I could sell to the meandering masses of first-as-in-last-impression-management.

 

 

And those lips which had spoken of Love & Peace while resenting their seeming ability to express to everyone how they saw just as much eloquence and beauty in Hatred & Violence. For it all begins in the mind. And if only others knew what I knew then I could perhaps be redeemed. Then would they all come home, one by one, my prodigal brothers and sisters, in equitable prostration. And perhaps together, with wills combined, would God finally surrender his grasp upon Heaven & Hell, and, removing his mask of Omnipotence & Righteous Wrath, be stolen from His throne to reveal Himself as no more than the force behind all which had brought us here. For then, we might come to appreciate Eternity, as we lamented all the time-space we had squandered when we still believed in our own deification.

 

 

For now we could finally see, how the world we had struggled for so violently had, all along, already been won. And I hoped in the end that I would be just as blessedly broken, as how I had set myself apart in order to keep myself together would become the means to the beginning of my sweet and slow unraveling. For only then, would I know just how beautiful I was, standing there naked, shorn and trembling before my God. Thus, did I finalize my decision, and it would be the kindest thing I had ever done for anyone-most of all, myself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 17

 

 

 

There has always been an abysmal Despair & Grief that I have awoken to for most of my life. It is very much known, and yet wholly intangible. And so I continue to remain, yet another casualty in the epic battle for sovereignty between a harsh Ecclesiastical Realism and a much gentler Romantic Mysticism. Yet still, everything sinks to the bone, consumed by that insatiable thirst for the sweet, intoxicating wine of the Inscrutable. Hope, for some, lies in Certainty, for others, in Enigma. For this latter kind, the science of fact, is untactfully exact.

 

 

Yet for the former, the science of applied fiction is a much-coveted affliction, cure for the root of all ills, where Passion sleeps and Stoic Resignation further stills.

 

 

And who is the keeper of this house? Is it that Brother of Sleep, so fiercely loyal and omnipresent, as the costs of Survival are weighed and Life extorts nevertheless without us?

 

 

Soon, the work gets neglected and we come to see that there is no way to stop the fraudulent accounting before even the red soon runs dry and we quickly falter without a quarterly reminder of our debts.

 

 

Yet the Overseer has still managed to keep us upright, and we can at least be assured that as long as there is blood coursing hot and quick beneath the skin, the books will remain in balance. And we just might remain fatally upright in our figurings, until the costs of our Survival reach their final recompense before the low court of that Brother of Sleep.

 

 

For soon, even the Overseer decides that he can live in indigence with us no longer, thus granting our guardianship to this Brother of Sleep, more commonly revered as Death, the mortal enemy, yet forbidden, secret lover of the Life we had so carelessly spent, trying to preserve.

 

 

For most of my life I had felt both dead and yet acutely aware and sentient of the life pulsating, throbbing and burning without. It was the worst, most terrifying feeling. And so would I force myself out to breathe in this life which I felt I did not possess, but would hear voices of condemnation, persecution and rebuke, bearing accusations of my dubiety and duplicity.

 

 

I often felt as if I were some great Automaton of Melancholia & Ennui. And, after so many years experiencing the ravages of this existence, I often even wondered if I had not metamorphed into something altogether subhuman. The only wisps of cognitive-emotive prescience that billowed as but mere tattered remains of a real, live human entity within my mind, within my soul, could be sensed only through a wrenching, dehumanizing loathing and seething envy for the life which I felt to be so vital, vibrant and vivid within others. I felt that they were color combinations of infinite, kaleidoscopic, dazzling array, fluorescent, animate and eminent. Yet I remained, that barely apprehensible little, grey blot of blemish upon the canvas.

 

 

I sensed impending revision, as I knew, sooner or later, that I would be brushed off of that canvas by the Master Artist Himself. The ominous dread of existential annihilation which most rarely allow to surface from the primeval, subterranean depths of their subconscious, I fully inhabited like that of my very own breath. The deep and abiding Terror was that I would soon become so faded, jaded and weary that all self-sight sense would betray the optical nerve of The Third Eye, and I would be damned not only upon this earth but thereafter.

