Notes to dad, cont.
Forgive us our excesses
As we forgive us our shortcomings.
...And I am not denying the reality, the gravity, of your Faith. I wish to someday approach it with a tenderness and livid reverence for its sublime rendering of the human plot. But for now I must walk away from it, I must long for something grander for myself – something which I will stumble upon freshly, spontaneously, something that will strike me to the very marrow, bypassing all these arguments, all these passionate recants and canto’s… This me I am after will not be boxed by the institutions and cultures and heritages past, tho remnants and possibly its entirety may be found to resonate with them – with all of them. I do not feel that I can afford to limit myself to one – it is almost as if my reek and base stench as well as my beauty and inspiration need an entire macrocosm to be aired out in – the incenses and incantations of ritual, of stultified, standardized faith do not rid me of my awareness of the gap between reality and religion… more and more often they end up turning my stomach, making me want to flee from their synthetic atmospheres…
‘Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven.’
True fear for me is in the utter relativity of life. If the believer’s most basic and profound fear is that his belief is not true – if doubting the supreme truth for every other man as well as himself drives him on to sleepless nights and daring approbations of his fellow’s lives and modes theretowhichof’s – then my shudders and sighs and prayers of hope are seeded and fostered by the fear of the worth of any striving, by the thought that all is vain mumbles and half-cocked selfassurances, that all is subject to the indifference of the universe and her foils. But, like the faithful believer whose honesty incorporates all failings into his moments of God-bequeathed glory and full-hearted giving to the world – like he who finds the power to reconcile the inward factions of his self (and whether or nay he attributes this reconciliation to Redemption or the Blood of the Lamb matters to me not so much as the authenticity of the completeness he has won) – like him I find hope in something which lives – not in heaven or in some fanciful hereafter, but right within my life, in my daily experience – and to me my struggle lies in the becoming aware of that unifying element or elemental process…
I want to recognize the Creator everywhere, in every moment and teaching, from every sigh of man to every heave of earth. I want to collect every divine spark and droplet and myself exude and excrete it as purely as I am able – in both deliberation and spontaneity. I wish to be free of what binds me – through both self-realization and Divine-realizating. I want to give what fullness I have to everyone I come into contact with, unencumbered by a dogma or a wordy, worldly fixture – a bit of belief, a bunch of being.
I also seek clarity, for intensity and for power. I grow queasy in the face of authority, but full and delighted in the presence of power. I will never lead a flock, but I wish one day to inspire a multitude, but by that wish I will never breach into Reality, only acquire more ways and more qualities of relation and relating.
The delusion of the senses lends enhancement and a quite useful juxtaposition to the self by shewing to it intimately, from the inside, different selves and realities. To me it has given insights into genius and dread. The thought that an eventual, looming mortification of body and mind and a diluting, even irreparable degeneration of my spirit – this fear never once tempered my abuses, but has spurred and invigorated my pursuits of spirit and mind much. It is such a peculiar and almost perverse quality of my refutation of piety and moralistic stoicism that, however awful my situation becomes, however wretched and sickly my habits make me, I can never regret them but that on reflection they somehow have bettered and necessitated the he who once frets, once rejoices over his sins and vices. In the end I do not seek for forgiveness or forgettal, but for a restitution that finds renewal and maturation in all means. The ends I only see as more conversion into more. That is, the ends are found in moments where God and Life are in and through me, and the ends are in the ability to be aware of and to help people, the realizing of wisdom within, the ends are moments of glory, the twofold realization of the Power that, ever beyond me, at times becomes me...