ANTITHESIS CRUCIFIX:
JOURNAL OF AN ORTHODOX MELANCHOLIC
A WORK BY VALERIE LYNN STEPHENS
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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 consent of the owner of the copyright of this book.
©2014 Valerie Lynn Stephens.
All rights reserved.
ISBN #: 978-1-387-29727-6
My dreams speak in the only language that I can understand. I trust only in their raw, uncensored reality. I am not sane, they say, for I see only the Truth. Yet I see through the lies embraced as Truth-and so am I even moreinsane, they tell me. I am not of sound mind. But what is sanity? What is insanity? Perhaps Machiavelli was right, that you must lie to win in this world.
Where has faith in righteousness gone? I am lost, but I am found. Things are different now. I am irrevocably changed. There is a point of no return where, once it is breached, the only thing left to do is to be. This is the beauty of growing older not only in body, but in mind. Old obsessions fade, to be replaced with an eager new confidence to bring to actualization all of the ambitions, ideals & dreams which devout reverie once sought to compensate for, or perhaps, could only idly ponder.
There is only one way to go henceforth-forward. I am not conditioned to walk backwards for too long of stretches. Nature will work for us, we must just trust in it. The nature of humankind is not to just someday die, but to realize what we are here for in the first place-to live! We are here to love! We are here, to actualize into that which the Divine Himself bore us for.
All of the books of philosophy cannot match the Empiricist wisdom which Aristotle himself touted. We cannot be brought to any feasible conclusion about the true meaning of life without living the questions.
And what of those maladies, so pervasive & pandemic, brought about by the human condition-which is what blinds most to the very meaning of life-their own fear of their own intractable human condition manifesting itself in its various nightmarish guises?
There is no cure, and this, in & of itself, is The Answer, TheRemedy. No metaphysician can heal that which presents no true illness other than psychosomatous & idiopathic.
But why should one want all of the answers when the very joi de vivre lies in these very vagaries & challenges which having “the answers” for would merely seek to betray? Transcendence is often misunderstood. It is not manifest in the loftiest states of being & consciousness, but in the nerve where foot meets earth, firmly & stoicly.
*
The eloquence of Life holds me in catatonic reverie, & I cannot even begin to express my ambivalence towards it without feeling both a fool & a criminal. The earth revolves daily around my dizzying evolution & I find my soul thrust into panoramic, kaleidoscopic mutations of internal climate with each tumultuous turn. Today forecasts a long, hot summer.
It forecasts one of those days where the Sun hangs like a half colon in the sky, a proclamation of something related to one's own contemplations, but non-sequitor. And sometimes the Sun emanates a hot point of exclamation, or uncontested proclamation. At other times, it is merely a big period, which looms perilously low & understated behind a lazy haze of cumulonibi.
On other days, there appears to be a little black dot thereupon its surface, glaring like the eye of some merciless predator, lying in ravenous wait for your next move. And it is on these days that one longs for a nuclear winter.
Yet even on those days, the heart still flutters beneath the breast in eager anticipation for something it cannot quite explain. It can never quite explain, which merely further serves to validate the utter weight & significance of that very something which eludes its identification & translation-into-action.
In this existence, mysteries always loom large in the surrounding air, despite those “airs” which human beings affect, of order & logic. For no matter how loudly & clearly Logic articulates itself into one's ear, the human heart possesses a logic all its very own. For how else can one explain when the question is posed concerning which voice to listen to, the reasoning mind chatters away deafeningly, while the heart is always content with a knowing and deafening silence?
All of the life is slowly being squeezed from my soul. I suffocate in my own paranormal paranoia, as ghosts of Shame, Humiliation & Disillusionment threaten to brand my spirit with systematic demise by stagnation.
All of the anger & self-hatred must be exorcised from my cognizance or I will be possessed by the most immortal & omnipotent demons of the all-those which the Self creates for its own torment, ravaging edification & ultimate annihilation. For truly, this is often that creation of human design crafted with as much techné & mastery as one can muster.