 

 

Yet I did not know which terrified me most, the prospect of extinction into utter Oblivion, or that of an Eternity spent in some Gehenna of my own creation. And I not only began to question who I was, but what I was. I began to develop complex phantasy structures to cope with the anguish wrought by my hypervigilance. I dreamt of being anything that was not human just to feel a dignified part of some species of life. In my dreams, I would be a black panther which scaled the walls of luminous buildings and sprang from the buoyant limbs of spindly trees with a swiftness and agility unmatched, and whenever I fell, would always land on my feet with aplomb, and everyone would utterly adore me.

 

 

I was a heartbeat, tripping all over itself. I was a breath, ragged with the ambivalence of that ancient longing to striate two irreconcilable worlds. I often wondered which insanity was sane and which sanity was utter madness? For the true madness housed itself within the need to ask the question at all. For when Nature must be forced, inwards or outwards, the boundaries between Heaven & Hell become so blurred, they often merge, are completely indistinguishable from one another. Yet the memory of Heaven was still strong enough within me, though distant in its reminiscence most of the time. Its imprint somehow always remained fresh upon the permeable membrane of my Soul.

 

 

Yet the tragi-comedy always pandered to one theme: How the full knowledge of Heaven is the very thing which grants Hell its scourging singularity and its very existence, while the knowledge of Hell is gleaned directly from the longing and striving for its counterpart. And the Edenic scene faded out none too harshly upon the panoramic projections of my imagination, as I came to see that those sins which would deliver me to Hell, paled in comparison to those I would omit while in Heaven-the knowing so painfully separated from the being continuing on even in a newer, more celestial incarnation.

 

 

But it all began to make sense, for I saw the sum of one's Life as coming down to those choices made in the full presence of this spiritual prescience. Yet how often I would foolishly run asunder, forgetting all too easily that this kind of comprehension needed not be so painstakingly grasped at for that navigating which the Heart already has its own adept compass for.

 

 

And I began to see that the two worlds through which my paths would meander allowed both for my knowing and my being, and that I could never be forever lost. Yet most of all, I could also never be lost completely to others of my human family. And soon, I would no longer need to grapple so much with the question of Sanity vs. Insanity, but would see the wellness inherent in both the need to ask the question and in the desire to answer considering not just myself, but all others as well. After I had made my decision that one day, for once, I began to truly throw caution to the wind. But this time, the air which moved me, was the very breath of God Himself.

 

 

And now, could I let my blood course through the ports of every emotive sea- beyond any bounds, tamed as I was within the graces of God, no longer in dread of the snares of Fear's vast, crude wilderness which had always gripped the Achilles’ heel of the soul in merciless tenacity. Now, could I let my heart beat at its true pace, thundering, rumbling, allegrissimo, affettuoso!

Now could I allow Joy and Courage to lend final conciliation with Grief & Cowardice, so that my mortal Soul could finally meet its noblest Cause, that indefinable yet overbearing thing which had kept it for so long now tied to this blessedly-cursed earth.

 

 

Now, could Transcendence be seen for what it had truly been, all along, pure beingness, right here and right now. Now, the inherent wisdom of the primordial mind needed no longer turn to the counsel of that nihilistic, Nietzschean platform, spouting the pithy propaganda of contrived self-determinism & Stoicism. No longer would my human organism stop the very natural, right and true processes of Life itself with blind adherence to such countless, corrosive ideas, regiments and schemes. Now, would I choose to no longer place such blind faith in the concept of Life as a mere conduit for Death's ultimate goal. No longer would I exalt mere survival above thrivance.

 

 

Now, would I see only through the corrective lens of Truth and instead view Life and its purpose with an unapologetic and majestic simplicity worthy of it. For countless poets, philosophers, priests and sages throughout time immemorial had sought to answer of Life's purpose, presuming it rather incorrectly to be so esoteric, so elusive. But I now knew, and the simplicity of its answer no longer precluded credulity: The meaning of life is, to live it with as much truth and humanity as is possible, no more, no less. So, what of survival then, and its creaturely cause? Should I live in complete abandonment of the restraints of even this carnal need? But I concluded that it had never been so much about choosing sides, insomuch as an exercise in learning how to embrace it all with equanimity and regard.

