Starseeds and Fruits of the Earth

For a long time, I have experienced no significant sense of being invested in this world. If I have endeavored to invest myself, it has been primarily out of consideration for family and friends. Yet, I sometimes imagine, not without guilt, that my true family and friends are not of this earth, but are divided from me by the veil of death. And my presence here is perhaps a greater mystery to me than the presence of many others is to them.

Again, I have reflected often that, in contributing to this world, even in doing works of charity, I am merely enabling an addiction, and feeding a rabid dog. Sensing that my tribe and my home are not of this world, I have an abiding fear that I am really being a kind of impostor, or spy, whenever I have made efforts to assimilate here.

More often still, I have felt a profound longing for something unmet with in this world, and imagined another world, where this longing would discover its counterpart; and consummation. At such times, it does not seem to me that one should necessarily have to wait for death before enjoying such a world, or that this life should in any way be encouraged and prolonged, so long as such a place exists. Proust wrote, "Desire engenders belief." Fervently, I desired, and I believe it does exist.

Naturally, the kind of ideas I'm conveying now are deemed mad, out of hand, by the establishment. But, then, it is precisely the establishment which such ideas inevitably undermine, and one can only expect to be deemed mad by an order which one's notions would overthrow.

Not that I would like to see all people as disenfranchised as I have become with life on this planet. Like Nietzsche, "I speak for the exception, so long as he does not wish to become the rule." Which is to say, I do not wish to become the rule, if it means pitting myself against the loves of my loved ones. While the bringing of souls into this world causes me a pain I cannot deny (lest I deny the very heartstrings whose vibrations are the music of this pain), and while procreation seems to me, at best, a morally dubious enterprise, it is not my place to impose, or by vehemence to inflict, these radical beliefs on others. I am content to speak only as much as is necessary to secure my peace. I have no quarrel with anyone who would reject me.

I only ask to be understood.

Nevertheless, I know the power of an idea to spread from mind to mind, or of a spark to ignite a whole village. An idea like this is nothing less than Promethean; it is like the introduction of fire itself. I do not know who first spoke it, but we who speak it now are still sharing in his fate. We cannot make it known to men without, like Prometheus, inviting the torments of the gods, the ruling powers of this world.

The price for speaking an idea which flies in the face of what the establishment tells us and, if only theoretically, undermines the very fabric upon which they have printed their worldview, -- the wages of this unforgivable "sin", -- is to be misunderstood, and more or less summarily dismissed. It is the silence of one whose tongue is intact, and whose words may well be golden, but who has no listener with ears to hear him. Perhaps they are not flexible enough to hear him. Or, are they simply full of the dissonance of everyday life? Are they already too flooded with the noises of the street to attend to the music of the spheres; or even the mutterings of an obscure thinker in the apartment overhead?

Whatever it is, there are ideas born before their time, and before the world knows what to make of them. Men of some vision begin one day to speak them, but are not heard, not understood, like madmen speaking only to themselves or in some secret gibberish. They are treated, too, like the mad. Being sane men subject to prescriptions reserved for madmen, is it any wonder, then, if they really do become mad? As though their notions were not enough to commit them, the nervous ailments they must suffer on account of their position, isolated and disregarded by their peers, are interpreted as unmistakable signs that, not only they, but the notions, are insane.

This has been the fate of all the trailblazers and of all the great ideas. It is for future minds to pick them from the dustheap of history, brush away the ashes of ages, and remove the stigma which has always hung like a plaque over their life. Often their faces, if not their names, are lost. Sometimes even their words. Never their ideas.

But they take time.

Is there ever a movement both worthy and wide, whose founder was lately alive? True leaders can only speak clearly to posthumous followers. They are born long after they have died; their immortality begins where mortality ends; formed from the spirit of their works, and not their flesh. The greatest ideas are dropped like seeds into the compost of our times, and do not bear fruit until the ones who introduced them are silent in their graves.