To create to create? Or to create to destroy? To destroy to create even? All nevertheless, are methods employed to bring equal measures of Absolution.
To destroy to destroy is perhaps pure Art at its height of depth, for that which lays the foundation for Nature's aesthetic architecture of Catharsis is that which also reveals Truth in its most redeeming anti-Manichean multiple manifestations.
To create to create is Destruction at its most subversive acuity in a world where the birth of Death is ever ordained.
Yet the absurd tragi-comedy of the human drama is rarely unmasked for what it truly is-the same cog in the same old wheel of every man's mental machinery-the hunger to transcend that irony-brickaded barrier, housing as it does on each side, that which is natural & that which is sublime & transcendent.
The former being that which one needs to survive, the latter being that which one needs to thrive. Must we learn how to love? Must we learn how to hate-or is love indeed hate properly sublimated, therefore making Love & Hate beneficial bedfellows?
*
A mind questioning things it cannot comprehend. A heart grasping desperately for things once felt. A soul starving from inhibition. A spirit estranged. A body writhing. A voice outspoken-yet still, unheard. A name held in contempt. An instinct weakened. A dream closing. A will crippled. A light, glaring & mocking. A truth forgotten. An honesty brutal, searing & seething. A peace unearthed. A love, a mind, a heart, a soul, a spirit, a body, a voice, a name, an instinct, a will, a light, a truth, an honesty, a peace, corrupt. A redemption, dire.
*
I have bade the devil to enter & he will not leave.
Oh for what Love is lost has Terror been returned in macabre measure to this iniquitous, frail fleshly ghost down to its crusty crux, leaving a residue, cruelly & compliantly fixed.
And what the mind fails to understand the soul sweetly demystifies through the slow but sure abreaction of implosive transgression, & I fall into a truistic trance of unruly oblivion & inert intuition.
This Shadow follows wherever we go. It needs no light to grant it substantiality or form. But at least I recognize it nowadays.
How long can one live a lie? Can I dance with Hypocrisy for longer than I have been able to bear dancing with Contradiction? Or are they perhaps, one & the same, set apart only by name? When will I truly begin to live for Life rather than for Death? I feel on the verge of psychotic immersion & frenzy. The complex architecture of Self-Hatred & Rage begins to construct itself, housing the space-time causation of an endless Void, echoing mnemonic remnants of humanity lost.
*
A quieted mind of inert dynamism. A heart filled to overflowing with relatively righteous wrath, the weaponry of Truth's loaded gun, cocked to endless assaults of systematically implosive suicide.
Atlas is on strike but has no idea just how lucky he is.
Everyone feels the insurmountable weight of each their own private lament & burdens, but at least Atlas had a Fate, destined, strictly & clearly pre-ordained by his creator. Everyone but the self feels that anyone's pain except their own is unjustified, insignificant-even blasphemous.
But truly, the only heresy ever committed by man is when he fails to recognize that there is indeed such a thing as both solipsistic, subjective Reality & absolute Truth, and that they can & do-must-coexist.
Yet the mortal human life is too often spent trying its best to deceive-to turn Truth into Falsity, Reality into Illusion, Myth into Reality. Yet those who embrace this state of being forget that lies have a life force all their own-equally as omnipotent as Truth. The lie will flourish & propagate to the end & the ones seduced into its lurid oblivion will eventually be forevermore deceived-forevermore lost.
*
The problem posed is not in distinguishing between what is truth & what is illusion. The true task is in extinguishing the fire inside, flame by flame, which lies at the very incendiary root of an individual's choice to embrace Lies over Truth. And lies can present themselves as being just as relative as any deep personal revelation of Truth.
But the difference between a lie & a truth is that Truth speaks quietly for itself. Truth needs not be twisted so dexterously 'round the axis of Justice. Truth concerns what is Good & Holy. The lie may pose as Protagonist in the first few acts of any self-penned human drama, but will quickly be shown to be the worst villain of them all by curtain call.