 

 

For I had been living under the delusion of Survival as Life's sole Keeper, when in truth, it was Life's certain, final and, rather debasing asphyxiation. Thus, the Great Paradox shined forth once again: One must die in order that one can live. And how it always seems to come down to this, opposites in constant striving for blissful Union.

 

 

And just as Life courted Transience as we thrashed about in Jealousy & Rage at having been so misled, cheated, betrayed, abandoned, exploited and neglected, could we now finally glimpse into the dear, sweet face of Inevitability, as it gazes back with such calm austerity and feel within, a strange consolation and vindication at last.

 

 

Furthermore, hit with the lightning bolt revelation of the futility not of life, but of our struggles while living it, loving it, hating it, even seeking to kill it within ourselves and others, can we finally find rest in our iniquity and infirmity. Yes, now I had resolve, but it was that born of a much deeper-rooted, more authentic humility and wisdom, which I would come to regard as my most indispensable shield and Saviour in the next days to come especially.

 

 

And Integrity, that true warrior possessed of the indomitability of all potential enemies, internal and external trooped together, would instruct me in the fine art of cultivating Joy Everlasting. Yet little did I know, how taken aback I would be, when the Great Instructor brought forth the tools and texts with which I was to work, instead schooling me with an overabundance of Sweet Nothingness, reams of annals completely blank, and for once would this be, for this fledgling but learned and weary scholar, quite something.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 18

 

 

 

The heart always bleeds while the modern day mind knows not. We must die in that we may live. And why do we ask questions for which we already have the answers? And truly, those answers most sought would prove to be antecedent to the only questions worth asking.

 

 

My dreams were steeped in prophetic doom. I rose from them, doused in pensive lucidity, to beach the ghost shores of shame and nameless, endless indignation. And only now was I beginning to truly fear the wrath of others' potential wrathful reciprocity. I knew that I must change or perish. For my armour had become too conspicuous, too heavy to bear.

 

 

And truly, we are always the death of ourselves, forgetting all too easily and eagerly how to instead garner our Courage & true Strength from the nurturing but ironclad hands of reverent Virtue & Heart-Tenderness. But had I the courage to be soft and malleable in a world so quick to turn cruel at the slightest gesture of self-preservation, no matter how it is expressed?

 

 

For when everyone bears sword & shield, this act becomes perceived as an act of defiance, a death-wish, the stoicism of jesters & fools. For it seemed to be now, that the only way to truly survive was to turn the other cheek. And I most definitely was not conditioned to this.

 

 

Yet I knew that I must begin placing my Faith in the saving graces of Discretion & Humility. Now, forgetting the self would become the basic tenet of and my means to the end of saving myself. For my former philosophy of unbridled mortal expression and purist naturalism in the name of breaching Freedom and Transcendence now seemed the stuff of idiocy and delusion, for it had truly served the means only to the end of creating within my essence, an inmost core of rabid toxicity and self-estrangement.

 

 

Yet, in the Herculean grip of Loss, Alienation and profound Grief, had I still the resolve of will to kill this sickly Beast? Had I the strength to stand apart with purity of heart? Just how far had I slipped? Was it enough by now, that I would never completely sever ties with irreconcilable Rage & Disgust? Would I settle for the cathartic yet disastrous camaraderie of Hatred & Fear, or would I manage somehow to return, a prodigal orphan of the Hell I had bore, to the arms of my beloved, heavenly blood Father, to be loved again as the simple child that I had always been in His omniscient, redeeming eyes?

 

 

All I knew was that I had to die to all that had come before this one moment in every moment from henceforth. How that could be achieved, I did not know. And yet, I knew that I had to try. Thus, did my prayer to my God become: Oh Heavenly Father, if You can bear any more kin, I wish, to be born again.

