The Darkest Disease

Some of my favorite artists are the Cranberries, Ingrid Michaelson, and Company of Thieves. I grew up to the tunes of Enya, Jewel, and Lisa Loeb. The edgiest thing I listened to for a long time was Alanis Morissette. It’s not much a surprise really: I’m a generally gentle guy, calm and peaceful, quiet and contemplative.

But I’m also a Gemini.

The irony is that my first love of song that breached this facade itself means to fade away–and yet they have remained a staple of my soundtrack to life ever since.

Truth and Recreation

I’ve written a lot lately. In fact, since my last post here I’ve written over 23,000 words–or the equivalent of approximately a month’s worth of posts, if we assume I post about twelve times a month and each of them are slightly less than two thousand words a piece. Then again, this is what I expect during NaNoWriMo: A lot of writing but not a lot of writing here. Or on school papers. I’m so glad they’re not due till December.

Lately I’ve also been hung up on saying “the truth is.” Well the truth is I don’t know why I’ve had this obsession, but I’m almost certain that the two might be related.

It’s what I like to call truth and recreation.

Like Coals of Fire

Today I’ve been lax. I just haven’t had the energy to do anything. Not that I’ve been sleeping too restfully, though. Why is it when I yearn for sleep most my dreams keep me awake? Perhaps I’m more stressed from the prospect of school starting on Monday than I had imagined.

In any case, our time here is beginning to close. With the passing of one narrative births another, and only seven teachings remain.

2.15 Each of the disciples taught three things.

Rabbi Eliezer taught:

Cherish your colleague’s honor as your own;
Be not easily provoked to anger;
Repent one day before your death.

(He is also quoted as saying: Warm yourself at the fire of the scholars, but be wary of their glowing coals lest you be burnt. Their bite is that of a fox; their sting that of a scorpion; their hiss that of a serpent–indeed, all their teachings are like live coals of fire.)

The first three can go without saying. Treat others how you wish to be treated. Take a deep breath. Say you’re sorry. It’s all things my mother taught me, and surely things other children have been taught all throughout their childhood, too. What interests me is not the teaching itself, but the notes at the end.

Coals of fire… What could it mean?

The Antithesis of Fear

The illusion of fear cannot be broken because fear is not an illusion. In fact, I feel, fear is the one true emotion that we can all experience without delusion. Science, I read once, has suggested that depressed people have a clearer, more realistic view of the world we live in; that happiness itself is not merely an emotion, but a mask, a lens that obscures the truth existing around us and lets us soften the corners of these sharp edges in our minds.

When we feel an absence of fear, it is only the alleviation of that fear that we are experiencing. When we feel fearless, we have not known bravery or courage, but have not yet seen a reason to challenge ourselves, to cause that fear plagued upon us each differently to rear its head and demand our attention.

But perhaps there is an antithesis to all of this. Perhaps fear, as the other end of an extreme spectrum, is not itself the only true emotion, but the only one within which our human minds can identify.

Philosophies of the Wolf

Once upon a time I met a man, a most spectacular specimen, with a mind as quicksilver and sharp as anybody’s, and we got to talking about philosophy, about truth and belief, what is real and what is merely perception. It was a provocative conversation to all extents of the imagination, and I must admit, perhaps foolishly in so public a forum as this, that the truest way to my heart is kindness and depth, and let me tell you, this man had both.

Then again, such sincerity is hard to feign, so perhaps it’s not so foolishly shared here anyways.

Regardless, such a deep conversation got me thinking, what is my personal philosophy? Do I even have one? And after some consideration, or years of consideration if you’d rather go back to when I first began to formulate the postulates of my intensities, I decided I do have a personal requiem of philosophies that I stand by. They are tenets and towers, facsimiles of faith and fiction, the philosophy of the wolf himself.

I is for It Gets Better

Back while I still pondering over what H is for, I felt I was for Invincible. I said to myself, being open, being confident, being who you are, makes you invincible, makes you impervious, makes you incredible. I felt of sharing: When I’m afraid, when I don’t think I can go on, I surround myself with positive things–with thoughts of my friends, thoughts of the great people in whose presence I stand, of the glory of God imbuing everything there is with his light and his love, and then I feel invincible and I can go on.

Last week, I began to wonder if I really is for invincible. Instead, I began to think I is for Individual. I felt of sharing: There is no greater bliss than of knowing who you are, all your faults, all your foibles, all your fortes. To understand what goes on inside is to make you impenetrable, insightful, indivisible. To feel, nay, to know what is hidden beneath your exterior, that part of us that we so often wrongly equate the entirely of “I”, is to open doors and possibilities and events that otherwise would remain lost forever. To be an Individual is perhaps among the greatest gift God has ever given us.

Today, although both of these statements stand true and always will–I am Invincible, I am Individual–I know that they are not all I is worth. I is worth a wealth of ideas, a well of inspiration, a river of incentive. I spoke the other night with a wonderful man, a man of whose nature and build I did not think even God could have crafted, and it made realize, in that strange way that unrelated events inspire worlds of difference, in the way that butterflies in Africa incite hurricanes in America, that I is well worth so much more than all of this.

