My old definition of love was nothing more than the symptoms of a disease rather than the actual sickness. I hope you won’t take that remark as blasphemous, because love is viral, but you are infected with life. You have a surplus of ease. Once you are overflowing, you have no choice but to act on what you’d been given. This is where giving, losing, longing, touching, running, hurting, laughing, crying, sacrificing, everything that can be done for another come from.
And that’s when I saw them, the people I had sent to death, for what they really were. They were walking blind, but who needs sight when all it does is distract you from what you already know?
I saw Soren and his people now, brilliant and haunting. To this world they shone like moonlight; their faces evidencing some greater power of illumination just momentarily hidden in the dark. The juggernaut, a river of light, was moving - they marched liked sons of God, immortal lambs to slaughter. This earth had no more room for them now than Hell had quarter. Dona nobis pacem.
They were in love and there was nothing that could stop it. Somewhere, a voice was shaken from the earth saying: “Qui habet aures audiendi audiat” as Death himself was crying out, “I have no power here.”
Everything was undone, or redone. Like a flower blooming out again from the height of its floret, something new was born out of what had been thought complete. Some things are so real that they overwhelm everything that had come before them.
Soon they will have passed onto something greater than all of this. The time for their amphibious existence was almost over. A moment was coming when they would be changed into something whole and thorough. Even now I cannot be sure if I was witnessing the vanguard of a healing or rather some sort of revival. If they were being made whole, was it by becoming something new? Could it really be something they always been, but only in part? A time was coming when they would be brothers, and no longer brothers in arms.
What I was sure of was that I wanted to be one of those men who stood on the horizon. Under the face of God, light is everywhere. Such a place has no room for shadows, so they are eaten up until they disappear.
What could hide there?
What could ever want to?
I walked from the window to my desk and started writing. I‘m going to go wait for the sun, but until then, I‘m not sure.
I stood up from my chair in the corner of my room, I get away from the bed I had fallen over onto and move to my dresser to tear up some shirts so I can wrap my arms and stop the blood from being a nuisance. I tie each unenthusiastic bandage around by my wrists and walk to my window. I can still see the lights from the people I would soon be responsible for executing.
I can see the lights of their funeral march. I almost expected to hear singing, but that may have been some wistful longing to know that not only were they unafraid, but that they were happy.
That’s the thing about seeing the truth I guess, once you’ve seen it, you can never un-see it. You knew what really was, by all the logic of the senses, inarguable. For all my hope, I knew that despite whatever they believed, it didn’t mean they would be happy right now. Belief doesn’t exist entirely without doubt, that’s the whole point. It is not knowing.
I thought about my living daughter and my dead wife.
A few months ago, my little girl had come to me asking about love, not in a sentimental way, but with genuine curiosity. She had been young when we lost her mother, but she had known her enough that they would never have to be totally separated by snapping threads of memory.
She asked me how I could know that it was real. She asked me how I could know that I was loved. Even then, I knew my thoughts were regrettable. My thoughts raced over the ideas of feelings, and actions, touch, looks, giving, sacrifice, unity, completion, etc, all of the corollaries but none of the causes. I was dejected in my inability. I knew she wouldn’t be satisfied with something so pedantic.
After all, I loved her.
Didn’t I?
I had all the reason to and I showed all the signs. I knew the way she made me feel when she ran to me. Even my wife hadn’t done that. Only my daughter ran, away from the world and right to me, at my approach. How can I even describe that, if you’ve never known it? It is a feeling unique in itself to watch as someone cannot wait any longer to be closer to you. It’s the tipping point of love’s event horizon. When you watch as the whole world turns into nothing compared to you. It’s one hell of a feeling.
It’s somewhere in that moment, I think, love. It’s the current the moves in her, and that she moves freely through, right at the instant where everything about her forgets the world because it knows that something better has come.
That’s why I cannot tell you how ashamed I was when I looked at that girl and told her, “Baby, you can’t know.”
But she’s something better than me I think because she’d just looked at me and said, “That’s right Dad. You can’t. That‘s the whole point.”
At the time, I had written it off as something endearing. A story so that when I heard people discussing their children’s latest exploits to people who weren’t especially interested, I would have something to offer. But now, I think I can where she was coming from.
There’s a trick to it, seeing what other people cannot. You have to be willing to believe it for yourself. Before today, I wasn’t able to, for even a moment, be willing to see through their actual eyes, not just mine from a similar vantage point. When you’ve seen this little bit farther, you can follow their thinking all the way to end. You can really see that there’s a reason for this thing they believe that you do not. Belief becomes a bit of framework in their definition of the world’s innermost workings. I could see that for my daughter now. She was just so sure.