 

 

As I reflect upon my past now, I recall how I used to believe in the devil far more than that of a holy, benevolent God. Yet such a phenomena is rather pervasive when the sentient organs of the mortal human experience, by Truth's indiscriminate, ecclesiastical hand, are dealt enough blows of the profane. Yet without first, recognition of Tragedy, even Comedy turns tragic and there is no imminent cause for redeeming ourselves.

 

 

But perhaps we do not need Tragedy of any kind? Perhaps the only true tragedies are those we invent merely to lend ourselves credibility and our existences, some sense of meaning, purpose. Yes, perhaps this is the one and the only tragedy. And it arises out of the absurdist convictions we cling to in order to create something out of what is truly, nothing, thereby heedlessly and needlessly enhancing and prolonging our own suffering.

 

 

But how now, once the acknowledgment has been made, after years of this tenacious gripping, could I let go to let it all go, so I that I could holdon? For the very act of surrender required an inscience of self-sense which I did not think that I possessed and which I knew, therefore would not be in my best interest to attempt at this point, especially being one of those of my kind.

 

 

Yet I often wondered, if Time had to be so short and Life, so consumed by the juggling act of all Paradox and Dueling Duality, then perhaps man did indeed merely invent Religion and all of its gods, demigods, devils, demons, saints and angels to better aid his ontological dexterity? And many before me had concluded that perhaps the struggle itself was the meaning of human existence. But to what ends? You see, this question never ceases to follow.

 

 

For no matter how craftily I attempted to attribute a factor of nihility to my life, I still felt a pull towards something which I sensed to be far from arbitrary or self-serving. It could be described as an instinctual, unceasing longing for Creation over Destruction, or as a faint murmur of possibility from deep within the heart.

 

 

But whatever I chose to call this intangible but very powerful force, it did not need me to validate it. On the contrary, I intuited that it was inherently imbued with its own aseity. This higher sense and wisdom was as real to me as my very own breath. Furthermore, I knew now more than ever that even my bouts with faithlessness were an illusion, for even at my most atheistically-prone, I was well aware that this, in and of itself was proof of an undying, underlying faithfulness. For who or what was I to dictate or mandate what was fact and what was fiction even for myself? For was not the imaginal realm within which everything, especially for the Artist, was infused with true life and enrichment?

 

 

And if only the two realms of the fantastical and the practical could merge in harmonious dwelling within the world, who knows what humankind could achieve. For although a synthesis of this is enabled to occur on some level, the quixotic, notional or extraneous matters always end up getting short shrift. And for those deemed idealists, dreamers, artistes, eccentrics or romantics, how accommodation of a world of crude Realism felt all the more taxing. Life, for those of our kind often feels like more of an affliction, when in actuality what is truly needed is a salve to soothe those wounds inflicted by a continual abnegation of our more eclectic, exotic and unorthodox leanings and pinings.

 

 

Yet, in my devout mindfulness, I knew that this world was nothing more than a diversionary detour to worlds much more ideal and captivating. Hence did I remain in a state of limbo between these two worlds and was equally admired and resented for my ambivalence. But, even with just one foot in and one foot out, I knew that I would still find enough asylum to enclave me until such time as it was to return once and for all to celestial nativity.

 

 

For I believed that we are all orphans of that Lost Paradise, as well as being the potentially prodigal progeny of that Grand Dragon, Satan. For there truly is no limbo, no middle ground, no merely alive or dead. We may dwell in an either-or kind of state but must still pretend that we can dwell cohabitantly within both at the same time. For how can Heaven house Hell and Hell, house Heaven? Although here upon this earth in these current incarnations, this is very much the state of affairs. In nature, the lion never lies with the lamb, albeit in the form of dust and bone.

 

 

Yet this comes down to mere conditioning, as the lamb wisely intuits, for the sake of its own preservation, to stay away from that lion's den. Yet with humankind, such instinct cannot always be obeyed and the lion's of this world stay well-fed, while the lambs among us remain malnourished. And, as it so often is observed, that which makes the Homo sapiens advantageous over all other species, namely his perspicacity, is also the genesis of all of his woes and potential endangerments.

