A Violent Truth

I was washing dishes and cleaning counter tops in the kitchen one rainy and muggy afternoon.

Rising up from her dark lair, I heard my mother-in-law's voice beckoning to me:

“Bamboo, are you up there?”

“Yes,” I yelled.

“Did you see Hilary won Pennsylvania?”

“Yeah, it don't mean nuthin',” I replied loudly.

“It does, too!” said the urgent voice. “That Obama can't handle it!”

And then she cackled that laugh of hers.

I stretched out my damp tea towel and noticed from the kitchen window a pair of disturbed blue jays jumped from their naked perch and began circling the house, spinning faster and faster as ominous thunderheads beat their low rumbling drums slowly on the other side of the river, still miles away into eastern Kansas.

“Shit,” I thought, “it's going to be a long summer.”

Before the summer, just a moon or so ago I was finishing up another serene walk-about among the native tribes in the sacred Indian Nations. The libations were cooler then, as I recall, but that trip did end rather violently. It was the kind of violence you see when dreams dispatch themselves from the truth, kind of like when the giant fuel tanks on the space shuttle separate from the mother ship upon escape from earth's steady pull, saying a slow and graceful goodbye to their beloved payload as an unstoppable momentum thrusts their old friend deeper into outer space.

Hmmm...

What is true and what is a lie? Truth and lies. What's the difference? Are these qualities like atomic particles, one positive and one negative, constantly attracted to each other? What of the neutron in this ethical formula? Where is it hidden? When instantly unbound from each other like a nuclear explosion, is there any less detectable violence? Is there anything more understood or more universal in this cosmos than a perfect lie? If so, does that indicate that its timelessly silent partner, universal truth, is still a ghost, hiding in a cosmic material-eating black hole, always there just outside of our grasp?

Well, I did speak with a few wise beings along the way and I fortunately recalled the hard lessons of my youth. It always seemed then that conflict and rejection only occurred when I opened my mouth. Had I kept my mouth shut on certain occasions, young life might have gone a bit smoother.

Finally putting that previously proven theory to some alternatively good use, one day I made a promise to lie to everyone I met. My secret purpose was to separate fact from fiction, to see if I could trick the truth into showing its ugly head as if the black hole might be suddenly visible only from the spot where light does not exist. Those few wise men in my path were only unwitting pawns in this dangerous game...

Inside a typical sweat lodge only several miles beyond the border, I settled down with a group of fine fellows who once knew me. Before the first few tears of recognition had dried, they asked me who should be the leader.

“I don't care,” I replied.

Two of them sang at once, “Ehh...what?”

Realizing my honest mistake, I corrected myself.

“Only a man should be president,” I said.

It is the opposite of what I believe but such unflinching statements are demanded by many in the Nation. Fashionable lies allow access to evidence of the drifting river that one might not be allowed to observe otherwise and this instance was no different.

Wooden Eagle grinned and patted me on the shoulder. I was pleased that he was happy with my answer.

Together, they asked me why I came to see them.

“I wanted to hear about your latest dreams,” I answered with a shallow smile, as if I was betting the house on a pair-of-deuces bluff.

Wooden Eagle nearly blurted, “Sasquatch is real...I dreamed of him once then I saw his giant foot prints in a creek bed near the mountains!”

Carries Big Stick calmly said, “I believe anything is possible. He may exist or not, I don't know for sure. I have not dreamed about him.”

The renegade Cherokee Chuck replied, “Bigfoot doesn't exist. We haven't discovered any carcass or bones of this creature, have we?”

I knew then I was warming to this burden of proof concept but I wondered who was trying to convince who on this matter. The “proof” may or may not be convincing or even true since history suggests our people are easily misled by deception, error and indistinct dreams. To combat that, I think the honest burden of proof is at least a two way street, in both a positive and negative flow...in other words, the “receiver” is just as responsible to repute any claim of truth, questions naturally subject to the scientific degrees between a theory which may only explain the path and a law which may only predict the future result.

That's what I heard, anyway.

I may have missed the point but, to my confused thought, it would have been a mistake to choose sides in the Big Foot debate. I found each stance equally unjustifiable...not just open to the accusation of “no proof” but all deserving of a healthy critique. I couldn't bring myself to lie on this.

I wanted to report that Science has spent a lot of effort, particularly in the last 150 years or so, trying to better define life around and within us. Newer microscopic understanding, down to the gnat's ass, evolves almost daily now. But I certainly have no platform to argue with any of that.

