Posted on March 25, 2005 by Jenna
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Once upon a time, the world had a purpose.
Back then, everything did.
Everything had a purpose, and a truth, and a dharma.
This time was full of sorrow. If a banshee howled, then someone would die. If a mermaid called you, you would drown. If a witch cursed you, you would shrivel and suffer ill fate. Such was the nature of the banshee, and the mermaid, and the witch. If Coretta’s Lion had your scent, then it would hunt you down, and eat your skin and muscles, bit by bit, and you would take three days to die. The world was full of things like that.
But these sorrows were small.
The worst of the predators of this time were the predators of truth. For there were things, things like Death, and Sickness, and Old Age, that declared their truths supreme. It did not matter what your purpose was. Theirs would overwrite it. In the end, you could not defeat them, because it was the nature of their truth to mean more than your own. They were a very exclusive club.
The monster was such a thing. He was such a predator. And he was undefeatable. And it is because there were monsters, and because there was death, and because there were truths like theirs, that the world was broken, and the gods were cast from the world of truth into the heart of emptiness.
Tre Ore
March 25, 1995
Martin stumbles against a man, and his touch does not turn the man to dust. After a long moment Martin realizes that this is so.
“Hey,” Martin says, and refocuses his eyes.
This is a place of deep water, but the man is parched and dry. Fruit is dangling from the trees all around him, but he is terribly thin. His name is Tantalus.
“Hey,” Tantalus says.
Martin backs away a step, tilts his head, and frowns. “You’re not like the others. You’re not a broken god.”
“No,” Tantalus says. “I am a man, and I am dead, and I have been consigned to torture here in the Underworld for roughly three thousand years.”
Martin whistles. “Harsh.”
Tantalus shrugs.
The deepness of the water has put a silence on the woglies, but Martin still feels edgy and twitchy down in his soul. “Hey,” he says. “What makes that okay?”
“Okay?”
“What makes it okay to torture someone for three thousand years?”
“Ah,” says Tantalus.
Then he laughs.
“It didn’t matter,” Tantalus explains. “Zeus sat on the throne of the world, you see, and it did not matter which of his dicta were okay.”
Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit
540 BCE
“It would have been better to kill him,” Mylitta admits.
Mylitta sits tailor style on the dust and grime and brushes White Lion’s fur.
“But the problem with heroes,” she says, “is that monsters have an answer to them.”
White Lion lowers its head to the floor.
“A hero is a storm,” Mylitta says, “and storms are terrible. But there is a place above the storm where the air is calm. And I do not know how. But I could feel it, like I could feel the wind and the sunlight. That he had found that place. And so there was no single specific moment in which the monster could be killed. ”
“I thirst,” rumbles White Lion.
Tre Ore
March 25, 1995
There is a silence.
“I had fruit,” Tantalus says, “Only a few decades ago. But I would still like some water. If you could hold up some water for me to drink, I would love you.”
“My hands are full of dust,” Martin says.
“Oh.”
“I thought they were people,” Martin says. “I thought they were my predecessors. But when I touched them, it turned out that all they were was dust.”
“It’s the Underworld,” Tantalus says. It’s an explanation or a dismissal; Martin is not sure which.
“My sister keeps making gods to save her,” Martin says, “and all of them fail, and all of them wind up as mud and dust.”
“I remember that,” Tantalus says. “The gods were severed from the world.”
“Severed?”
“In the face of the monster, they were lost,” Tantalus says. “They had no meaning that could compare to his own. So they were cut from the Earth, torn away, and made into isn’ts, lest the monster’s dharma set a new order on the world. It was my doing, in a way; my children could not have learned the truths that make a monster had I not stolen the secret of the gods.”
Martin frowns. “The secret?”
“If you accept a purpose;” Tantalus says. “If you declare something to be your answer to the emptiness; then you must accept the consequences of that answer. It is desirable, for gods as for men, to shrink from that burden; but in the end, it always catches you, and, if it so pleases, it tears you apart.”
Tantalus sits down heavily, and the water sinks into the dust lest he should drink, and the woglies surrounding Martin are in the air once more.
Behold, Your Son (X/?)
546 BCE
“I am born to answer suffering,” says Siddhartha.
Siddhartha and Yasodhara travel through the city. Yasodhara is very pregnant.
Her answer is light and teasing. “And who is not? If you were born to cause suffering, my love, then I should name you a monster.”
Siddhartha says:
Let us speak of death, then, as a monster.
He may be fought,
But the terms are his own.
Each time you make escape from him
He claims his due.