 

 

But if only we could feel our Creator's sense of Compassion, Loss & Sorrow for us would we know just how deeply we are cherished and loved. And even I was beginning to see this. For the fog had lifted and I could feel so clearly that love which I had held so dearly, unbeknownst even to me. And I could even see just what I had been depriving myself of and how foolish it had all been. And just yesterday, the Mind had gritted its teeth and the heart's muffled screams had gone unheeded, drowned out as they were by the black noise of mosaic Fear, easled as Higher Art within the sparse chambers of the esurient heart, obfuscating the masterfully-crafted magnificence and Beauty there beneath.

 

 

It was Joy, spawned by the matrix of that Higher Love, now being bathed within its baptismal meditations, cleansing the architectural artifices of all egoistic fortressing, erected in such wasteful haste, leaving the mind and heart with no more need for illusory, compulsive assertions to all of those things which had taught me how to hang onto the one branch sure to only bow and bend but eventually snap in two, from the weight of such self-pitying, petty-whetted laments.

 

 

Yes, the fog had lifted and I could not only see more clearly now, but most significantly could I feel with more resonance and clarity. And from henceforth would I make the first real commitment I had ever made in my life. From henceforth would I choose Justice. From henceforth would I choose just like any other day, but much differently. Yes, from this day onward despite the epic battle I knew lay before me, would I choose to embrace Love. For Love had flooded the desiccate crevices of my crumbling heart and my blackened soul, saturating them with the superencumbrant, almost unbearable levity of true, deep and abiding Joy, Freedom and Life.

 

 

And I felt so foolish when I realized again, just how much I had missed, having shut Love out, and just how much it had missed me. And I felt as if, all of those times I had lived without Love had all been some Grande Illusion crafted solely by myself and the demons I had let enter into myself. I felt almost as if those loveless times weren't real at all, as if they were just spurious, random projections to keep me preoccupied until Love and True Life had found me-or, rather, I had found them again.

 

 

I also had the revelation that this loveless world which I had wallowed in all of those years was not and had never been my true or rightful dwelling place. No, this time I really felt this truth. I believed in it just as it had never ceased believing in me. And this other, darker, colder world I knew did indeed, still exist while I was here upon this earth in my current mortal human skin, but I had a strong sense this time that it would never ensconce me as it had once possessed the power to. They did indeed still coexist, these worlds apart, especially whenever I began to fall back into trying to appease them both, but by the grace of God, my weary Soul had finally tired of this charade, this attempt to serve two such antithetical masters.

 

 

For although my upbringing may have taught me to hold in highest regard the causes of Chaos & Opposition, and indeed, these things do hold their Heraclitean honour and status within God's grande design, but now I was becoming a much more well-balanced human being. Now, I was beginning to fully see the righteous purpose of Order & Morality. And I also began to understand more thoroughly how Paradox & Struggle were not there to merely inflict pain and to withhold all good things from us, but was there to teach us, and indeed, as the Eastern Mystics would admonish, to evolve us.

 

 

I now understood how the dance of Creation & Destruction cavort in celebratory diplomacy, more so than in anarchy. And from henceforth would I contend much more triumphantly with the bifurcate mind and would I navigate with much more agility, the labyrinthine, hazardous laboratory of Life's Great Quantum Experiment, and stay truer to testing the hypotheses of Life's highest and noblest objectives, so that now, when I went forth into the world, would I rise and rise, continuing evermore, to rise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 19

 

 

 

Sitting here, wrapped up within the quiet repose of morning, my soul gently awakens to a heavy sense of my own imminent mortality. So as the sun rises, it also sets, everything returning to the same source. And this choice of a voice, to speak completely and unabashedly without rhetoric, but filled with passionate surety and conviction is perhaps the cry of every mortal human soul. Ars longa, vita brevis est indeed.

 

 

But as for Death, despite the longevity of Art and the brevity of Life, how long coming it seems when at last, we have reached its gates. I am stolen away by the gnawing fever in my brain, given to the preponderance of all of this once again- only this time, not merely in the abstract.

