|
SubscriptionsSites I Read
|
|
|
|
| christians don't seem to know a damn thing about love these days. | | |
| One.
There are suicide notes I will not be writing because it would not be
worth adding the insult to the injury. The non-recipients of these
unwritten notes could not possibly suffer any more or less at the news
of my life's ending if I did address them so why would I bother
punctuating something at wholly meaningless as taking my life with more
meaninglessness?
Friends from my childhood and college roommates will not be addressed
because we have undergone sufficient transitioning away from each other
in our relationships due to growing geographic non-proximity and the
passing of time. My death can be to them like a conversation they might
overhear at a coffee shop. A bright young woman killed herself for
apparently no reason, how sad. They are at a distance from me now that
it can be enough to process the information like glancing at the title
of a newspaper editorial. Just that.
Despite this small allowance of my selfishness, suicide is the least
excusable way to die. Still there is no outcry for medical science to
find a cure, or for the government to dispense immediate financial aid,
or for the reversal of some Supreme Court decision like Roe vs. Wade.
This is not the culture in which committing suicide is the cathartic
resolution for otherwise irreversible dishonor.
My mind has fought to process the loss of a great many things, still
perhaps far fewer losses than the average human mind endures. Suicide
says I'm done and you all might as well be done, too. It is the
ultimate "fuck you." There is nothing more inappropriate but at times I
can convince myself that there is nothing more necessary.
There are those people to whom I would be compelled to write, though
not because of any delusion of mine that they could in any way
appreciate it. How could I expect anyone to conjure any good thought of
me for a note that ultimately reads "fuck you." With these notes I
would incite the worst kind of karmic influence for my soul and say
that the love and affection the note's recipient has for me is an
offense. Their concern is a trap and their hope for me is wasted.
By killing myself I would welcome damnation and damn my very inclusion
in any aspect of existence. I would be conscious of this, transgressing
against the nature of God and making myself slave to death. I could be
your personal antichrist, so if your faith is lacking in any way I
could infect you like a virus.
There are no holy week vigils, no peace advocates marching to my door
to protest the end of my life, the notes I will or will not write and
the evil I manipulate to glorify my power. I should be made to suffer
relational embargoes. For my destructive possibilities and my
willingness to pursue them I should be locked away.
Suicide is the actualization of the greatest personal and communal sin.
In committing it I would relinquish my right to redemption and know
that I was attempting murder on your spirit.
All manner of people have tried to convince me that there is absolutely
no validity to my notion that I need to kill myself. I know it is
useless to debate the fact, because it is impossible to understand the
mind of a suicide, just as it is impossible for a suicide to understand
another suicide. All we can know is incomplete and therefore
meaningless at the moment of crisis.
The difference between the person who does not contemplate suicide and
the one who commits suicide is that the one who would not think of it
can dismiss the meaninglessness while the one who commits suicide
embraces it. Those who wander the spectrum of contemplating suicide and
suicidal ideation are those who converse with meaninglessness.
Sometimes the conversation is like an argument, but sometimes it is
like a seduction.
Two.
My conversation with meaninglessness has evolved to be something of a
lovers' quarrel. We have a lot of great memories: the adventures we
have undertaken, the stories we have written, the late nights over
coffee and cigarettes. At the end of the honeymoon we had to get real
about the nature of our relationship.
Meaninglessness is so demanding. It requires persistent denial of
self-worth and consequently the worth of others. Being human is
difficult because is it selfish to deny meaninglessness and it is
selfish to embrace it. A person has become an adult when they first
base a decision on this tension, because self-interest is a conflict of
interests and to be an adult is to practice an interest in being a self.
Selfishness is as much a virtue as selflessness if virtue is a means to
an end and the end is the inherent value of human life. In fact,
selflessness on the part of any person has potential to illicit harm in
the same way that selfishness does. This leads me to reason that no
activity is virtuous, that the virtue of any action is contingent on
the fact that it is a reaction.
Time exists because of its need to bring every moment into connection
with the next. Virtue is the meaningful connection of moments in time,
yet this is exactly what leaves the possibility for meaninglessness.
My name for the element which causes the continuity of time is truth,
aletheia. My philosophy is that humans are incarnated soul, each
incarnation having a spirit which is its sole connection to the
continuity of time. The human mind is a complex mirror and when light
or other stimulation occurs, the awareness is called consciousness.
Thus, existence transcends consciousness, but the self cannot. The self
is the perspective of the spirit and community is the experience of
soul. Perspective is the vantage of the spirit due to consciousness.