Thus it is that no man may fight death.Let us call illness a monster.
It may be fought,
But the terms are its own.
We do not choose the behavior of purity.
Even touching a man,
In exercise of compassion,
May bring on sickness.Let us speak of age as a monster.
She may be fought,
But the terms are her own.
The more you fight, the more she grips to you.
The more you fight, the more she claims her due.
Thus it is that no man may fight age.This is the flaw in the world.
How can I answer suffering?
Monsters have no remedy.
“The root cause of suffering,” Yasodhara observes, following the train of her own silent thoughts, “is that no one wants to suffer.”
Today You Will Be With Me In Paradise
539 BCE
Nabonidus is educing a god from her when Mylitta breaks.
“Sometimes,” Mylitta says, clearly, “it’s like there’s this thick yarrow stick in my chest, going through where my heart used to be, stretching from my spine to my ribs. And now, suddenly, it’s like it’s just split, and blackness is leaking out all over me.”
Nabonidus blinks.
There is a light that roils under Mylitta’s skin, and then fades. There are great wracking coughs that shake her, and violent seizures. Then Mylitta stops. Her head lolls to one side. Her eyes dim.
Nabonidus looks blankly at her. He steps back. His arms fold around himself for comfort.
“Um,” he says.
Mylitta sleeps.
There is a great bulk behind Nabonidus in the room. It is white, like a maggot, like the wriggling young of flies. It is leonine. It is soft. Its name is White Lion, and it is a god.
“She will not wake,” it says.
The creature pads forward. It says, “I have asked her to leave this place, to come away with me, a thousand times. But she has always said no. I do not think she will deny me today.”
It leans down. It takes Mylitta in its mouth. It turns to walk away.
“She’s mine,” Nabonidus says.
White Lion looks at him.
“She’s my husk,” Nabonidus protests. “I broke her.”
White Lion leans its great head down. It drools Mylitta onto the floor. It looks up. It opens its mouth. It roars.
It is a terrible thing, that roar. It is like a wind tunnel that blows away the qualities of the world. Nabonidus cannot see. He cannot touch. He cannot taste. He cannot smell. He cannot hear, save for the roar.
.
.
.
Nabonidus is on the floor. He does not know how or why he is on the floor. But Mylitta is gone. So he does the only thing that he can do, in answer to her emptiness.
He makes a god.
Behold, Your Son (X/?)
546 BCE
“Ah,” says Yasodhara. “There is a monk.”
Siddhartha follows her gaze. He frowns.
Who is this, Yasodhara?
This man—
His head is shaved,
He wears a robe,
He has a strange demeanor.The smile on his face
Seems more
Like the one I seek
Than the smile of my father Suddhodana.
“He is a monk,” Yasodhara says. “He lives in the temple and he travels the kingdom, teaching people how to be good.”
“And what is his answer to suffering?” Siddhartha asks.
Yasodhara studies him with the eyes of a goddess. “A very small fiend,” she says. “It lives in his gums. It locks his jaws in that smile. There are bone passages connecting his teeth to his ears, and this allows it to whisper to him constantly, ‘people need not suffer.’ It is a painful fiend, but it has convinced him not to mind.”
(“If only ancient India had had proper dental hygiene!” Jane exclaims. “He could have brushed the fiend right out and put it to use saving the world!”
“There are many tragedies,” Mrs. Schiff agrees.)
Siddhartha opens his mouth to speak.
“Oh,” says Yasodhara, interrupting him. She has gone pale. She leans against him.
Her labor has begun.
Today You Will Be With Me In Paradise
539 BCE
Exhausted, weary, broken, and warm:
Nabonidus is crying.
It has cut him raw, to make a god. It is like being a skinless man, for him, naked in the face of everything he is.
It does not hurt terribly. But it stings.
It costs him that control that would keep him from his tears.
There is a snuffling in the room, and the clicking of nails on stone. A cold wet shadow passes over the footprints of White Lion, the altar of Sin, the blood Mylitta left behind. Then the creature he has made, the Dog of Nabonidus, brushes past and around him and leans against his side.
“Why couldn’t I keep her?” Nabonidus says.
The Dog looks at him. Its eyes are expressive. It is almost as if it wanted to say, It is the monster’s nature to consume his victims.
“She was strong,” Nabonidus says. “She could have fought. She could have kept herself unbroken.”
The Dog pants, quietly. If it could speak, Nabonidus thinks, it would no doubt say, She did not wish to. In the end, she chose to leave you with the burden of the contradiction of your lives.
“Why?” he asks.
Because it is the only answer she could find.