Even when one chooses to accept a lie which panders to the best possible interest of those being deceived, Truth will still not be denied, as it is the very air which a mortal soul must aspirate if it is to truly survive.
Truth may bind the Soul within its engulfing enthrallment, but it is only through those things that we feel most encumbered by that we can ultimately find that most priceless Freedom of all-the prerogative to not only think, feel & understand for the sacrosanct mission of that of our own self-actualization & salvation, but the Freedom offered up by the Holy Spirit which enables one to know Truth, beyond the shadow of any doubt.
*
I am the darkness on the velvety black cloak of Night. The shadow of a man, six feet under. Lightning flashed on the surface of the Sun. White on white. Black on black. Grey on grey. Death on a tray, next to Life. Pain enmeshed with Pleasure, that ubiquitously unearthed treasure of infinite measure. Oh let those who've the eyes to see, see me, the distinguishably invisible.
*
I am filled with Sadness today. I wait for the cleansing but the tears do not come. I am filled with Madness today. I await in anguish for Catharsis but clarity & mellifluence of expression does not come, heeded by the futility of necessary neutrality. Absence of action in any mode betrays sentiment.
“How are you today?” That's rhetorical, right? Knowing what one feels with more conviction than knowing what one knows or does not know. And so the “right mind” becomes lost amongst the passive-aggressive clamorings of the Heart's totalitarian rule. I am not sane for I feel too much, again they tell me. I am not sane for I feel too little, they also say. Yet still there is no confusion in the wake of Surrender, & I am finally, blissfully, dead awake.
*
If only what one feels, hopes, desires & knows could fly across the template of life with the same graceful eloquence as one's thoughts can fly across a page. During mortal hours such as these, every new day is foreshadowed with doom.
And when it enters into my dreams, I am always still hoping, although not altogether so sure if this, too, will be another day that I can deftly discredit with the jagged blades of burgeoning wake. The dread is truly this: That one day, I will wake up, to never sleep or dream again.
*
It's hard to believe one is moving forward in a mind that is in continual rewind. Needing to move forward in a mind in continual rewind, puts one in quite an existential bind. To be or not to be-was never in question. There is equal validity to both the question & the answer-when one knows how to synchronize the dance & the dancer.
But when one has not yet mastered this metaphysical maneuver? Then where does one find the lamb for such failings that not everyone else has already slaughtered in endless sacrifice? For trying too hard to spawn self-regard merely leaves one indelibly caught between surviving & just being all that one is not, in order that one may become more fully all that one already is.
Someday perhaps the human soul might learn how to see Life as its own adequate cause in & of itself, however simple or profound its movements & variations.
*
What is this skin? It thins with age as I surrender all joie de vivre to the weathered cemeteries of cognitive sophistication. Where do I belong? In this skin, even I feel a misfit to myself. Nothing fits anymore save my own gnawing loathing. I cringe from within. At least I am better at disguise. Or am I?
The skin is just too thin for the fires of earthly Hell that we stoke with our Insolence & Ignorance. What is right, is wrong. What once was wrong, is now right. So, whose opinion matters more? One's own used to suffice plenty.
Is there no more fight left within me? Is this merely a state of induced, systematic falling away? To fall away. To just, fall away. I have already been caught. The more I am hated by this world, the more I feel that I may have found my place once again.
What am I? I am utterly dehumanized. Have I no heart, no soul left? Mine eyes have seen both too little & too much. I can only pray that God has mercy upon my soul. He has had mercy in abundance all along but-Can I take any more than I already have only to squander it all on shame & self-reproach? I cannot take any more than I, myself, have given. I just do not have the stomach for it.
I have already perhaps bitten off more than I can chew. I am not whole until I have given enough to receive without shame or reticence. And thus it seems to be, survival of the misfittest. I've plenty to offer, just seemingly no one to take the offerings for what they are truly worth. I am just not quite myself as of late. Will I ever return? I hope. I pray. I hate hating & being hated, but perhaps this is the mysterious miracle behind how we come, to fully & truly, love.
