Your Soul

Your Soul

Samuel Bird

Your soul. I see it before me. Prostrate and writhing it lay on the ground, possibly before me. With no motion, you pull at some portion of my soul. Your plight becomes my mission, duty, and wish. No obligation or force, but a pull from your being to mine. If any case was worth sympathy, yours, and anything worth effort, it is you. And why do you lie? Next to you, a throne. A simple throne of oak and vine. Empty, it sits with no occupant and certainly none worth its basic majesty. You, you fell from it. No, that is not right. Get up, please get up. Join yourself where you belong in the rightful place of princeship where organism meets mind. Between God and His creation, let you be heir with sovereignty and ascendity. Maybe, the ruler you rule below is no longer out there, but why leave your throne? Let the beasts and weeds look up to a good protectorate. Why did you fall? Was there a push? To the other side of the throne, I see a fool. He taunts and jears with pointed finger and scornful gaze. With no push did he put you where you are, but with his words did he propel you. There you lie before me. I wish to all the superstitions I can have to know what to do for you. What is it that you need? I don’t know, let alone any way of bringing it about. The fool he tells you, that you are not. How could he say you are not real? You are something to see from, think from, and be from. How is that not real? If he defines real as material, he obviously concludes that this perhaps immaterial portion of you is then not. However, no matter what could amount to this thing you are experiencing as. In fact, the mysteries of being and reality could possibly be explained by this awareness you see from. However, the fool in his pinings gets you to doubt yourself. How can the world you sense be real, but the sensor not? With this doubt, you look for something in the world to be paramount and primary as your soul is toppled from its pedestal. 

“Please!” I scream to no listening ears. “Help!” I plead, with no coming aid. Contorting and quivering you reach out to me. A hand held out and I reach mine to yours, but I can’t. Something pulls me back from you. All my wishes for your salvation are inhibited by many facts, including my own. No, don’t let me fail you too. Whatever leads you to hear and now, let it be, but please don’t let me wait here useless. Do these basic facts aid you? Does my seeing you help? Does the knowing that someone saw into this tragic scene, help it blossom into realization such that the counter invalidations are dashed away? Can this humbling offer of perception be worth a moment on the altar? Even this, is fortunate and unreasonable. To be with you now, with all pretensions stolen away from desperation, I see you and worry you can do the same. How do you see yourself now? In your nakedness and need, is there clarity? Man was never any good at reporting himself and now you must see through your distorting wincing. Though not the start to your writhing, perhaps that is the continuance. You can’t see yourself. Not only not to see what you are, but enough you can’t see that you are. Cartesians cries wish to save you, but you know you are only a mammal made from the soil your meal grew in and you will soon return to this. How then can your soul not be real if it feels pain? If its ignorance causes inconsistencies that eat up the rest of the person, then perhaps it exists. The fool runs with his definitions, with the hope they approximate what you are, but you predate them. You are what finds the baskets of words to place phenomenon in and can you carry yourself in a basket? Please, I beg you with my own contortions, at least be gifted with the knowledge that you are. 

