stream of consciousness

What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

He thought of the dead, said a silent prayer. And as he did so, he asked his God for a word of protection against the souls of the damned, for such things did prowl the world, though encounters with them were rare.

We have finite length lives in which to figure out what the Truth is, and all the while have to fear death. Death is scary.

Is death the end, or just the beginning?¹ And if it’s a beginning, what kind of beginning? The beginning of Heaven? The beginning of Hell? Or just another beginning in an infinite chain of beginnings and endings?

I’m confused. I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t. I have a mystical outlook on life. I know we exist in this world for a reason, and I strongly expect that we are loved, supported and protected in profound ways that we couldn’t even begin to imagine.

What is this life all about? Everything to us is surface and appearance. Most of life is but the thinnest of veneers, stretched taut and thin. That veneer breaks sometimes, stretches too thin and tears like paper. And what lies beneath the surface, what we hover over everyday without seeing, that great and terrible waging war between good and evil, it would freeze the blood in our veins, make the hairs on our arms and legs stand tall and rigid and erect.

Good and evil². Evil and good. What is good? What is evil? They transcend definition. They just are.

Good is love. Good is kindness. Good is patience, support and gentle understanding.

Evil is a baby left on the street to die. Evil is a baby punctured in the hollow of the womb and left to die. Evil is pain and wickedness and suffering.

Yet, what is evil but a counterfeit good? All that is evil has its origins in something good, because evil is nothing more than the great imitator. What is a lie but a modified truth?

Footnotes

1. This paragraph I actually edited and posted on my Tumblr as a writing fragment. You can find it here. If you’ve read this before, now you get to experience the broader context in which it was written.

2. This and the remaining paragraphs were what lead me to write the blog Does Reading About Evil Make You Evil?

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What’s Friday Freewrite? Find out here.

Noise. Voices chattering and clattering, stumbling one over the other, tumbling, rolling across the air, through the restaurant, falling, even though falling doesn’t make sense.

Words, jumbled, tangled, mingled, mixed, floating, falling, colliding, crashing, like clapping symbols, stumbling finally to my ears in a great drunken disorderly fashion.

The noise drowns all thought, leaving me alone, isolated, turned inward on myself, thinking, surrounded by a thousand and one voices, none of them one with me. My voice is the only one silent.

Thinking, reflecting, pondering, wondering, worrying, anxious that I’ll always be alone, solitary, by myself. Forever, everlasting, a great void filled with darkness, a great cavernous empty space, with only me to fill its lonely halls.

Cathedral, columns rising into the infinite depths of sky, reaching, grasping, pulling toward heaven, trying to pull it down, bring it here to us broken earthly creatures.

Colors, swirling, tumbling, mixing, splashing.

Cars, growling, engines churning, shaking, vibrating, moving in place.

Rhythm. Rhyme. Music. Beat. Tamborine. Strumming, beating, hitting, shaking.

Bells. Tinkling, shaking, twirling, a streaking silver rainbow arcing across the sky, shining, glittering, reflecting back bright blinding crystaline light, illumination.

Chase¹. Azure fire, glowing, piercing, blinding. The glow suffuses the darkness, gives it substance, texture without touch, patterns and shapes and definition, blue, filling his eyes; blue, filling his mind; blue, filling his heart; blue, filling his ears².

Blue. Azure. Fire. Burning. Imolating. Consuming. Destroying. Raging. Tearing. Canceling existence. Annihilating. Cutting. Piercing.

Fire. Raging, a bright burning sun, blackening, charring, killing, painting the world with bright golden light, new life in the face of death, creation in destruction, beauty in ugliness, lightness in darkness.

Contradictions. Filing my ears, buzzing, contorting, twisting, filling me with tension, mind taut³ like a rope, waiting, despairing, crying out for safety, for salvation, for obliteration.

The soul, yearning, feeling, reaching. Truth, so far, so wide, so broad, so narrow, a light in the vast multitudinous darkness, one of infinite possibilities, the truth alone given substance and form, a million alternate realities denied existence, darkness without end.

Needing, wishing, loneliness, coursing through my veins like acid, burning, killing, annihilating love, leaving behind only bitter alkali in its place.

Evil. Patient. Waiting. Dark, choking vines, climbing, reaching into my mind with feelers, poking, prodding, pushing buttons, testing, probing for vulnerabilities.

Footnotes

1. I was looking at a Chase Bank sign when I wrote this. It glows a bright blue at night 🙂

2. As I’ve said before, like dreams, freewriting often doesn’t make sense. These are words that happened to tumble into my head at the time. You’ll see a lot more of this in future posts.

3. I actually misspelled this as taught, but reproducing that error here would have changed the meaning. I’ll do my best to present my freewriting in its raw form, but whenever that raw form presents an ambiguity that wasn’t actually present in my mind at the time of writing, I’ll correct it.

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©2014 Jeff Coleman. All rights reserved. For reproduction rights, please contact the author (who happens to be a kind and eminently reasonable man.) Unless otherwise stated, images are copyrighted by various artists and licensed by Shutterstock.