Now What?

Now what?

Samuel Bird

Bare feet grip onto the rubble at the mouth of the cave. The wind blows in his face, and spreads his scent away from his foe. With it, his cloak waves in the wind and illustrates how naked he truly is. His foe he goes against is clad in thick scales, and here he is with only stolen wool. He presses further against the wind until the snowy sky allows a shape to be seen before him. Grey all around with a deep black between. This is it, this is where it, and consequently she, lies. Peril was caught in his chest as he fought to breathe. He is safe now. If he turned away at this moment he could leave and have his life, but that was not what his life was to him. His life was the story that led toward her. He couldn’t recall a moment he didn’t know it would be her. He fought to feel the breath in his chest, but in that moment he realized his foe could blast him with a breath of flames all while he could barely breathe. Why not turn back? He could mourn her loss with the rest of his life. No, he could not turn back. His life, to him, was not that breath in his chest, but the story that ended in her. Only a few nights before his planned confession of love, and the beast had stolen her away from him. It wasn’t morality or even love that made him press on. It was authenticity. To not do that foolish thing he was about to do, would be to not be that thing he was. His being was brim with a desire for the proximity that he could be blessed with to her. Let his scorched corpse confess what he was. He pressed forward into the wind that hid him, and yet fought him. He drew his blade in mounting anticipation as he readied himself for anything. Could he bare his being too late? If his blade couldn’t save her, it could at least aid him in helping him join her in death. Stepping more, he came to the cave. He held up his blade as he entered the forboding mouth of the chasm. His accustoming eyes saw her lying next to the beast. His body became hot with rage at the contrast between her divinity and the cold ground she lay on. Every bit of him waited as time slowed, to see if his love breathed. Her chest that held the heart he wished to join, gracefully rose and fell. His love yet lived. Perhaps the gods prepared her as she lifted her head and moaned quietly in a tone that made his heart grow tender in its rage. Her long hair parted from her face to see his figure black against the cave mouth with the sky to his back. Her hair parted to see those eyes that sought to pull her soul within his. Here he was. Here she was. Here it was. He lay his index finger gently over his mouth to suggest her silence as he wished he could say so much more to her. His bruised and tender feet crept silently across the cave floor as he came to the monster that stole the other half of his soul. He finally came within one arm's strike away from the beast, only to feel some sense of dishonor. Its slumber was indefensible, and with it, so was his striking. “Beast, I’ve come for my love!” He said in infatuated confession and glaring warning. The scaled lids pulled over the eyes as the head was raised. “She is not yours, but I do wish of her someday being mine.” He said as he lunged forward. Though the beast was awake, his mind was still in thought and unprepared for the strike as the hero drove the blade straight into its side into the heart that must have the same taste as him. The beast slowly collapsed as the air escaped its lungs fled. He had done it. He had defeated that great evil, as he saw it, that stood between him and her. He rushed to her and helped her to her feet. “You are my goddess that walks the earth. Let all the rest of them be blessed that I am with you now.” He said as he gripped her in a tearful embrace that wondered at all that could have happened. “These miles and perils I have traversed because to me, you are worth anything I can think to lay at your feet," he said. He then pulled his body from hers to see that face that was the closest to the embodied divine he would ever know. Every emotion he could feel joined together in celebration and recognition of the depth of the love he had for her. His shaking fingers slipped through her long hair until they found themselves behind her head. He held her there, looking into heaven descended, before leaning in and closing his eyes in reverence. His course and warm lips met her cool and soft lips, as their tears mixed along their cheeks. Let heaven and earth be at war. Let the beasts and men meet in battle. Let nothing other than this be, and it would be well with him. Their love only deepened on the trek home, where they were promptly wed. He was made something of a hero in his village, but he didn’t care. No gold or jewels, but this love for his spoils. Their love was celebrated and magnified in their life as children came. As they marveled on his knee, he would tell them the same story over and over again, only to then look into those same eyes he fought for and then to look up to her. That face then became wise with greyness. The day finally came when that same death he fought against to save her from came for them both. To die is to cease to be, or to be and not know what. This last great enigma he slipped into left only a self-contained story of being with her, or else a reunion by her side. Regardless, she made death a blessing. 