Emaciated and atrophied, I see you. My mind struggles to think of how you were or how you could have been, but certainly, this was not right, wasn’t it? Taught to feed only from the hand of the fool, you starve on the sawdust of pleasure and the straw of happiness. I wonder if I could happen to have a morsel of meaning to offer you. The fool tells you that his modernity, utilitarianism, and humanism place the organism at center stage. As he assumes that is all you are, he may do well. However, you still are something that can suffer, and from that, be. Oh please I beg you, don’t hate your suffering the fool gave. That will be your final submission to him. He knows not where he goes but to aimless detractions. He teaches that your flesh is all, and by making your body master, makes your soul slave. Then you must reign in tyranny from the throne? No, your responsibility is between God and His creation. You have dominion over but are subjected to. You may worry I am another fool that thinks he is aiding. Certainly, we found that there was no necessary God to undergird all values, meaning, and truth. That is the secret I wish to tell your soul. You never knew, but your assumption of something above you gave you something. For it is not pain that is the enemy, it is meaninglessness. The charge to violent death, the trevail of childbirth, and the toiling of the field have their reward not simply because of net pleasure, but because now your tale coneys something more than what it started to say when you took over its authorship. You are a sentence you write. You mustn’t run on with it and hence are punctuated by death. In the middle, you posses the subject as yourself and the object as the world. Where then can we find a verb to save you and make you meaningful? Here, take it. I give it to you. It is Esse Maxim. The doing of being. Though my arm can’t find its way to yours, I can toss it to you. Now, this sentence has a verb: Engaging. For right or wrong, truth or error, failure or success, you will be a part of your life. It will be many things valued in many ways, but they can’t say of you that you were not there for it. I dare the fool to take this from you. I dare him to steal the last bit of meat among mud for you to chew. He will tempt you. He will say that it is with kindness that he does what he does. His affirmation of your organism would be more admirable if it was not at the expense of your soul. He worries more that you like him for his recommendations than that they serve you well. For that reason, his advice is swayed by your whim, making you a poor master of yourself through him. I speak harsh words. Words of denial that don’t even purport to stop the pain. However, you can bear all things when those things amount to something you value sufficiently. Family, Deity, and ideal, all are something for you to pour your soul into, and then find a vessel for which to live. I care not for how you like these words, the mud is easier to chew than the meat. However, the ways in which I hurt and correct, I ground them in a priori fact to ensure I have the best chance I could have. 

Your soul, unrequited as love, unanswered as mystery, and unreciprocated as effort. Still, you writhe. I must learn to bare the witnessing. I know when I tossed you Esse Maxim, that it was not your salvation from being, it was the cessation of trying to escape it. It was the resignation of the facts, shedding of naivety, and earnestness of existence. How then can I watch this scene? It pulls at me, you pull at me. Let this vision be a reality. Let my soul escape its mind, then its organism, to meet you in yours. Let me finally say what words left me gasping. I would do it. I would climb into the sky and carve abyss into walls and nothingness into spires until I made you a heaven we can be sure of. Would golded streets and a rubied throne be enough for what I see you as? Then do I err? Not only my possibility, but my imagination fails me. Let me leap from these letters and across time. Let me rise from the medium you are reading this in, to sit with you. Let me hear that tragedy that no one else has or will. Let my shoulder be the resting place for your tears. Let me nod my head with every brutal fact you suggest comes from being. Let me help you externally realize the wonder within yourself that you get to be. Let me be there with you as gratitude for existence goes above all pain to make your being something to bless over its curses. Let me forget all the anecdotes and advice I have, to have the honor of being with you. You won’t always be, at least not like this, and I want to revel in it. I am so sorry. I am so sorry that I can’t break and bend facts of the world to give you what I see you in need of. In my hubris, I forget that God may have had His reasons for not giving them to you. I pray to the possible, that they will but with no relief. Is there wisdom in this? Perhaps we find you back to your throne and forget modernity, but I think the writhing will slow, not cease. I find myself becoming the fool and cursing this material for meaning that is the horrors. Your sentence can now have conflict that accentuates your greatness. Perhaps then it is this God that not only allows the writhe but sponsors it. 

I wish to master metaphysics to aid your soul, but I have not even mastered myself. I wish to walk the streets calling out this message I can’t simplify well. From adorned stages or empty fields, I would cry it and be a fool myself, if it meant it could get to you, but I don’t do that. I simply write these words down and hope their consolation takes the stead of the obligation I have undertaken for you. I am afraid. Lacking security before, fear grasps me in the life I have and keeps me from escaping to be and do with you what I envision. I have betrayed you for hard labor that bring resources barely sufficient for subsistence. My belief in myself is the faith of a heretic. One mind fortunate to see above the haze, and that mind is too troubled to come to you. Forgive me. This desire that wells up in me, does not amount to ability. However, can you believe me when I say that this desire wells up in that part which is most core of me, for that portion which is most core of you? Am I another charlatan who’s idea’s conclusions will be corrupted by their own initial assumptions? Perhaps I will have to ask you to do what I never could, believe in me. With your earned ear listening, I will remind you that you write that sentence which you live by. This is my hope. First, hope as a request, and finally hope as faith. One more notion to give solace and commiseration. The reason I found your soul prostrate on the ground, is because I find myself doing the same next to you.