step by step. But when one is frustrated to the point of utter despair what good does it do to know where or when the first fatal misstep occurred? What matters—and how it matters, O God!—is only now.
How to squirm out of a vise?
Again and again I banged my head against the wall trying to crack that question. Could I have done so, I would have taken my brains out and put them through the wringer. No matter what I did, what I thought, what I tried, I could not wriggle out of the straitjacket.
Was it love that kept me chained?
How answer that? My emotions were so confused, so kaleidoscopic. As well ask a dying man if he is hungry.
Perhaps the question might be put differently. For example: “Can one ever regain that which is lost?”
The man of reason, the man with common sense, will say no. The fool, however, says yes.
And what is the fool but a believer, a gambler against all odds?
Nothing was ever lost that cannot be redeemed.
Who says that? The God within us. Adam who survived fire and flood. And all the angels.
Think a moment, scoffers! If redemption were impossible, would not love itself disappear? Even self-love?
Perhaps this Paradise I sought so desperately to recover would not be the same. . . . Once outside the magic circle the leaven of time works with disastrous rapidity.
What was it, this Paradise I had lost? Of what was it fashioned? Was it merely the ability to summon a moment of bliss now and then? Was it the faith with which she inspired me? (The faith in myself, I mean.) Or was it that we were joined like Siamese twins?
How simple and clear it all seems now! A few words tell the whole story: I had lost the power to love. A cloud of darkness enveloped me. The fear of losing her made me blind. I could easier have accepted her death.
Lost and confused, I roamed the darkness which I had created as if pursued by a demon. In my bewilderment I sometimes got down on all fours and with bare hands strangled, maimed, crushed whatever threatened to menace our lair. Sometimes it was the puppet I clutched in a frenzy, sometimes only a dead rat. Once it was nothing more than a piece of stale cheese. Day and night I murdered. The more I murdered, the more my enemies and assailants increased.
How vast is the phantom world! How inexhaustible!
Why didn’t I murder myself? I tried, but it proved a fiasco. More effective, I found, was to reduce life to a vacuum.
To live in the mind, solely in the mind . . . that is the surest way of making life a vacuum. To become the victim of a machine which never ceases to spin and grate and grind.
The mind machine.
“Loving and loathing; accepting and rejecting; grasping and disdaining; longing and spurning: this is the disease of the mind.”
Solomon himself could not have stated it better.
“If you give up both victory and defeat,” so it reads in the Dhammapada, “you sleep at night without fear.”
If!
The coward, and such I was, prefers the ceaseless whirl of the mind. He knows, as does the cunning master he serves, that the machine has but to stop for an instant and he will explode like a dead star. Not death . . . annihilation!
Describing the Knight Errant, Cervantes says: “The Knight Errant searches all the corners of the world, enters the most complicated labyrinths, accomplishes at every step the impossible, endures the fierce rays of the sun in uninhabited deserts, the inclemency of wind and ice in winter: lions cannot daunt him nor demons affright, nor dragons, for to seek assault, and overcome, such is the whole business of his life and true office.”
Strange how much the fool and coward have in common with the Knight Errant. The fool believes despite everything; he believes in face of the impossible. The coward braves all dangers, runs every risk, fears nothing, absolutely nothing, except the loss of that which he strives impotently to retain.
It is a great temptation to say that love never made a coward of anyone. Perhaps true love, no. But who among us has known true love? Who is so loving, trusting and believing that he would not sell himself to the Devil rather than see his loved one tortured, slain or disgraced? Who is so secure and mighty that he would not step down from his throne to claim his love? True, there have been great figures who have accepted their lot, who have sat apart in silence and solitude, and eaten out their hearts. Are they to be admired or pitied? Even the greatest of the lovelorn was never able to walk about jubilantly and shout—“All’s well with the world!”
“In pure love (which no doubt does not exist at all except in our imagination),” says one I admire, “the giver is not aware that he gives nor of what he gives, nor to whom he gives, still less of whether it is appreciated by the recipient or not.”
With all my heart I say “D’accord!” But I have never met a being capable of expressing such love. Perhaps only those who no longer have need of love may aspire to such a role.
To be free of the bondage of love, to burn down like a candle, to melt in love, melt with love—what bliss! Is it possible for creatures like us who are weak, proud, vain, possessive, envious, jealous, unyielding, unforgiving? Obviously not. For us the rat race—in the vacuum of the mind. For us doom, unending doom. Believing that we need love, we cease to give love, cease to be loved.
But even we, despicably weak though we be, experience something of this true, unselfish love occasionally. Which of us has not said to himself in his blind adoration of one beyond his reach—“What matter if she be never mine! All that matters is that she be, that I may worship and adore her forever!” And even though it be untenable, such an exalted view, the lover who reasons thus is on firm ground. He has known a moment of pure love. No other love, no matter how serene, how enduring, can compare with it.
Fleeting though such a love may be, can we say that there had been a loss? The only possible loss—and how well the true lover knows it!—is the lack of that undying affection which the other inspired. What a drab, dismal, fateful day that is when the lover suddenly realizes that he is no longer possessed, that he is cured, so to speak, of his great love! When he refers to it, even unconsciously, as a “madness.” The feeling of relief engendered by such an awakening may lead one to believe in all sincerity that he has regained his freedom. But at what price! What a poverty-stricken sort of freedom! Is it not a calamity to gaze once again upon the world with everyday sight, everyday wisdom? Is it not heartbreaking to find oneself surrounded by beings who are familiar and commonplace? Is it not frightening to think that one must carry on, as they say, but with stones in one’s belly and gravel in one’s mouth? To find ashes, nothing but ashes, where once were blazing suns, wonders, glories, wonders upon wonders, glory beyond glory, and all freely created as from some magic fount?
If there is anything which deserves to be called miraculous, is it not love? What other power, what other mysterious force is there which can invest life with such undeniable splendor?
The Bible is full of miracles, and they have been accepted by thinking and unthinking individuals alike. But the miracle which everyone is permitted to experience sometime in his life, the miracle which demands no intervention, no intercessor, no supreme exertion of will,