*
We all secretly yearn to give way to insanity, for Madness is the Abyss into which all, eventually fall. To lose control of that unnatural selection that barricades the earthen church of all that is both expedient and yet, forbidden. For truly, Life is often lived in masked revolt against the assured & systemic slaughter of one's truest & most ultimately redemptive Essence at the hand of so-called “survival”. This is why that “madness” so classified by the masses is perhaps the least ignoble state of the human condition.
*
It's been too late from early on. In the beginning, I came to know the end. Yet the end became the serendipitous burgeoning of Infinity & Eternity, totally unbound by Protocol.
As of late, I have wondered if the mind is truly “our own”, or if it is merely an intangible extension of Intellectualis Dei, or Diabolus, after all. And my answers to such inquiries have come all too quickly, as they dangle at the border of thought & action like mismarked semi-colons, & rumble on mercilessly like run-on sentences that can no longer tell the difference between mere sophistry & relevancy.
But the insinuating syntax of the full sentence of a human lifetime, is that it is all equally relevant & irrelevant. It is a matter of knowing when & where to speak out loud. It is a war of cognition & enterprise, whose casualties often begin & end in mute incomprehension & inertia born from the toxic yet fecund Womb of Apathy. For the world is only as we think it to be, no more, no less.
*
Love floods the dessicated crevices of the heart & the whole Soul is again saturated with the superencumbrant, unbearable levity of True Freedom & Life.
And we always feel so foolish when we realize just how much we've missed, in shutting everything out. For one cannot exclude the Shadow without snuffing out the Light. And we also realize that perhaps the life which we have been living for so long in a state of hypervigilance & terror, was perhaps a spurious projection or substitution for our true Home. Any world outside the Womb of Agape, is not our true dwelling place.
Although, these two spiritual realities exist & bear equal relevance to our metaphysical journey towards evolution & salvation, nevertheless. Yet the human Soul was not made to serve two antithetical masters. And in this life, one can come to be seduced by the notion of that “noble savagery” found in Chaos & Anarchy.
But one comes to see that this is, indeed just a whim, or a romantic myth & nothing more. And we come to see that Paradox does not exist solely for the purpose of inflicting pain upon human beings, & that it is, in fact, another act of God's mercy & providence. Life & Death have always cavorted in celebratory diplomacy. We must just learn their dance, & join in.
*
Why are some so afraid of Sadness when it was Sadness from whence they were spawned? The melancholic heart is the Mother of all contemplative serenity & inward equilibrium, & hence, is the Creator of true happiness. The sorrow must come first if the joy is to spring forth from the Chrysalis of Conciliation & Revivification. For the human Soul, is becoming drunk on the blood of the weeping grapes of Solemnity in which this world steeps, & soon sleeps, within the ever-vigilant eye of its brother, Death, that it may be reborn unto the Eternality of its earthly doings.
*
Not known, yet presumed to to be known by many strange faces, non-kindred spirits. The masque, thus, is adorned again. For Oppression if the true-blood Mother of Stagnation & Existential Ennui & Dissipation.
The Sphinx utters the riddle of me, & yet only I have the means to decipher it. Others can only guess not only at the answers to my riddles but also at the questions. And many allow themselves immersion into inauthenticity due to this fear of isolation. But alone is not to be feared-it is to be tongue-kissed. For the individual Fate withers away to nothing fed sweet-bread & wine, within the cold, steel-barred confines of staunch Conformity, & thrives best upon the bitter aliments of Individuation.
For only from the Womb of Chaos can true Destiny be born. Without a leader from within oneself, leaders from without shall soon force one to follow to one's own ultimate detriment.
*
I feel with great doom & remorse, that I have been once more led astray by the ill pursuits of human tendency. Yet I am, in actuality, not unlike the innocent party who must now try to prove my guiltlessness in crimes which I have not committed.