This model of a story is one that you are familiar with. It is the story of someone and what they value, pressing them up against the horrors that be. You will note how the fear mattered little in face of what he valued. This love he sought to be with was sacred enough to easily make his life a fair sacrifice on her alter. Before I spoil you with what about this story I found most resounding, do you have your thoughts? What about this story is most impressive to you? I will tell you a secret today. Fate can make many heroes. If your situation calls for it and presses you into it, you can do great things. Your whole life and the sheer will that you are, pressses you up against fate as you do not accept its offerings. In your magnamity, you labor against it until you either die or find yourself the victor. This is the story of heroes. However, as someone who has enjoyed being the hero a few times, we find ourself asking this question that this young man certainly would have. It is that question that happens somewhere around “the end.” That question?: Now what? We fight and we push. We sacrifice and we labor. We cry and we bleed, all for that thing we find worth every drop and more. Perhaps fate will never allow it to us, perhaps it will. However, that moment arises when fate gives way and in our fighting it, we find it as friend worth our love. We have now obtained. That thing worth fighting for, is now won. In that moment of success, the mind comes to this thought it didn’t prepare for. Before being is perception. Before perception is mind. Before mind is will. To follow all being we find sheer will as that which binds both the atom and the heart. I have written about the unrequited, but what of that which one does acquire? If my life is to me the medium for bringing to pass, what is on that strange occasion when fate permits my victory? The part of this story that is most peculiar to me is likely the one most easily dismissed. His life had been the labor of reaching for his love. We simply say the mounting context as climax. Outside of the written story is the one found in the readers heart. What were those years like when his love for her was kindled as both of the came to adulthood? What was the relationship between their families and what fears kept him from her? This hero wisely placed the dance of the ages core in what he valued in such a way that it became core. However, we know that this man did something more than place it at the very core of what he valued. Otherwise, when he acquired his love and his blood mingled with hers, creating his next great loves, he would go through some variety of a crisis. If all he was was this effort to obtain, then what was left when he did? Somehow, this man is his wisdom made his love and their beautiful family a part of his Esse Maxim, but they were not his Esse Maxim. They followed closely after in necessity or contingency, but they trailed behind. Man should never see God in the flesh. His highest value should never be istantiated in its exactness, but in its forms and thoughts. This man’s life was hyperboliclly about his love, but based on his actions, his love was that other being he desired to embark on this great effort with. Mountains to scale, beasts to slay, love to save, and this man would never run out of territory to conquer for her.

We have consider the “now what” in terms of the end of a tale in triumph. However, there is a similar “now what” to the end of a tragedy. When one is left with a mindscar that changes the access one has to the world and themselves, their whole life lives in a shadow of a moment that they barely made it past. All of the body and mind was strained with the question of how they could survive. The faculties were left with little else to consider and muscles and emotions are frazzled and frayed for the rest of their days. The rest of one’s life is an unexpected mystery. In the philosophy of pleasure, the mindscar is an unreedemable curse. In Esse Maxim, it is the crushing weight of potential greatness that wears on the rest of what makes one human. I have a few measures for a man, but high on that list is how he considers his “now whats.” As circumstances he finds evil or good close and he is left with his story closing, with what initiative, energy, and passion does he pick up the pen and recreate himself ex-nihlo? Whether in the the greatest and most transcendent of loss or gain, how does he turn back to being to engage with his existence? Let him have a few moments to thank fate, his own faculties, and rest enough to accrue new resources. At such an exact point, let the invisable crowd one struts before cheer you in silence as you hastily embark on the next quest. You may worry about the direction your embarking is toward, however, let that direction be found in your movement. Go back to that admirable fight that will likely never again say such a clear “yes” or “no” to you again. Let your life be the fight for that which you pretend to desire, but let that fight become what you love. Let your weary warrior pass still water to find in reflection what it is you have become. Largely, let your image be one you forget, but on occasion, find yourself to be what you and fate have made together. Perhaps my friend you will find of yourself that which I see of you. You fight thinking the victory is what you crave, only to find that regardless of fate, you have become the victor. How can we say it is ease and pleasure our kind are after, when we love stories of peril, climax, and sacrifice? Suffering is inevtiable. To be truly powerful, one takes one’s dose, and then asks for some more. Ascetecism to any degree is to love life and fate as they are and not as you wish them to be. Such is the taking upon oneself the story that fate and yourself wrote. Your graduation, retirement, wedding, achievement, loss, and death come toward you. You do this and that to prepare for each, but then you forget just how soon they come. When they do and you leave behind every battle you bled for, you will look for answers. Like this hero, you are given no answers and have to rather live out his question. When you find yourself in victory or defeat, with honor, curiosity, and maybe even gratitude, know that you are not the first to ask, “Now what?”