Anyone can doubt. You could argue it until your voice was hoarse, but you couldn’t take it all the way from her. It was defining to her nature. This blind belief, blind love. This tangent between conceptualized knowledge and proof was not something I’d been able to span on my own. I had to be forcibly pulled into something terrifying before I had allowed myself to willingly abandon my need for evidence.
However, even now, I cannot tell you if I believe in the heart, or the soul in a theological sense. I know that I hadn’t. I had accepted them as projections of my mind trying to make sense of what I simply was not able to understand about myself. Was there really some intangible part of me so defining as the heart, so unending as the soul? I might accept it now. But why?
I thought again about the little girl who runs to me, almost satisfied to call whatever exchange we have love, but some part of me wouldn’t allow it. The part of me that had seen infinity and nothingness wrapped up together would not be satisfied by so lucid a form. The mind could handle attraction, and longing but not this, it was too big. There had to be a place where that love came from, a place that could be reached somehow.
I knew that there was, in me, a need that had never been sated. Even as a child I can remember never quite being what I would call content. Something had always come up short. I could feel it ebb and flow. It was as though my mood, and even my perspective was changed by my life’s proximity to joy. Well, no, not joy itself, but it was something more like the likelihood of joy. I could tell when everything was lining up for content happiness to start moving towards me. For most of my life, I’d mistaken that for the real thing.
I hadn’t been miserable, I wasn‘t exactly suffering. My life had never been easy, but I‘d gotten through and knew the pleasure of it all. However, I could see now that this shadow of joy was built on a hope that has been neither separated from me nor satisfied.
I know, in the deepest part of me, that there’s a day coming when I will wake up. I will open my eyes and I’ll be made aware that everything I’d thought I’d known wasn’t real, or at least not real enough. One day I would just wake up and be happy, forever. I’ve always needed this.
Where had this need come from? It was like a real hunger, like my need for air. It was essential for my survival, and as defining of me as any biological function. How could I need something that had never existed?
My mind threatened me with notions of false loves, mistaken desires.
Hadn’t I needed those too?
Though they were never fulfilled, I’d survived. Why wasn’t this the same thing? I knew the answer even as the question was posed. The need for love is not the same as the need for a person, just as the desire for good things is not the same as desiring a specific one. Once we impose our specificity on our real needs, they’re diluted from that essence into something we think we can understand. Here’s the trick: that person isn’t love, in your heart you’ve always known that. However, if you’re lucky, they’re damn close. What they do is allow you to never forget that Love is real.
This must be an earlier Earth. It looks so young. Do not forget that we are looking from outside Time, so my witness of this ancient occurs both as a present event, but also as a memory. As I get closer to the surface, there is a sensation of life that I wouldn’t have thought possible. Everything is vibrant, from vegetable to rock; they all seem to carry more substance than on the Earth I know. It is as though the fauna contained more of their essence, their animal-ness. It seems the birds, far larger and brilliantly radiant carry in themselves more of whatever it is that defines them as “bird.” Each entity, I realize is simply being itself to the truest of its ability, and they all are great for it.
The rock is great for its hardness, its shape and it’s color are its merits. At the same time, the water is great for its fluidity, it’s refreshing, it lack of form and color are its merits. They all serve to compliment the whole. Seeing a world so fully enacted hit me with a sensation of music. Not that could be heard in my ears, but as the player might feel a fervently pounded piano. It moved through me, but I moved it as well. It was a song of the Earth and me because I had come into it.
As it should have been - I hear from inside me.
Suddenly I am filled by shame. Each of these uncountable leaves, grains of sand, seem to overpower me because I know that they have been truer to their nature than I have ever attempted of myself. The dust in the air is a greater dust than I am a man.
The choice was made to separate you from this - The voice again. I understand that the “you” it refers to is in reference to all Men, but it might has well have been spoken to I alone for I know it to be irrevocably true.
However, while I watch, I can see a sudden darkness appear like a blotch on white linen. Some part of me is broken hearted at this, but whatever is controlling this new vision (I am unsure if it really could be the Void moving me along, or if this is entirely a product of my subconscious in which case I would be leading myself).
Whatever is moving me feels alien, but familiar. Like being led by an utterly trusted friend, I was bound by its instruction, yet unopposed to where it was taking me because I knew that it would not lead me to harm.