Yet they are nonetheless crimes which I feel deep within my Soul I have yet to be fully acquitted of within the private-sectored court of my own self-adjudication & condemnation.
And Lady Justice, perched majestically upon the granite mantle of my conscience, appears to have now lost all sense of equilibrium & fairness. To compound matters, she also seems to have regained her sight-the blindfold has been undonned! She no longer wears the blindfold & is also thus, unceasing in her partiality & bias.
Yet for the most part, she is not my advocate or my defending witness. Her scales are not calibrated to weigh in my favour or mercy. And when she is my defending attorney, how I deftly refuse her counsel, while simultaneously taking on the role of my own prosecution. And oh! What elocution! What poise! What an expert case I have prepared against myself when I have summoned to the chaotic courtroom of my tormented Psyche to be held time & time again in contempt but never removed.
And when the gavel strikes, the verdict is almost always tried, convicted & innocent, the sentence being life in a miserable incarceration facility constructed & kept under unyielding watch & surveillance by none other then myself.
The only parole I have the hope of ever receiving is granted only when I stand trial at yet another debasing self-indictment when the time has come once more. For I am indeed, my own best worst enemy. I am prosecutor, jury, judge & executioner. And I am the only one to be feared.
*
When the light goes out, the shadow is nary to be seen. But be not deceived, for it is just become, engulfing darkness.
Seduced by the devil. Once again mistaking carnal freedom for grace, redemption. Yet redemption is coy by its very nature, though not the least bit sly.
It is persistent, but not in the least loyal. It is fragile & fickle &, not unlike Fate, will abandon us if we neglect it. For then, both Shadow & Light may be lost to our sight, & henceforth may the darkness better deceive us.
Shadow & light must coexist not because they compliment one another, but because, in due time, they will both reign in a state of metaphysical symbiosis, cancelling each other out altogether, & all that will be left, is Infinity & Eternity, an eager new Void, hopeful & teeming with Demiurgic prognostication.
*
I walk with reluctant command through the icy night air. The atmosphere is thick with loneliness & loss. The loss of things that cannot be regained or reclaimed.
Now is now, a moment unlike any other. Things have changed. Things have shifted. The self is changed yet is still the self one has always known due to the persistence of mnemonics weighing heavily upon the Soul. One can't remember to forget the insignificant & trivial pursuit of a balm to soothe the pain no longer being inflicted independent of the Mind's redundant recycling of it.
And so the future remains indefinite yet also immanently present & portentous viewed as it is through the splintering mosaic of the past. With every step forward, five steps back seem to follow, thus making every moment seem tortuously futile.
Patience is the most coveted trait sought in the training of this unruly former self-child. The fight is not in being, but in becoming.
A sustainment of Joy thus becomes shrouded in mystery & the misadventures of a mind compulsive with Skepticism become anguishingly mundane, fostering an incendiary contempt. I have strayed from Truth & Reason, or have they strayed from me? Is Madness, then, perhaps an essential phase of psychospiritual edification & fruition?
*
My existential nightmare is a nihilist's dream. It is an endless cycle of futility & meaninglessness. I can no longer feel anything, thus does life seem just as devoid. But I am, & life is always indeed, quite something. I do still know this from somewhere deep within.
But the merits formerly awarded the poet, the artist & the philosophers are no more. It used to be that people were hungry for Truth. Now they have a seemingly unquenchable thirst & carnivorous taste for only Lies, more so lies of Omission.
Ah, but I'm sure they delude themselves that their tastes have merely become more sophisticated, when in fact, the smorgasbord of popular society is both the least exotic, nourishing or sustaining.
*
This sadness, this deep sorrow no Joy could abolish. How long will my heart remain in chains? I am everything & nothing. I am everyone & no one. I am everywhere & nowhere. No mirror could adequately validate, with its reflective plays upon light & optical nerve, that I am truly or ever was, alive.