 

 

And, traveling at the speed of Now, out of the corner of my mortal Eye, Infinity passes too quickly by, as all sophistry of the where, why, what, when, how and who, surrenders both Erstwhile and Forthwith to the masterful craftsmanship of that prolific potter of Antiquity, while the Temporal-Eternal faithfully keeps vigil with a Mona Lisa smile, all this while.

 

 

The leagues of the mind converge, arriving upon disembodied Truths, understood but not fully comprehended or apprehended, so indecipherable they have grown to the conundrum-dumbed tongue. And now, sound and sight pass from their incarnate glory into the densified annals of the rest-the Absurd. For this body and its modes of being are truly seasoned only for the art and Techné of Comedy.

 

 

And again, perhaps Tragedy is a concept which we humans invent to lend ourselves credibility, as we seem only to be taken as seriously as we manage to be convincingly indifferent. And so, does the most pernicious tragedy lie within the trickery and deception we must pretend when all we truly want to be is simply that which we are, in our nakedness and honesty.

 

 

And so it all seems to come down to want vs. need, a dilemma intractably inherent within creatures that need to want more often than we want to need. And, indeed, if only the most pertinent information could exist...But then I fear we would invent Tragedy on even grander, more catastrophic scales, and the comedic might just become our sole idol, and nothing would be sacred save the profane.

 

 

And yet, we still cry out: Nihilo sanctum estne? And we are saved for as long as we can fully seek that answer solely within ourselves.

 

 

The angels still gather at my feet every morning. I feel their leaden promises of buoyant liberation weigh heavily upon my weary heart. They lift up their voices, so silverish and oddly benign, as if I cannot really hear them, but only see something like footnotes settling into the dark crevices of the bed sheets, whose utterances cannot possibly be read, only recalled.

 

 

I now walk the streets once more, my pace quickening as I continue on, drawing faithfully upon the satirical determinants of the body's massive, superencumbrant purpose-to deceive transcendental consciousness, always biting at the heels as we struggle to maintain the facade of pragmatic initiative and resolve-these things truly being, mere antonym to the magnum opus of Life.

 

 

I am brought to a halt at the raucous intersection, pedestrian walkway looming before me, its bold, adjudicating white lines assaulting an otherwise perfectly black, tar-marred earth, and I think to myself that perhaps today, I will teleport. For yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Doubt, I will fear only this-Doubt. For the rod and staff of any god cannot comfort thee in the face of this. Doubt, the Dracul of Hope, always in search of the blood of saints-that rich, liquid gold of the reverent and truly noble, those who have crafted of their souls, impenetrable temples of diamond, onyx, lapis lazuli and mother of pearl.

 

 

Might I become one of these, of my God, for only then do Thy rod and Thy staff comfort me, guiding me to the stillest waters and the greenest pastures no matter what might very well lie on that other side. For despite their perilous proximity to the fiercest opposition, have they remained, the safest places to dwell, where the encompassing skies whisper of joyous lament, and one's greatest strength becomes one's greatest weakness, and at last, the mortal human soul can surrender to the tides of sanctification & be redeemed.

 

 

For only He restoreth the fatally aggrieved mind, turning all which humankind has used towards its own usurpation and destruction, into Victory over Evil. For He can dwell only in those places most high, where Reason and Devout Circumspection are at their peaks of concern and dominion. For soon, my Mind's Eye would gaze directly into the Son, not blinding me, but enlightening and honing my sight unlike it had ever been before. And those clouds bearing acidic rains of the scathing reproach of my archaic, cardinal heritage could no longer lurch in menacing overcast. And a new season would be heralded, bringing to its close, the human need for meaning of any form or cause.

 

 

And as we struggled to comprehend the meaning in order that we might someday come to mean the struggle, very soon, we saw how this in and of itself becomes the struggle's end. And now I saw it all so clearly and could hear the bells tolling the song of true Freedom & Exultation. Yet I still feared that, if left completely unguarded and undammed, my heart might hemorrhage, and I would seep with unbounded, vibrant Joy and Love until the end of my days, merely existing for their sake alone and what then?