My invisible guide tells me that the shadow is painful to witness, but only because I do not yet know what is to come. It tells me that this all is necessary. We rise again to a greater distance to perceive the Earth as a singular notion rather than a composition of unfathomable detail.
I am quite sure that this is done strictly for my benefit. I watch in turn in front of me. As unstoppable as its spinning is for me to cease, so is the spread of darkness.
The shadow in front of me is overwhelming the light I had been a part of only moments before, back in the ether. Or was it years? I could feel my conceptualization of time’s pursuit working its way back into my thoughts. In all of this, I am reminded of remorse. I can feel it festering in me and I can feel it changing my balance as I am no longer a part of the medium in which I am suspended, but merely an object placed in the vacuum above a world.
As I fall to the ground, all I can think of is how this is not what I want. Where I’m going is not the real world. It is not the world as it is supposed to be. It is not the world as will be forever. I want out.
It’s like being back in dark, running from the armory. I have a body a again and it screaming. Get me out here. Please, please, get me out. Get me out!
I hear a voice. It’s sounds like a stranger, but it’s overbearing and unavoidable, so I have to listen. You cannot leave yet. This is not the sage advice I had hoped to be sent from a bodiless advisor, but it meets the presupposition of a distant omnipotent ruler that some part of me had always feared was living just behind the sky. I look up, and I see nothing but clouds and blue.
I know something is wrong, this isn’t how it was before. I was part of that voice, wasn’t I? Hadn’t I known it like I know myself? Was that just some fantasy that had been built by the drugs I took before going to sleep?
Before?
That word has no meaning here right?
Or was that earlier?
What?
I am dizzy cork.
I tell myself, “Remember Lao, none of this is real. You had too much of something and it’s still working its way through your system, but your closer to reality now.”
In an instant, I finish this thought only to feel the ground beneath me shaking as though in response to perjury. The voice comes back.
Why are you running back to your weakness. You have been shown the truth and now you want to pile your old ideas on top of it? Do you believe it can be hidden so easily?
I can’t answer. I’m too confused to make sense out of the conversation I am having with the sky. The voice sounds ferocious, thundering, consuming. It continues.
You didn’t want to come back here. Why was that? Why do you now doubt what you know to be the truth?
Maybe it isn’t ferocious, just overwhelming to the point that if I continue to be pummeled by its vigor, I will come out of this discussion alive.
You begged to kept away from this place. Why is it that now that you are here, you cannot turn away?
Definitely overwhelming. Too much for me to stand against, but I can remember now that it does not want me to confront it.
“Why did I have to come back here?” I asked. My mind was drifting back to a place above the ground. I remembered that I liked that feeling.
I can feel the voice inside me again. I cannot answer how I had forgotten my guide. It isn’t in my ears now. It is moving in me.
What are you willing to do to come back to this place it asks. I am caught somewhere in between the dark Earth and the white Light.
“Anything,” I answer, “just let me stay.”
I am bathed in something warm as I hear the Light reply, Not yet.
I woke up and found my arms were in searing pain. My hands were covered in my own blood. “Oh God, what the fuck?” I thought. I looked down to see dozens of deep scratches pulled from my elbows to my wrists with my own finer nails. Like I had been scouring myself. They wrapped around both the underbelly and the exposed outer flesh. It was as though I had been trying to break out of my body. Was that just some uncontrollable by-product of the dream? I had managed to escape from Lao the organism and didn’t want to be put back in?
Regardless, it hadn’t worked. I’d traveled out of existence into the realm of the Real, but I had also returned. If I wanted to escape again, it required some outside influence, because I couldn’t do it on my own. Like a beeswax candle to cure the darkness of a dream, I just had the wrong tools.
First things first, I needed to get cleaned up. My thoughts, I knew, would have to collect themselves.
As such, Time does not occur to me to be of any importance. For my efforts, I cannot conceive any circumstances by which this medium could have been begun. What can have no edge, no points of reference, no change and still be conceived to have started somewhere? (Now, I also believe I can honestly say that I applied no real determination to establishing this, it was simply too true to doubt) It was not like our universe, beyond size, but sparsely cluttered with material so as to force perspective and location. This place was utterly saturated.
I wonder this only to see that shapes are being formed out of the homogenous glow. At a first glance, I think they are the light condensing into something physical, but something tells me that this is not the case. The masses are dimmer, easier, binding. That stuff in which I am suspended is the reality. This is me trying to sort some order from it. My concept of order leaves it dulled.