I know that I am sometimes only due to the words here upon this page communicating themselves. I think, therefore I feel, therefore I write, there I am not altogether unheard & without a voice. I must put it all into words, give it substantiated form.
I must transcend this quiescent hysteria that I may rise to a roaring existential crescendo of Being, for it has grown all too hushed in here. And lest my words be misread by the masses with a hysteria not my own, I shall take up the perfect disguise in subtle pseudonym & feigned congruency with them so that my words may reach all minds & hearts, even those indisposed to edification. For my truth is their truth, with one name & one face, of the human race.
Although lies are more easily embraced & clung to by most, leaving the world in a vertiginous inertia which even the loyal persistence of the heavenly bodies in their succinct dance of numbers could not rouse to long, purposeful stride towards Heaven's gate.
Yet even with Heaven as it lies in wait for those who belong to Him, we invite Hell into our lives, forgetting the ready availability of Heaven's abiding, even here upon this earth. Thus, the question becomes: How can one defy Hypocrisy & Paradox without incurring the fatal wrath of this world?
How does one choose a side while remaining sane & whole? For if we do not choose devotion to God & Self, we betray all. For the world meets us only halfway regardless. Thus must we cultivate a mindfulness without mindlessness. Thus must we diligently choose that which edifies over that which comforts & gratifies.
Yet sometimes what one must do to “survive” betrays what one must do to “thrive.” But the purpose of this very existence was laid out in the blueprint for this very lesson. All is well with my Soul, for Heaven & Hell both console.
*
I am up high on low. I am everyone's exalting platform. When the barrier is down, everyone merely steps right on over you and goes gaily on their merry way.
When the barrier is strongly standing secure & tall, everyone wants to see what's on the other side. Is making oneself scarce the only way to truly be seen? Is making oneself enticingly opaque without being too vulnerably transparent the only way to find anything of lasting value in this world?
Yet one can still maintain the cornerstones of one's private cathedral without selling the whole lot to the Devil. And some fine day, I suppose, the fruits of Wisdom, both sacred & secular, will be fit for consumption. Until then, one must continue in the cultivation of the necessary self-awareness & erudition to get one there.
*
Most want to kill the Darkness inside of them. I want to kill the Light. For I cannot dwell in a world created only by that of my own doubting, reprobate, misanthropic mind. It is a wonder how any human entity transcends such wretchedness to sprout up on wings like eagle's & redeem oneself.
But this just it-such a power cannot possibly come from the same self which plots that of its own demise with equal ferocity as that of its own exaltation. It must indeed be, the Holy Spirit which quickens in me when I am saved from myself. And if one does not learn to surrender to this self-sovereign force, one must learn to pray with all of one's heart, one's mind & one's soul, that God sends one straight-away to the very bowels of Hell. For all beings made in imago divinus must first descend to each their own Hades, to one day, enter Heaven.
*
Most dance around the flames. Then for some, this is not enough. Some must feel the burn, smell the putrid singe of flesh, hair, bone, trembling tendon, before they reach that place of Dionysian frenzy & ecstasy which releases their soul to whirl above them in the cool, ameliorative air, freed from the fiery furnace of the body & the grinding heat of the mind.
Most dance around the flames or evade them at any & all costs. How does one go from one who knows well enough to keep away to one who not only plays with fire but must become fire itself?
Where has Nature been perverted in this tragic sequence of existential human affairs? Or perhaps, it has been sanctified. When does the wisdom of the archaic mind turn to the Nietzschean, Pelagianistic propaganda of pseudo self-determinism?
When does the human organism decide to stop the natural process of evolution itself with the infinite ideals, regiments & schemes brought forth by the preening, prying inventions of its day?
When does an innate instinct to self-preserve become an almost a reverse-religious drive to self-destruct?
How can one choose to place such blind faith in Death's fatal representation of Life as a means for mere “survival” until the end, over Truth's corrective lens of life for life's sake?
