A Billion Mouths

Dear John,

I have come to the difficult conclusion that I don’t understand the world.

It has been a long and protracted exercise in trying to see what kind of truth is held by Gaia, to seek out any kind of Good that grows upon these fields.

But in my humble defence, the world does not understand my sorry soul either.

Instead this world strikes me as a strange and confusing place filled with creatures resembling familiar faces but who act in a callous and chaotic way. I see even my own friends and brothers with an eye of suspicion. What game are they playing? Why do they trouble themselves with these little things? Why do they close their hearts?

I am beginning to understand the appeal of return to the earth: the blood and soil of animal husbandry and that Arcadian lie. The lambs and the hereford cattle don’t know anything about software development or politics or the winter olympic. They are pure in their ignorance.

It is only our kind, these fallen creatures, who have eaten from the tree of knowledge. Nothing of beauty can be created by the mind. The mind cannot feed the stomach, nor can it quench the thirst. Our intellect is the lens through which we see the world, but its glass is thick.

My attempts at mellowing out have been semi-successful, but the inescapable condition is that we are still a social species. As much as I admire the sovereign man, the regal class separated from the mediocre, we all fundamentally share a social consciousness. Even those who can afford to purchase a tropical Island and travel about in their own private aircraft still fall into their own cloister of mortal sin.

How would I characterise this world I have inherited? It is a humiliating blabber of noises of the body and the mouth. The squeaking and snorting and grunting of a long-faced creature rooting for something deep beneath the cold soil.

I am considering for myself whether those vows of poverty like St. Francis are suitable for a man like me. The alternative, like our admired Hank Rearden or Paul Arnheim is to become the statesman and business leader and to implement charity myself.

Our poverty is not a monetary question, of welfare and handouts and foodstamps. Our poverty is a cultural and spiritual poverty, a structural deficit that has been eating away at the rock of the building itself for years now. The saline and acidic water drips down the gutters and saps the strength of the stone while keeping the façade.

The ChatGee-Pee-Tee powered war machines and false pantheon of technology is the work of the fallen angel himself. On that dove of the spirit, the wing of faith has been broken and the wing of reason hopelessly flutters to compensate.

But despite this attack of mine I cannot give up on this place, for that is also the work of the wicked foe. Instead I look to the light. I can only look to the light. Though I recognise the self-righteousness and conceit implicit, the greater truth is such a light shines even as the darkness tries its best to close the curtain.

****

For the historical record I interviewed Mehdi Bassiri, a former Iranian diplomat who fled from the 1979 Iranian Revolution. You may enjoy it.

His interrogation by the Islamic mullah at the Iranian embassy in Tokyo went something like this:

Mullah:

“You didn’t take down the picture of the Shah because you say it was already there when you arrived.

You don’t go to the Mosque on Thursday nights because you say your relationship with God is private.

But what I don’t understand is why you didn’t tell your children about the revolution?”

Mehdi:

“…Because they already knew about it. They saw it on T.V.”

****

Only the son can pass judgement, and as I have previously written. My respect and understanding for his work has only grown.

What rational person could look at this world and think that it is redeemable?

What person could look at the psychotic emperors, the zealots, the persecutors, the grey-fleshed man-o’-wars, the machine-generated statements of war, and think that there is anything redeemable among any of it?

It is not just three mouths that the wicked foe has in his icy home, but billions. Each chews in its teeth not the souls of the fallen, but the words of the moderns and their conceited search for truth in the soil.

John, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called “knowledge”.

– Cody