A sphere breeching the scale of my understanding is taking its shape in front of me. I wonder why size has suddenly become a feature that demands my attention, perhaps it some remnant of the Terra-Lao that hasn‘t been fully shed, I am after-all in my mind. I know this mass by color (this is another sign that it is of less consequence than the eternal infinity of all shades and hues). Overwhelming blue, punctuated by contrasting green. I don’t know why I should’ve been surprised to see the Earth, after all I had as much chance of seeing it as any other world; and this was all in my mind, so familiarity would bring me to the only planet I’ve ever held in any particular accord.
I have not considered the parallel between my environs and Milton’s “void and formless infinite” from which the Waters that are the Earth were won. Has it, as with the Void, always been? And is its arrival just my becoming aware of what has existed from Everlasting?
That which must end, must first have begun - I hear the same voice which in a more awakened world might be mistaken for our intuition.
Time is a silly thing. Fickle and dim.
Connections which, by right of virtue, should be obvious are being realized in me, and it seems to have come at long last, but also as something I had only forgotten. My free fall turned static-actuality, is not just representative of spatial relationships, distance or direction, but of Time. As my stepping from the Black-Ledge into the Black-Empty is the rejection of volume and scale, so this is my refusal of past and future. There is only the Now.
I know that I may choose to straighten myself, despite the vastness of my tumbling, and step back onto the platform from which I’d fallen. I may even find my way to the armory. However, there is no want for this.
As I see the Universe forming around me, Light separated from Dark until I am hung in ordinary Space, I am equally certain that by my slightest efforts, I might bring myself into the orbit of a distant star or travel the gases of any thousands of nebulae. Or I could find myself walking the chromosomes of my own genome. But why should I want any of this? “To define is to limit” and to locate is to bind. I want the naked, empty everywhere.
Nevertheless, I am becoming increasingly convicted that the world in front of me is somehow separated from myself, which propels my mind into attempting to establish some sort of physical relationship. Am I over, under, East, West? These thoughts hit me like a torrent. I am forced to admit that I am, for the moment, positioned above the sphere.
In this empty everything, I cannot see my body. It doesn’t matter. I am here, but I don’t want to be. I have to get out of here. I have to get back to me. I don’t want this. How is it any better than bei- but my thought is cut off because light is coming.
I am unable to tell from where, but this is unlike the room I had woken up because it doesn’t emanate from any point and even if it did there is nothing here for it to reflect off of so I wouldn’t been able to see it unless it hits my body and I am becoming increasing certain I don’t have one anymore. It’s as though the air itself is glowing. I want to give it a color, but I can’t. At any instant I can see it as being chemically luminescent , but as I try to consider a color I cannot remember what one I am seeing. Is it changing or am I a witness to something new?
It is everywhere, all the way through me. I am certain now I am not occupying space, but am still aware of all of this. Something is pulled from my memory, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He had seen this when he said, “I become a transparent eyeball.” It’s true, I am an acute receiver and there is nowhere I cannot look. At the same time though, the is nothing for me to see but this light, this static, fluid, everything light.
I’ve heard that your brain requires certain stimuli in order to continue functioning properly and in the absence of such stimuli you will project images, sounds and sensations to fill the gap and give your mind something to do. However, there is something about this environment that is stranger than sensation, it is more like awareness. I feel it, it feels me back. It’s like an AC electrical circuit, only faster. The light and myself are receiving each other and being received with each exchange occurring so rapidly (it is like trying to pinpoint the light’s color) it is impossible to tell which is happening at any moment and I can only conceive that they are simultaneous.
I wonder if it is a conscious thing, an entity. It replies in the same moment without sound or alteration of form, but just a change in my perception.
Yes it is.
I am aware of the extent to which this light is aware of me, it‘s like making eye contact with your soul. We are separate from each other, but of the same stuff.
Consider taking every possible number, down to the an infinite decimal placement between one and two, and finding the sum of these numbers. Slowly but surely it would reach to infinity. Now consider the sum of all numbers of the same sort between one and three-hundred. You would get the same result. ; two infinities, one containing the other. That was me to the light, the same, but not.
These thoughts might have happened over either a span of second fragments or entire years. When you’ve emanated all of existence, there is always plenty of time.
