Thursday 8 March 2001

Pic of the day: You know, I've grown to love this planet.

Incarnations of mortality

We sleep, forgetting everything. But deep inside, dark slow currents run. They wash away yesterday, and sometimes bring up what was long buried. We wake up, and we think ourselves masters of our mind. We look around, but behind our eyes the currents still run. They have time, and are not easily thwarted. The mind is fickle, roaming, like a flickering firefly. The currents move us, and we do not see it until we are not where we thought.

Which is the true I? The restless rodent running around in the maze made up by the cargo, or the ship that moves the cargo, the rodent and all aboard to a destination not yet seen?

***

At work today, there was actually stuff to do. Files to process. Upgrade to organize. Dozens of long serial numbers to write down. People crawling under their desks everywhere (if not as much as I). But the funny thing is that what I remember the best had nothing to do with work at all. Not in the slightest.

Early in the day, I suddenly remembered a line from a song which I had not played for ... many months, perhaps a year or two. Why should I? It was completely irrelevant to me. It was so irrelevant to me that it could not be more irrelevant if it were about Africans on Mars. Even the few words that suddenly lodged in my mind were irrelevant, not about me. "Älska mej nu, du some känner min styrka" ... "love me now, you who know my strength".

Yes, that's Swedish, and I immediately recognized it as part of a song by Björn Afzelius, the late trubadour and communist hero of Sweden. (I've mentioned him before, including an obituary filling half of my 16. February 1999 entry.) As for the song itself ... let us just say that it is rather Swedish. It is not Southern Baptist, if you get the drift. Or, it is family friendly mainly in that it might lead to family growth. But very romantic, really. Very poetic. And very human.

I took the CD with me home and played through the song repeatedly this evening. Especially the first times, it was a very strong experience. It was like a revelation. In a way, I guess it was. In addition to the late Afzelius, I remembered a Norwegian friend and fellow artist of his, another red socialist incidentally, Åge Alexandersen. I know I have written before about how I like his hymn to the dark bedrooms (and it's not exactly the only stuff like that he has written, but the best in my personal opinion). They both used to also write songs about the injustice toward the poor, and about the callous greed of the rich. I guess that sort of explains why they were communists, but to me that attitude belongs with Christianity instead. Of course, there is not much of a milieu for this in current Christianity.

That's the thing, you see. The Jesus we glimpse through the gospels was hanging out with the poor, the failures, and ordinary people. He was so thoroughly human that I have never ever come close to being that human myself. And that's when the title of this entry jumped into my mind. It is a pun (as is good and proper) on the fantasy series Incarnations of Immortality by Piers Anthony. A nice enough series about ordinary people who through various circumstances become incarnations of major principles like War and Nature, with enormous magickal powers. An incarnation of mortality, of course, is the opposite ... someone who becomes an ordinary human.

***

I love erotic poetry, though I don't write it myself. It's not like I am sexually excited by it or anything. No, it's the sheer humanity of it. I don't consider human sexuality dirty or ugly, though it can certainly be. So can eating, when people just stuff their face as fast as possible, oblivious to the most rudimentary of manners, and without true appreciation.

As recurring readers know, I don't really have a sex life myself. And I'm certainly not writing this in some panicky attempt to change that while there's still some life left in the body. Heh. For various reasons, that become more clear with increasing distance, that part of life basically passed me by. It is not even scary anymore, now. And all the stuff around it, that's really most of it. To wake up listening to someone's breath, to have someone to hold close, all the stuff there. The need for it is part of the human condition, I guess. And you know I worked hard to not be human anymore. To become an incarnation of immortality.

There are limits to a human life, and I cannot live the unique life I live and at the same time live a very different life as someone else. But I can open my mind to it, accept the reality of human nature in me. Going the opposite way, from the top down, to become an incarnation of mortality. I don't mean depravity ... there is enough twistedness in me already, but that's an entirely different thing. I mean, I want to empathize with humans. Not, this time, to gain sense pleasure. (We have chocolate for that.) Instead, to gain completion.

***

It seems to me that I spend a lot of time here on these pages to humiliate myself, to tell you over and over again that I cannot always be strong. And that's true, you know. And yet, I am strong, beyond the imagination of most men. The sheer quantity of alone-ness in my life would be hard enough for two to endure together without madness and despair, and I am actually quite happy here. I wonder sometimes if I only hold up my doubts for you to see, and not the faith that balances them. Only my impurity, and not my innocence. Only my weakness, and not my strength. Only the triviality, not the beauty.

Would you still love me if I were strong?