A story of one soul during two lives

“And you find magic from your God
And we find magic everywhere
So the Christians and the Pagans sat together at the table
Finding faith in common ground the best that they were able.
Where does magic come from?
I think magic’s in the learning…”
-Dar Williams, “The Christians and the Pagans,” Mortal City, Razor
&Tie Entertainment/Burning Field Music c.1996

I pace the yard, tired and wired from the night’s labor, casting about for something to do. Three varieties of sedative have failed to induce slumber, and I have long since passed that delirious point of sleep deprivation and mental fatigue where anything coherent might be expected to appear on my iMac’s text window. Leave well enough alone.

No point in generating gibberish which will only need rewriting later. The poppies are popping, morning glory vines virulent, roses radiant, a dank spectrum of horny flowers living luxuriously; I wonder how they’ll fare in the dry desert when their human slave is no longer there to overwater and underfertilize them. Maybe Llewellyn can look after the garden when I’m gone.

Gone! Such an abstract idea, a world without Victor. Will it be a better world? Less contentious, surely. Probably my passing will be a great relief for protectors of paradigms past; yet even my enemies should miss me, as I would miss them. Without our opposites to contrast against, we are nothing but bland monochrome.

I certainly don’t feel like I’m dying. My skin is tingling, my head a whirl of exhilaration. I feel like dancing. The chorus of birds and rustling of leaves juxtapose a skein of subtle beats, and my arms rotate cautiously in the “figure-eight” configuration taught to me in a more innocent time to the din of booming hard house by a kid with purple hair and Adidas visor and dozens of chains of homemade plastic strung jewelry hung over a blue Rugrats T-shirt. Back in the day.

With Nature as my DJ, my feet join the party, the resonating rhythm overtaking me. Like riding a bicycle. Why did I ever give this up? I have no audience but Goddess, and Her smile shines on me along with the butterflies, birds, bees and every other being at one with itself. We all are engaged in a cosmic hoedown. I feel hugged. I can practically see the ball of energy bouncing around my body, the chi, focused essence. And I’m not even tripping.

Where, I wonder, will this force go when “Victor” gives up the ghost? It is inconceivable that it might disappear. The law of conservation of energy, which must surely apply to the spiritual as well as the mechanical variety, forbids it. I may not always obey the unjust statutes of men, but I recognize the authority of the Universe. I am not permitted to fade into oblivion.

Consignment to eternal paradise or damnation seems unlikely as well; unnatural. The two cannot exist apart. What nonmaterial joy could Heaven offer that won’t become passe over the Millennia, what spiritual torture could be featured in Hell that would not ease by acclimatization over the eons? The saved would be increasingly bored with their salvation, with yawning ages of monotony before them, which sounds horrifying; the damned could contrast their horrors to the earlier time when they were fresh and new, looking forward to steady improvement, and thereby eke out an increasing claim on hope. Hope in Hades, but none in the Kingdom of God?

Besides, who really deserves either? What possible point could there be to such an unforgiving pass/fail standard, on such a skewed and unfair examination? If God is really such a sadist, who keeps hugging me?

While literally absurd, the dualism may contain a useful metaphor. Something Christian fundamentalists have never understood about the Bible is that it’s mostly allegory, the painstaking symbolically-charged craft of antediluvian Jonathan Swifts with axes to grind and points to make. Only an idiot, the authors surely felt, would take stuff like talking snakes and all of humanity being descended from a single (genetically identical?) couple literally.

Actually, on further reflection, the snake talking I could buy. Like most acidheads, I score pretty high on the Buster-Idaho Gullibility Scale. I also engage in protracted conversations with inanimate objects and fervently believe in the efficacy of magic.