Why Am I Cold?
Am I cold? What is your definition
of cold that we might see if I fit it. Without feeling? I am
certainly not without feeling. Although feeling has diminished in
importance to me over time. Just being alive is enough of a miracle,
why ever feel anything but joy? I will get around to telling you
a story here, and we shall see if it diminishes the importance of your
own personal feelings to you. Because I don't see this as sickness.
I see ruling emotion rather than being ruled by it as the only real possibility
for survival. Because if I couldn't do it I, personally, would be
dead.
I am going to ask you to make some
rather incredible leaps of imagination. I am going to tell you a
story that I wish really was allegorical, and while whether you believe
it or not remains entirely your choice the fact remains that it is a truth.
You clever ones noted I said 'a truth'. It is history as I experienced
it. I do not pretend to understand anything more than that.
I will confess to every crime of which I am guilty, and you might find
some hard to believe. But you will also find that they do not include
every crime of which I stand accused. So be it.
Imagine that you have been with your
love over half of your life. Imagine that they have been parent,
best friend, confessor and lover to you. Imagine that you would do
literally absolutely anything for them. And imagine that you believe
that they would do anything for you. Are you feeling anything?
A little vulnerable? Well don't, imagine that you are preposterously
stupidly trusting. You must actually feel invulnerable to get into
a space shere you can understand what I did. Simple delusions of
grandeur and mere magalomania fail to describe the self image I possessed.
I was god's god, nothing that I ever did could ever go wrong because I
had at least one worshipper for life. And she inspired others.
Convinced others? Regardless, I wholeheartedly gave every last piece
of myself to our community. Some pieces of myself are of a most peculiar
sexual nature. If I had never shared these parts of myself my marriage
might still be intact. Is that horrible enough? Would you like
to live with that?
Or live with being called a rapist? The practices
in which my faith in us allowed me to indulge did traumatize her.
I now understand that. She did not call it rape at the time and I
didn't see it was. But the most horrible dharma on me is that if a woman
says she has been raped, she has been raped. But she also said I've
done other things I know I haven't done. The confusion would tear
my mind apart if I concentrated on it too long. But it's beautiful for
that, how it ties me to human experience, how I now fit in the fractal space
of the micromacrocosm. I now have a large chapter of my life I wish to
forget, much like the human species and just a few other individuals. I
understand so much more about the bottom falling out, the world turning upside
down and truly being beyond hope. And even though my spirit is very much
broken, I live on, rushing headlong into experiences which shall certainly be
anticlimactic. I feel so much more like Earwicker now. So much like
the caveman, the renaissance man, the industrial man. Connected to the
ages by an awful tradition.
I do not think that I am cold at all.