This is the ending of a short story (or maybe novella) I’m working on right now. Kind of an Apocalyptic thing. This guy Lao is in charge of eradicating and executing the usurped former governing society – his wife commits suicide, he finds out one of his friends is part of this group…(just a little context to help it make a little more sense). Anyway, this is a dream that he has and then the conclusion. Let me know what you think.
I’m lying on something flat. It’s too dark here, but my eyes have started adjusting and I can tell that I’m surrounded by something. There’s armor everywhere, which would in most circumstances be strange in and of itself. I’m naked on the floor. Everything is drawing me back to birth and I don’t want to move.
I still can’t make out the walls of this room. I know they have to be there but the only light seems to be coming from the center, it’s illuminating the floor though I cannot find its source. I unwillingly comply with some calling that I should stand. As I rise to survey my surroundings, I can see that though the floor is made of wood, there is not a single edge or crease to be found, it’s all a single piece.
I look at the panoply that is stripped around me and I am taken away by its magnificence. The care with which it had been made was truly astounding. Each article, helm, shield, breastplate, everything is completely covered with figures resembling soldiers in battle, the detail is so sharp that it seems to bite at me when my eyes hold it for too long. The time taken to construct something so intricate, extravagant, but practical strained my mind. I stand there, study it and begin to realize these images seem to be cut into the metal surfaces like scars from wear. They are the result of notching from unfathomable close calls and the glances of incalculable confrontations, each of which must have once been thought to be invoked by pure chance. But that was at the time of its engraving, this now. It’s only after great enough harm that the real affects of life can be realized.
But why were they on the floor? Something so awe inspiring had no place being cast haphazardly down. My own nakedness hadn’t occurred to be until now. Was all of this mine? Was it some part of my subconscious trying to rationalize my life’s own mutilations into something attractive? Something beautiful?
I cannot say with any authority how long I am standing, looking at the scenes etched into this adamantine wardrobe. Some part of my mind will not resist trying to match up each little nick and chink with some memorable event, though there is no discernable difference between each one. Despite my inability to draw any real conclusion, my eyes are fixed. Like an obsession, I am afraid to look away. The invisible light source dimly filling my present location is suggested in the glittering reflection mirrored all around me, and the thought occurs to me that perhaps this metal itself is actually the origin. It would make as much sense as anything here.
What kind of answer is this? Is the past needed as a light for the present and a blind hope for the future where all apparent randomness turns into purpose? Simplicity has its merits, but right now, it seems too small an answer, if small is the right word. Perhaps insubstantial, short sighted, or hollow would work better; not all of our thoughts have a language to depict them. It just isn’t enough.
Doubt floods over me like a cold pressure pinching my chest and brain, pushing my perception to some new set of eyes mounted just a few inches back into my head. It reminds me of terrible embarrassment and for the first time my nakedness bothers me, who could be watching behind the black veil that‘s expanding around me? In this light I could be seen, they could see me unprotected, ashamed and surrounded with the evidence of all my failed enterprises strewn around my feet. It is like a spotlight on my vulnerability. I need to go, now.
I take up a get-away heading like a bat out of hell. I run from the light now that I know I hate it. It isn’t me, it is just my defenses scattered and useless. It is just a shell I had once fit neatly into, but is now broken. The dim glow fades behind me and the dark encroaches. I run into nothing, but my feet always find the floor.
The walls never come; I might as well run for days. That is, until I meet some invisible resistance physically indiscernible from whatever medium I am been moving through. It comes from an awareness in me that this plain I am on has to have an end. I know that here, the world was flat and if I went too far I’d fall right off the edge. I freeze.
My feet are firmly planted on the same ground I’d found myself lying on in the floor of my armory, but they could detect that this ground had found its end. I am on the edge of an invisible precipice, the cliff top over Oblivion. What can I do?
Wait, how is the edge? Is that real? Or is it just my mind tricking me, like a child first hearing of some monster then developing a fear based solely on that new information, as though awareness of an evil somehow made it more likely to occur? This is time for a leap of faith, so I step forward, and I fall. I fall off the edge the world into nothing, and it’s not bad.
When you fall forever, eventually you realize you’re not really falling. You never get closer to the bottom when you dive through eternity. Many people, if they consider anything infinite for a long enough period of time get sick to their stomachs, but I am not one of them. I‘ve never had much faith in time, so the length of my freefall means almost nothing to me. In the black, the sheer and utter black, I am a child of the ether. I just exist.
Is this what the Buddhists had called the Void? Where was that blinding white light? What the hell is this? Uncertainty fills us with cork. We’re still the same basic shape, but all the substance is gone.