Meaning and meaninglessness are the language of consciousness. Being a
self is the conversation; civilization is the external experience of
the internal conversation. Truth is immutable, untarnished by human
consciousness. A self cannot create truth; a self can only create
itself in reaction to its vantage of spirit and its experience of soul.
The nature of its self-realization, whether it is philaletheist or
misaletheist, determines the virtue of itself.
Meaninglessness is as inescapable as meaning because that is the nature
of human consciousness. All we can be in relation to truth is a mirror,
so it is reasonable to recognize that life can only be understood by
the life of the mind. Knowledge and understanding are ventures of the
mind. Faith and hope are ventures of the spirit and love is a venture
of the soul.
Self-interest is original sin, the sin of every child with growing
consciousness. It is the beginning of the affair, meaning or
meaninglessness. To commit suicide is to run away forever with
meaninglessness. To die naturally is to survive to the day meaning
takes you at long last as its bride.
Conscious life is waiting for a light to go out. Patience works to make
it meaningful while impatience strives to make it meaningless. | | |
| things you do within your dreams, you do when you wake. those you have
long forgotten will be there relentless shoving your full name out
their mouths, or your nickname that's been gathering dust since 2004.
the wisdom of time wears your bones down like water over stones.
you can no longer carry the weight you shifted around with hapless
buoyancy long ago. your subconscious suffers age like your body,
twisting into your heart and manifesting awkward and ugly like sick
nostalgia for things you never liked back then. we wouldn't last if
time moved as slowly as it did in the 80's for us. the pace of society
would degenerate if we all practiced the asceticism of contemplative
love, shy and selfish hope, secret faith.
"when the clown makes the face
of the demon that haunts you,
that very face is the dream
and you are awake!"
we are all afraid of the same things, but it is our measure of guilt
that abstracts our reactivity. meditation is the act of dismantling
guilt where prayer is the act of appeasing guilt. guilt is the name of
knowledge of good and evil. religion worships god no longer, only as
close as it can get to god. thus the saints. atheism is the diligence
of loneliness, humanism the diligence of segregation. diligence is our
manner of fighting guilt.
there is no veil. god's dreams assault our own, fabricating this gothic
tapestry of conscious life. every mountain, tree, river and rock tense
at the thought of obliteration amidst their still-sounding first cry of
birth. you want to love somebody? try the diligence of honesty.
| | |
| having recently divulged my innermost conviction of truth to yet another amiable yet utterly fallible young man, methinks the renunciation of my commitment to pursue the sacred feminine through learning the mysteries of grace and possibility has alighted on the horizon.
the definition of horizon, that it can never be reached and can really only glower in the distance-- i wonder if that is a truth beyond the manipulation of mortals.
i'm spent on reconciliation of faith with love, immaterial with material, possibility with actuality. a life of non-violence must respect both realms or, if they are not exclusive of each other and are only sometimes interpreted to be, it must seek to dismantle the reign of violence in this empire of complacent ignorance and corporate blindness.
do you see me? i do not demand that you do or that you are somehow obligated to, but you cannot dishonor me by your foolishness in failing to hold me in the highest esteem. i must permit the possibility, but i will prohibit the actuality. that is the power of being like god after all, isn't it eve?
| | |
| our accelerated aging unwraps new languages and construed interpretations so our rituals for unraveling identity can have their justification. we weed out our pronouns and depersonalize our heartbeats, take a dream and pinch it through the phone to hear it die. i take my time turning my back until i hear you project across the abyss the affront i severed myself from already. you watch as i practice this again and again. this story has its places and characters we would like to take with us after the last page is read and we could read it every april to relive that transcendence of soul we loved, but how many times can you read a classic?
now i am one. no limbs, no heart to you; just one memory. shake me like a baby because i am a woman. my sins make me no less human, my darkness no less vulnerable. i am addicted to this hermitage for i am the weight of my delusions. who can say whether i will ever be able to fully control my actions or distill my motivations? i can find beauty in lies and beauty in truth but i don't trust any of it.
we come to the end only to expand and find other paths for this mistake. i can't be a poet because of form. i can't be a prophet because of voice. i can't be a philosopher because of folly. i have accepted this and chosen to be them anyway.
here my brown bottle dance commences. i step back, only the brightest licks of the fire light my gyrations. my arms swing and my feet rhythmically pound the soft earth. my companions beat their drums, cluck-cluck their tongues and wail me a hymn. i dance with a brown bottle in my right hand and a cap on my head. i dance for orion, cassiopeia and for adam, east of eden.
| | |
|