This just shows what countless sages, poets, philosophers, & artists throughout human history have wrongly presumed to be so elusive-so inscrutable.
The meaning of life is so simple, it is profound. It is to live. To be. To thrive. To self-actualize in imago divinus. But what of “survival” then? Should one live in abandonment of the confines of this amygdalian reflex?
Perhaps though, it is not so much a matter of choosing a master as it is in finding a way to accept both with equal deference & regard. Although one must indeed serve only one.
But survival as Life's goal is yet another trick of perception which the devil turns upon the human mind. Thus, again, the only way in which one can truly live & survive is by dying. It always comes back to this, doesn't it?
*
I feel a turn, a change from within myself. It is tinged with a sense of joyous exhilaration & yet portent, an ominous electric terror that I might just be finally emerging from out of the darkness & doubt which have crippled me for so long. The spirit has no memory of a past, only a sense of Amor Fati.
And the Soul holds Past, Present & Future within the teeming Womb of continual renewal & Rebirth. I am still the “me” of old that I always knew, & yet, I am new at the same time. And this is where Fear & Doubt writhe & entwine themselves most insidiously.
Truly the Future is an arbitrary confine to ponder, as it always, already present, ever immanently contained within the so-called forthwith. Present is future. Now is then. Yet perhaps the most pressing & encumbering inquiry wrought by this human condition is: Which must one guard most intently: the mortal Soul or the Spirit Divine?
*
The primeval Heart always bleeds while the Neoteric Mind knows not. And so, one must die in that one may live. A dying, not for Life, but a dying unto it. Yet why do we continue asking questions to which we already have the answers. Ah! But that's just it. Questions are content in their passivity. Answers, require action.
But perhaps the inquiry in & of itself, acts as a soothing salve for wounded, Icarian wings. Yet the truth of the matter is, that such mortal creatures of flight-simulation must allow their wings to be clipped by their Almighty & Sovereign Creator if they are ever to truly soar.
But this life is not a test of the Spirit-perfect in design, He, always is-but is a test of the earthbound mortal human Soul. For Transcendence is not measured in how high one can soar, but in how grounded & devoutly rooted one can remain, in the here & now.
*
There is no going back now. Something is inalterably changed. Something that was once so essential to my very being I fear has been lost to my cognizance. Is it still, an essential? Was it ever at all? I am malaised with a persistent, dull, idiopathic ache from deep within the microcosm of every cell, born of a benign yet nevertheless very plaguing Anxiety which presages some kind of downfall.
Will my new knowledge lead to an corrosive cynicism & spiritual foreclosure? Will I be led, like so many countless other souls have, to a kind of compulsive, egregious nihilism? For there is already enough of this beyond the borders of Solipsis, entering into the realm of Universalism. For all collective chaos is first birthed from deep within the individual soul & ill-will. For once a state of persecutory fixation takes hold within a human soul, it takes a miracle to subdue it.
But what is one to do when all of one's former methods of inoffensive posturing are no longer there to catch one's heel before one staggers in even the slightest bit, let alone falls flat.
Will one be spared the indignities of playing poster-child for that voluminous Void there in between Gravity & Levity in all of their inherent vagaries, ignominy, disesteem & self-reproach? Or, is it merely inevitable that, in the face of existential peril, the human animal will always digress back to its more vestigially vile methods of preservation? For what else does the endangered one have save the baptismally neutralizing offertory of self-nullificaton?
Must one regress to the zygotic phase of precognitive oblivion in such states of human extreme? Thus, the existential melodramas continue, the Antagonist played by none other than Survival, the Antagonist, Thrivance. One cannot serve two dramaturges, indeed. If a gun does not go off by the third act, the production must cease.
*
I awaken again to abysmal Despair, the source of which is too complex to be known, yet very much felt in full, nevertheless. My anguish exceeds any efforts to conceal it & remain, yet another casualty to gritty, harsh Ecclesiastical Realism.