 

 

For it could not possibly be sustained, this feeling that I had found, of such unheeded warmth, dynamism and weightlessness, and hence would I regard it with a healthy dose of skepticism as long as my Soul still took up residence within this fleshly inhabitancy. But perhaps it could be possible to always live in this state? Perhaps we were the only obstacle. Perhaps then, should I lend my body to Science, no ethical boundaries left inviolable?

 

 

I look up and the sky is crying. Its tears reflect my eyes upon the surface tension of infinite rivers of Contemplation. These blessed rains surge through my veins, my earth-sunken toes, retapping their roots again. In the absence of Disunity, my finite Essence is nourished, rehydrated and found, at once unbound by the painfully constrictive gauze and abrasive balm of all worldly afflictions and so-called cures. I stand now, a human tree, awaiting to be sunken back beneath yet above it all, nestled again within the Womb of the Omniscient Benevolence, to sprout up, in due time, a new creation, wielding fruits to overflowing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 20

 

 

 

I stand in the recital hall upon the day that I am to carry out my decision. The pianist plays, his fingers, tiny fervent wings warbling over the keys, flight of the hummingbird. Now, an alternate method of playing demonstrates itself as the young man leans forward into the regal, ebony & ivory-toothed beast to pluck at its innards like a harpist, creating an amalgam of sense and wonderment with which to feast the Soul's ear upon.

 

 

Some pieces are reminiscent of murder mystery film scores, very abstract, dark and moody, as they shift in intervals from adagio-lachrymose and ominous-to allegro-presto, thundering, rumbling and manic, creating within this listener a simultaneous sense of euphoric rapture and impending doom. And one feels an odd sensation of the original composer's presence in the hall, as the young pianist plays on and the piece gives testimony to man, in imago divinus.

 

 

And God formed Adam from the dust of His earth, where he roamed its fecund loam for days, searching for sky where solid ground lay, reticent yet rumbling, hot and quick beneath his feet. Yet his nubile, nescient mind had grown a thickened skin where the shock of something he had named 'Longing' in some quixotic tongue whetted the parched matters of his flesh at the sight of His Father Creator, drinking him in, just then, split-shifting his belief that truly, nothing did fill the space between Sky & Substrata, breaking him thus, into One.

 

 

But soon, very soon, would he be split into multiples of two, losing himself infinitely within their ever-complexifying fractal images of Creator & Self. And thus would most of his days in this incarnation be consumed with the fine art of Spiritual Cultivation & Sustainment. Yet, despite the sorrow and grief this would bring him, he also somehow knew how equally inexhaustible would be his continual renewal and reward. And this was the root of his faith and his achievements, his greatest triumphs & defeats.

 

 

I stand now, upon the leper's ledge. The sky lets out a warning as the ground shivers in apocalyptic suspense. The faint form of a man appears just beyond the vertical horizon of mountain splitting sea. Rock & Rain, the things of which Man is so fearfully and wonderfully made, a constant dueling of dualities kept stoked by the incendiary multi-fold doctrinal commands of the Existential Liberation & Blissful Veneration of all forms of micro-macrocosmic management.

 

 

Like water to stone, the things of which all is made, psyche to soma, soma to psyche, spirit to flesh, flesh to spirit, a continual baptism to impurification, a cycle dynamically and concentrically consistent and kinetic. For Life is best felt as an endless barrage of stones skipped over the surface tension of an infinite continuum of perfectly still waters.

 

 

The diaphanous image of the man on the vertical horizon of mountain splitting sea upon which I glanced but a moment ago has dispersed now, leaving in its place, the air up there. I watch all of this from the leper's ledge, which is quite homey for supposedly being the loneliest place on the earth. But the leper sees only his own beatific image reflected in the beauty & majesty of his surroundings, and so I let him be and do not burden him with mine.

