Just now I felt this surge of deep emotion that threatened to overwhelm me. It's as if I've been a little too persistent in my quest to understand what's what. This emotional feeling is not unfamiliar. It's as if I had bought myself some time for a while when I didn't have to deal with it in conscious awareness. I think consciousness is a docetic spirit that just might be "me". That's scary to me. Terrifying. It's just too big for little ol' me.
This odd perspective might have been inspired by this poem by Goethe:
The Holy Longing
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent
because the massman will mock it right way.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the live-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten.
a strange feeling comes over you
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught
in the obsession with the darkness
and a desire for higher lovemaking
sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you fare gone.
And so long as you haven't experienced
this, to die and so to grow.
you are only a troubled guest
on the dark earth.
Goethe
The images produced in me by this deeply profound poem is what I've been writing about for a very long time. Goethe would probably sue me for misrepresentation of his work. No blame. It's about how gullible I am can be. In this new perspective it might appear as if who-I-am-is IS immortal, and has been allowed to make decisions regarding the mundane behavior of a body that bleeds.
I write about this urge that drives me toward certain behaviors that don't make much sense to most witnesses, but my eagerness to dive headlong into the flame shies them away from interfering. Some even cry, "Jump! ...Jump!" No blame.
So, I'm asking myself: Who is in charge? The urge to extinction or me? Who is responsible to what? It might not be so important except for that urgency to give ourselves up to the flame like the moth in Goethe's poem. This same gene is also present in the lemmings seen grinning in mid-air on their way down to the rocks below. Is the urge to life the flip-side of the urge to death?
When I was around ten years old I fell out of a china-berry tree from about 10-12 feet in the air down to some hard-packed ground just a few feet away from the wrought iron kettle being used to heat pump water. That was one of my chores. I had to hand pump the water into a galvanized bucket and fill the kettle up. It was practically a daily ritual. We needed hot water to wash the family clothes and our sweaty little bodies in the winter on Saturday nights.
For a moment in my dazed stupor I thought the burning wood around the base of that black kettle were the fires of Hell. I'm sure someone told me about how fragile the branches of china-berry trees are. I had hollowed them out with my pen knife before to make a pea-shooter. I knew they broke easy, even when I climbed out on that limb further than I should have, just to show off.
The limb broke, and both the limb and me fell immediately to the hard ground... Ker_plunk! I landed in the prone position and flat of my back. It knocked the wind out of me. For a long moment I thought I was dead. I couldn't breathe. In the same moment I thought I was dead, my head was only a foot or so away from the fire under that kettle.
When I reflect on this childhood incident with fond memories (I was more scared than hurt), it seems very odd to me to realize that it was only after I caught my breath, and realized I wasn't dead yet, that I realized the limb had broken, and I had fallen to the ground with the limb on top of me, and how lucky I was it wasn't under me. .
I disclaim anything I write as true or false. That's not why I write. I can't make judgment either pro or con about the drifting thoughts I attempt to capture with words. There is no time. If I stop to wonder the me-and-thee-ing of some passing fancy, that consideration can become my entire world, and what I drempt of just before becomes a pond that's not there for me to fish in any more.
I wouldn't know the truth if it jumped up and bit me in the ass. Everything i write is ignorantly typed as an observance employed as some dumb ritual I once thought was cool, either that, or some compulsive behavior like adding up the numbers on the passing railway cars. It's something to do. It's just another fool's game.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