Escaping the limits of Science, I could have admitted that I've dwelt on surreality the last few years, wasting a lot of pleasurable life contemplating it's existence while detecting very little evidence of it. Perhaps, for all I know, that is the realm of Big Foot. Alternately, when trying to see and feel reality, I have been constantly reminded by Epicurus how my senses are so easily deceived. Hume told me that all proof is in the pudding but Descartes, that dickhead, showed me that my thoughts and dreams, as accurate or incorrect as they may be, are perhaps the only 'things' worthy of an honest, true existence. And Sartre, that guy, he said that I may not even exist or be aware of anything without the helpful construct of others. My life is dangerously frail without their dreams. And practically every one of these sad fellows told me that universal truth about reality, if any of that does exist, may be unfathomable to my ill-equipped mind.

But none of that would be a lie so I held my tongue, thinking that unlike rapidly advancing biology, it seems where reality and general existence fails me is in a study of human philosophy still mired in criticizing old concepts and dressed in tired semantics sewn together over the course of two centuries or so.

So, this common thread of discussion only kept the truth just outside of my grasp once again and the questions of “What is?” and “Who is?” began corrupting my attention and, at the risk of falling into an endless Cartesian death spin, I stopped listening entirely.

Speckled Bird, who noticed my silence but said nothing of it, rocked for a moment in his spot and then he spoke.

“I awoke from a dream one night and I was all twisted, my body was bent over and I felt as though I was coughing up buckets of bad water. As I came to, I realized I was not sick. My anguish was a result of the love I have for other people. They hurt, these people who I love, and so do I. Their pain is mine, and it all came to me in this one frightening nightmare.”

“Love, I am told, is the noble emotion that occurs when two become one. If you love somebody and you wrap your arms around them, and you hold them tight, and if you love them enough, in spite of the brief warm goodness you feel, you will soon feel every stab of pain, every prick of embarrassment, everything bad that those loved ones may have felt in their life. I know now it will all transfer to you and you have no choice but to accept it. In fact, if you love them too much, you will find yourself spent, wiped out, wadded up in a ball of pulsing hot blood and flesh, writhing alone on the floor in torment.”

We listened but did not look him in the face.

“It gets worse,” he continued.

“I was confused at first because even though we all may be perfectly capable of such consuming emotion, many of the people who walk on earth don't give this kind of unconditional love all the time. Maybe they are too alarmed by the deepness of it. Maybe they shy away because they are afraid to get too close to the things that are really scary.”

“But for a just a moment there in my nightmare, outside of my dream, the Speckled Bird you all know came to realize my experience was something else. It was not one of the people.”

And then Speckled Bird leaned forward, whispering so only the few closest to him could hear.

“This was the experience of a god,” he said in a trembling voice, “and love is not perfect.”

After a long breath, he went on.

“Do you think it's odd that I believed that so easily?”

“But I was taught that if there really is a god whose image we represent, who loves us like a father beyond any love we can imagine, then for a very short dream in my life I knew what He has endured. I knew that God did not rule as a king in magical white kingdom but has surely spent many moons like a hungry bear in a cold cave of His own making, curled up in a fetal position, His arms wrapped around himself, His hands desperately grasping His shoulders, screaming in agony, giving Himself up for His true love and yearning for release from this horrifying experiment in people that He alone created.”

“I realize now if I was a god, I'd think that I should have saw this coming. It would be difficult to say, well, things were going along just fine for many moons and then all of a sudden these people and the Devil started ruining everything and chasing away the buffalo. I'd have to say that I created all of creation, including the Devil, for the same reason that guides all walking things, and I gave buffalo to the earth not because I was afraid or even because I wanted to. No, it was what I had to do, even knowing that the buffalo would not survive, I had to race after the midnight coyote and I had no power to stop even though I knew it would leave me full of pain and regret as a result. Guilt, regret and pain are all part of the world and anyone who has ever created anything knows that all too well.”

“And God surely knew all that from the very beginning. He knew true love brings pain and pain is the sign of imperfection. And it is this guilt, regret and pain, the imperfections of love that represent us all. If we are truly made in His image, then those are the things He has bequeathed to us and what we return to Him. This is what all our brothers and sisters share.”

“It makes perfect sense to me now,” he said quietly.

“So, after my dream, not knowing why I was allowed to see it, I think we will likely never hear from this god again. He is engulfed in the endless fit of his own creation, tormented by ungrateful sons and daughters who question everything, refuse to accept the proof and constantly break his rules.”

A pause, a bit of smoke and tilted ear to the spring war drums outside allowed him to finish.

“We shouldn't worry about that, though,” he said and we all nodded in shaded agreement.

“We can't help but live exactly as He desired and He must be exactly where He always wanted to be. He loves it this way. But that means God can't be perfect and therefore he can't be a god, after all. He is, in fact, imperfect if we believe that he loves.”

We all sat there quietly for some time, smoking and drinking and thinking about Speckled Bird's dream.

I finally arose from my seat feeling that I had heard enough even though it was not the lie that I wanted to hear. I shook their hands firmly and said my goodbyes then fell slowly, gracefully, violently back away to the place of people.


Cheers,
Mb