From Precepts to Principles

1.18     Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel taught:

The world rests on three things:
on Justice, on Truth, on Peace,
as it is written, “With truth, justice, and peace
shall you judge in your gates” (Zechariah 8:16).

Ever since I was about nine or ten there’s been this budding mythology inside me that I’ve yearned to write down. It began as innocent childish imaginings, spawned of TV shows like Pokémon and Digimon or books about Harry Potter and astrology, but slowly the characters took on lives of their own, the stories became more defined in their own rights, and this collection of fantasies twisted itself into something rivaling a full mythology. My biggest dream as a writer is to be able to take all of these stories and compose them into a single epic tale.

But that’s for another day. In one of my earliest attempts to write this tale, there were two characters I called Truth and Justice. They had come from a magical world to set the main protagonist on his adventures, a catalyst to all the fantastic things I’d imagined. By the time I tried to write the story a second time, these characters had vanished and been transformed; these events had entirely disappeared and been re-imagined.

What stands out to me, especially when I read this teaching, is that even then—only nine or ten years old, not even half my age now—there was something inherently important to me about Truth and Justice.

Heart and Sold

I believe.

A lie.

But philosophy’s abstract and some days you feel like hitting the ground hard. Today’s one of those days. I’m high in the sky but waiting to land, and although my mind’s awhirl with all sorts of things, I want to hold tightest to those I hold tightest to.

I fall in love easily. Beauty’s everywhere, and amid the myriad of pretty faces, there’s a wondrous soul sometimes. I find those people, and when I find them, I’m lucky. There aren’t enough of those anymore, at least anymore that my spyglass can show me, but they give me hope for humanity, hope for humankind. These good souls, these good men and good women, they’re our future.

And to them I’ve sold my heart.

They don’t realise this. They don’t realise that every time I say their happiness equals mine, that nothing in the world makes me happier than seeing those I love at their happiest, I’m not just saying words, I’m not just spewing niceties, I’m being honest. In truth, there’s a small number of people I’ve imprinted upon, those that to borrow the avian attachment rating, I’ve followed from birth. I haven’t known them all from birth, no, life’s not so easy, but our lives have been parallel in many ways nonetheless.

It always astounds me when I see how parallel we’ve been sometimes, how close we’ve come to pass so nearby, only to meet later on and not realise what fate had dealt us until our hand had been played and fate’s work had been done.

This closeness is spectral, spiritual, something else altogether. I like to think of these few as my soul mates, those whom God crafted with me in mind, whether literally or figuratively, those souls of his that all came from the same mold, or at the very least the same dye lot. We exist each on the same wavelength, the same frequency. How grand, how heart-stopping, it would be if each of us came together in one place, at one time, just to exist and to be. The world would stop for a moment, I’d swear to it. It’d stop for a moment and cease to be; and in its unfounded absence, it would be everything and nothing, Heaven and Earth all in one.

It is upon this feeble ground that the foundation of my beliefs lie. It is in my own selfishness that I hope and pray for the success and prosperity, the fortune and grace of these few friends that keep me eternally afloat. In my mind, if I believe that God has a plan, that for each of these men and women, all will work out for the best, I can have faith in anything. When I believe in their ultimate happiness, I can believe that the world is in order, and I can believe that right will be right and all wrongs, in time righted.

This foundation is faulted, however, and my belief in the Grand Happy Ending of the Universe is no more than a fairytale. I know it’s untrue. I’ve seen too many sad stories and had too many bad thoughts to think otherwise. But this I must believe, for without this core belief, my entire world falls apart. If I accept that in the end there is no happiness, then I lose my faith in God. If I accept that good things will not come to good people, my faith in justice is crippled. If I accept that horrible things can and will happen to my friends, and no good will come of it, my single source of sheer bliss is broken.

So I lie to myself. I convince myself on unfounded, assumed knowledge that good things happen to good people, that all wrongs that befall my friends will result in their ultimate betterment, and that in the end all will be happy, for everyone. And herein this balance of self-deception, I find God. I see God daily, in the minute and extraordinary processes of the world at large, the realisation that we’re looking light years into the past when we look at the stars, and suddenly the world is Right and Just and Merciful. I see the perfect language of math and science, and I believe this must be true for hearts and souls, too, for my friends and soul mates, too.

This delusion is my only vice, but my also my only savior. Without accepting this lie, this unconfirmed truth, this confirmed untruth, I lose all faith in the world and all faith in God, and when that light goes out, the world goes dark.

I’ve been in the dark before. I still see only a black void when I turn my eyes to that time. It’s not where I want to be. It’s not where I can be any longer. I know, if I ever go back there, it will be a journey from which I will never return.

Deception is truth.

I’ve taken my heart and I’ve sold it away. And should I ever get it back, should my happiness for a moment rest upon myself and not upon those of whom I’ve fallen in love, I fear I won’t be able to hold onto it any longer; I fear all the world will fall away from me then. I need each of them, more than they know it, and I hope, so fervently and fruitlessly, that they can take to heart these words of mine and take care to shield their hearts and hold themselves high, so I, too, can touch the sky beside them, forever more.