Everything sinks in, consumed by an infinite thirst for the metaphysically intoxicating wine of the inscrutable. Hope, for some, lies in Certainty-for others, in Enigma. For the latter, the science of fact is untactfully exact.
Yet the scientology of applied fiction to the former, is a much coveted affliction. Yet both, when taken in proper measure, can be cure for the root of all ills, whenever Passion sleeps & Stoic Resignation further stills.
*
I believe in God because I have seen the Devil. I believe in Heaven, because I have dwelt in Hell. Which one is precedent, antecedent?
But such a question cannot always be definitively answered when the sentient organs of the mortal human experience, by Truth's indiscriminate hand, are dealt the first blows of the profane.
Yet without first, recognition of Tragedy, even Comedy turns tragic & there is no immediate cause felt anymore for redeeming oneself.
But perhaps we do not need tragedy of any turn or kind? Perhaps the true tragedy is the absurd convictions with which we create something out of nothing for our own ravaging edification.
But, I suppose, as long as its means justify its ends. But the question still remains, how, once the acknowledgment of all of this remains, do we let it all go in that we may hold on? For the very act of surrender often requires an inscience of self-sense which we may not even be capable of-or, which may not be in our best interest to coddle.
Must this life be so consumed by this matter? The answer is always-yes, if it matters. And of course, this is where the inherency of religious doctrination & strivings comes into play. The matter behind mind, & the mind behind matter & what ultimately, matters. The epic struggle between Good & Evil. The Temporal vs. The Eternal. The Material vs. The Discarnate.
Indeed, many would posit that this struggle, itself, is at the heart of the very purpose of this human condition & existence itself. And such a statement, however seemingly reductionistic, betrays not legitimacy & relevancy, as more than half of our very lives are directly or indirectly concerned with the aforementioned themes.
And it cannot be denied, that no matter how much we attempt to attribute a factor of nihility to our human existence, or to the machinations of the world or the universe, we still sense some pull towards a higher goal far from arbitrary. Even if we are suffering & have a will to die, we nevertheless feel the counterbalancing pull of Life calling us back to it.
I have finally concluded that the doctrine of atheism (& indeed it is, the most dogmatic of them all) is the delusion of delusions, Satan's Manifesto, his Magnum Opus. For even the most faithless very fervently believe in their disbelief.
And who is to determine what is 'real' & what is 'unreal'? For is not the human imagination-the realm of pure thought-that womb from whence all Actuality is midwifed into being? If only both things could live in such harmony now in what we call “the real world.”
For although a synthesis of so-called “reality” & “fantasy” can be achieved in some moments of nouminosity, the deemed “quixotic” will, for the most part, always get short shrift. And for the Artist, the so-called “madman”, the idealist, the romantic, the eccentric genius, the dreamer, this verity of ecumenical existence qualifies the world a living Gehenna. For him, though he is indeed blessed, he is equally, if not more so, cursed due to his the cognitive & existential dissonance & displacement which he experiences daily.
But he is fine again when he remembers, that this earth is not our final destination by any means. It is merely a psychospiritual evolutionary tool with which he can choose to smith his soul to Divine proportions, until such time as it is to return to Celestial Nativity.
*
In the company of the Beast, I am most myself. Though vile & repulsive, I am never alone.
Weeping endures for the night, but woeful gnashing of the teeth unifies for all Eternity.
I dwell above ground, but nothing here is real. I feed underground where the nourishment is faithfully inflicting & the alibis are irresistibly air-tight & enticing.
For here, the lifeblood of God's love runs lukewarm & arsenic beneath the skin, & the shivering upset of the mind's flesh finds more than adequate incendiary preservation in the promise of Hell.
And yet as the Devil draws his blunt instrument of Deception from the mind's flesh, you know that you have taken vow to your Eternal Master & have unleashed the one things inside of you that will never let you go-the thing that will not & cannot give up on the task of your Salvation, on your Redemption.
One cannot kill the Darkness within, without snuffing out the Light. To be damned, is to be saved.
*
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