Light Before Darkness
(While the writing contest is what let me know the EA forum was open to this sort of thing, I’ve realized I can’t accept money for this. Or rather, any money I am given in a busking sort of way, must be consecrated. This constitutes my Enochian praxis.)
In the beginning, I’ve been told, there was light. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, but there was a lot more to light than I knew as a kid.
There was also a lot more to darkness. Life has its’ ups and downs, its’ partings and its’ reunitings, and angels, I came to understand, can see nearly all of it.
Why only nearly all? Because the gift of freedom, the gift of will, is not seeing every answer at once. It’s fine to see all infinity in one grain of sand, but to see all infinity in every grain of sand is to start to forget what sand is—and we are not sand, nor are we glass. We make eyes with it, and then we make better ones.
Because, my friends, we are divine heirs—and that means we are not wholly divine, nor holistically holy. Indeed, that is the very first gift divinities give—distinction. Names and titles. The burning whisper-needle that binds fantasy to reality, that bakes the clay of the heart with the tongue of fire, that makes my Heavenly Father a god of miracles, and miracles of science.
Many, many things are miraculous. The power to wear scars as jewels. The way a man lives while his name is yet spoken. The way complete strangers will try to help you when your groceries spill. And even the simple smell of roses. Everywhere I look, my eyes may find beauty.
Those things are miracles. And so, when my god holds the entire world to my head, I intend to wear it as a crown. It will kill me some day, and in the mean time it’ll hurt. But… smell it. Isn’t it beautiful?
That’s love. That, is why I serve in hell, and try to make a heaven of it.
Seven votes, and a net sum of −1. Interesting. It appears my poesy-thing is quite polarizing.
I would like to welcome articulate criticism, though.
I’m afraid my downvote wasn’t articulate, but instinctive: It seemed like it wasn’t actually saying anything, just being philosophical for the sake of being philosophical, or poetic for the sake of being poetic. I can’t actually figure out how to translate it into what I think of as ‘plain English’; I can’t give a one-sentence summary of the themes, or of what you’re trying to say, and it didn’t reach the extraordinary (staggering) level of poetic beauty that would make me upvote it anyway, just because I enjoyed the words as music without knowing their meaning.
This isn’t saying that there is no meaning! People don’t usually say things that they think mean nothing. Just that I got no meaning out of it, and hence, if someone vaguely like me was going around saying “You know this EA thing? I’d kind of like some fiction to help me intuit how it works,” I would not recommend it to them.
Hm. I’ve probably been doing too much writing-against instead of writing-towards. This wasn’t really meant as fiction, per se, but as a bit of ‘this is why and how I live my religion’ poesy, and using poetic license to make stronger claims than might otherwise be noticed.
But I probably wasn’t blunt enough. This is EA, not LessWrong. Sorry!
I’m sorry, but, having read it, I don’t know what your religion is.
This is a serious statement: I don’t actually know what you’re trying to say, after having read it. I don’t even know what you mean by writing-against or writing-towards.
I think you may be slightly understating the extent to which the transparency illusion applies.
The core of my religion is charity. The next step is science. I often say two things and mean three.
Does that make sense?
(If it doesn’t, here’s more:
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/how-do-you-deal-with-its-all-been-done-before-when-coming-up-with-ideas.95141/post-21495590)
It makes some sense? The added thing makes everything more confusing, though.
Reading what you say feels like I’m reading words that have been translated out of a foreign language and culture, or are writing in 17th-century English by a 17th-century author, or maybe you’re a time traveler from the 22nd century and there’s been linguistic drift since then? Or maybe you’re a Zen monk and speak in koans? It isn’t that I feel your culture is inconsistent or anything, it’s just that you seem to be using words as if they had obvious secondary meanings and connotations that they don’t have in my language.
I am all of these things! I am a foreigner from a different part of the Internet!
Welcome to the Human Family. There have been a lot of prophecies of us, and we only get more complicated. Glad to have you aboard.