 

 

In solitary sublime-ment I find and claim once more, my oppressed and maimed Spirit, which had been awoken by the gentle caress of God's Creation, so benevolent yet omnipotent is it in its reign. The billowing breeze strokes the statuesque trees with its wispy fingers, rejuvenating all of my senses, restoring my innocence. God is here, soothing my world-weary Soul, reminding me of true solace and where it lies, not merely within that Divinity mirrored through God's Creation outside of oneself, but that Divinity which lies within each individual Self, the Spirit's Eye of Truth & Justice, always watching over all sentient beings plagued by worldly impiety and corruption.

 

 

And this is a Truth which, when sought out and allowed to be the only Eye through which one sees, shall bring to slow fruition, a sanative, beatifying rebirth. For such things seen through the mere anatomical eye will be robbed of their depth perception. Such things when tasted of with only the soft, sweetly savoring palette will be robbed of their true sustenance.

 

 

Such things felt only through the tactile sense will only numb down and dumb-down the human Essentia. And often, as such things merely vocally defended are in doubt within the defendant, certainty is akin only to silence, and inaudible contemplation. For such things seeking and finding resolution in the absence of inward reflection elude true wisdom and merit. As such things of immediate resonance claiming forthwith to be heard have truly fallen on deaf ears.

 

 

I rush to the ends of the shore to shelter myself from the weathered waters of the world-tide, where the ebon earth has lain for me, a blameless blanket of landscape, soil and solace. I rush to the ends of the shore to shelter myself from that choleric, sullen sun, where sanguine saplings of benevolent bark await in the shade to cradle me within their spindly limbs and clothe my shame with their flora and fauna.

 

 

I rush to the ends of the shore to shelter myself from all of the unruly elements that I, alone, cannot master, where Unity & Harmony await within a quiet, humble surrender to my utter Impotence & Finitude. Now, here, standing upon the beach, in the middle of Everywhere, I am released into the vortex of Omniscience, as a tidal wave of revelation washes over me. I, a miniscule mote of Creation amongst an infinity of creations, still stand, feeling somehow, my own significance in all of this.

 

 

Yet it is a humbling kind of pride. For even the grains of sand upon which I glance, and let run through my fingers, and make my ephemeral imprint humble my soul, for I have only begun to grasp the concept of Him, as the round, calcified chalices of my knees and the callused balls of my well-trodden feet surrender their reverent hollows to the warm sands of the fathomless Creator God, The Alpha & The Omega. And thus does the end of all ends begin, and the beginning of all beginnings He sends, upon His gentle, sustaining breath of Life, the winds.

 

 

Since the five years ago that I arrived at what then felt like my final destination, and the building of the Police Station loomed before me, although execution for my crimes has finally arrived, I feel freer than I ever have in my life. I am 37 years old, yet have lived many lifetimes. The prison guards arrive to shackle me and lead me to my final penance. I walk down the narrow corridor, the clanking of the chains proclaiming my Fate, for so long delayed.

 

 

Yes, now I will return, making full recompense for all I have stolen, and all that I have taken out of turn. In Death will I finally embrace Life. The electricity now shoots through the highly charged conductor of my mortal vessel. I hear Heaven. I see all of those whom I have violated and pillaged from, floating in synchronous swirls to the fluctuating, gentle tides of Vindication. I feel an odd sense of only Ecstasy & utter Union. There is no more encumbrance. I am free to fly. There is no more of Alone, only total celestial enmeshment and release.

 

 

And as such indescribable weightlessness slowly consumes me, I find abolition from those shackles and chains of banal profanity which my former Life's fruitless searches upon that God-made but devil-harvested earth had wrought upon me. Yet up here, nothing spoils, nothing toils, nothing boils in the agony of its own defeats or remorse. The body is in a form you cannot yet fathom, to no longer be scathed or face the indignities and ravages of petty Lust & constrictive concupiscence.

 

 

Up here, the Intangibles are no longer deemed the Insubstantials. On the contrary, they are the very substance which composes and infuses the atmosphere with its very substance and existence. Up here, words no longer need be spoken. There is no need or want for anything, anymore. Up here, nothing needs compensation or absolution. Yes, up here, it all speaks, for itself.

 

 

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