Footfalls

So, what has been going on? Well, I have been having a back ache from the cold butter knife Death has been jabbing me with, and I have made the transition from a blissful and busy worker to a very, very unhappy one, all with a single day's belch of miasma in my direction. I'm rather weary of egos that are like the thing that may never be filled (Proverbs 30:15-16).

I spent a good amount of time, or rather a bad amount of time, sorting through the horde of wrongs I had done and the reasons I had for suffering, thinking that the solution would be the grand quietus, but, of course, that is not satisfaction. That is cessation. Satisfaction is in going from comfortable and collegial to surveilled and disconcerted. The problem, of course, is in knowing or even speculating upon what it is that is doing the accounting. If it's just me, as the OT VIII's would say, then to Hell with it (get it? that's clever). If it's some cosmic compter, then I'd like to know when, exactly, meekness will pay off or why I'm not enjoying the payoff, or if that failure to enjoy the fruits is itself another debit in the column. If the frame of reference is grander and more intelligent and loving than that, then I'm in the world I know. In the divine realm, suffering is neither good nor bad. It is irrelevant, by itself.

That's right: I said that suffering is irrelevant, and so is death.If you think about things, then you really don't have any alternative but to think that death, and consequently its presagements, are neither good nor bad. I do not mean that they lack value. They certainly have both value to the one doing the dying, suffering, and grieving, and they have meaning, but they cannot be moral. Morality requires free will and choice between that which is obedient to the good (or God) and that which is not. One thing we know very well is that not a blasted, blighted, benighted one of us has the least choice in ailing, perceiving the ailment (suffering), and dying.

I could extend this to an imitation of Donne's Thoughts upon Emergent Occasions and paint suicide and suicidal behavior in the shimmering light of over-analysis, but that would be as illogical as believing that death is a special act. Donne understood death better than we do, I think, for he never protested it nor welcomed it. Life builds up, and death takes away, and so each death is a reduction until the final reduction. By that time, one needs to have a new lease elsewhere, a new home. However, at the same time, every creature is born to a death sentence. Logic is enough, even in such darkness, to illuminate one fact: nothing can be special if it is shared by every creature that is or ever has been. It does not actually come sooner to the good or the bad, and disease certainly does not care about the virtues of its hosts. There are things we can do to make this event more or less likely at a moment, but the fact is that we are all driving or driven by a machine whose wheels are about to come off.

If you are at peace with these facts or raging or wailing or smiling, it makes no difference. It is simply a topic that does not welcome or even allow thought. Thinking about your own individual extinction on earth is almost impossible. It is like trying to remember a pain you have felt: you can summon up the fact of the pain, but not the experience, and, just so, you can think of and acknowledge the fact of your death, but not think about it. This is how nature made us, and it shows the hand of the divine.

Think about this. If we cannot imagine zero or infinity, either one, then the instruction is to live, and in living to accumulate life. What is it that makes us live? That which is most lively, is, no doubt, loving, but so is pleasing and being pleased. This has been my thought, anyway, my philosophy.

So, about being meek. I am not meek. I've never been meek. I've given up, though, on struggling against the deeply seated manias of others. There is no reform possible, when what they are doing is born out of their needs rather than their reason. Thus, the ego that may never be filled is best avoided, like an event horizon. Thus, if someone has plans for every other person to do this and that and this other thing to glorify his own shining heart of gold, then the best thing is to be invisible. Once spotted, sucked, dragged, and crushed, though, there is nothing better to do but try to find the comfort, no matter how cold. Look up. Look down. Look somewhere, but try to find the thing that is still living.