So Nabonidus goes home to Babylon, and he whispers to Mylitta’s absence, “You’re right, of course.”
Mylitta’s absence remains constant.
“One of us must pay the price,” Nabonidus says. “And you think I’m not strong enough. You think I’ll bend. But I won’t. I’ll make a host like you have never seen, and send them after you, to make you whole. You won’t escape from me. I will fix you.”
There is a void in the room, an emptiness, a devouring. For a moment, Nabonidus thinks it is his heart, but then he realizes that Belshazzar has let himself in.
“I will help you, father,” says Belshazzar. “If you let me.”
“Help me?”
“I have seen how it is that one pulls forth gods.”
Behold, Your Son (X/?)
546 BCE
Siddhartha is in the garden. The midwives have chased him from the room where Yasodhara is giving birth, explaining:
Every child we pull forth
Is an answer
To the suffering in the world.You are Prince Siddhartha,
And we glory in you,
And one day you’ll turn the wheel
And conquer all the world
But you will never be a midwife.Your fussing distracts us!
Your philosophy confuses us!
Out! Out! Give us space
To answer the suffering in this room.
“Midwives are intimidating,” concedes Siddhartha.
He sits in the garden, under a tree, and thinks about the monk, and suddenly he realizes:
I am suffering.
I know the meaning of it!
And it is this:From the beginning of my life,
I have made observations
And conclusions regarding the nature of the world.These carry me along
Like a river
Each new truth means another thing is true.I have built a world
From premises I’ve found
And premises I’ve madeAnd this is my suffering:
A flaw has crept in.
A wound has snuck into the world that I have made.Dukkha.
There: I have named it.
Somehow suffering is intrinsic to my world.To deny suffering
Is to find contradictions—
We can’t have everything we want.
Maya is in the garden. She sits down beside him. Her eyes are shadowed. She says:
I am here to offer you the treasure wheel.
It is power.
It is truth.
It is the nature of the world
And where it goes, it conquers.If you take it I can let you live.
Siddhartha says:
I am glad you are not here to kill me,
Mother,
But to bind me to that wheel—that is crueler.It is beautiful
But it is the cause of all my suffering.
“It is not the cause of suffering,” Maya says. “It is the answer to it. If you have power to dictate the ephemera of the world, you may release things from their suffering.”
Siddhartha reaches out to touch her hand, but she drifts away. She is standing now, slightly out of his reach, staring out at the world, holding the jeweled treasure wheel in her hands.
Siddhartha asks:
If someone is wounded, mother,
What would I use the wheel for?
To heal them, Maya says.
Siddhartha asks:
If someone is being tortured, mother,
What would I use the wheel for?
To save them, Maya says.
Siddhartha asks:
If they are tortured again, later, mother,
What would I use the wheel for then?
To save them again, Maya says.
Siddhartha asks:
If they suffer in the meantime because they remember torture, mother,
What use, then, is the wheel?
To heal them, Maya says.
Siddhartha asks:
If someone suffers, again and again, mother,
What use is the wheel?
You may end or prevent that suffering each time, Maya says.
Siddhartha asks:
If there are conditions in life that make future suffering inevitable, mother,
What use is the wheel?
Maya frowns at Siddhartha. She says:
It is life itself that makes suffering inevitable.
If you end all life, you will end all suffering
But this is not the Maya-Dharma.
And this is not compassion.
Siddhartha says:
If there are conditions in life that make future suffering inevitable, mother,
Is the wheel then no use at all?
Maya says:
We suffer because we love what might have been.
If you end love, you will end all suffering
But this is not the Maya-Dharma.
And this is not benevolence.
Siddhartha shakes his head. He says:
If someone wounded says,
When I bring the wheel to them,
‘This wound is inevitable,’ mother,
What must I do then?
Maya says:
Such a person has lost perspective.
Ignore their words and heal the wound, Siddhartha.
Siddhartha says:
You have lost perspective, mother.
The world is a wound.
The nature of things is a wound.
That suffering is inevitable, this is a wound.
Do you understand?
Even if I must shatter love,
Or shatter life
To heal them,
I will end that quality of things that makes us suffer.
Maya lowers her head. “So ruthless,” she whispers.
Siddhartha reaches out to her. He says:
If I did not know the Maya-Dharma, mother,
I could not transcend it.
Maya says, quietly,
O Prince, O Prince,
In your rooms
Your son is born.Will you look upon him?
Will you go, and look upon him,
And know the reason for this world?
“Sons are an impediment,” says Siddhartha.
Maya looks wry.
I shall not. Siddhartha rises, and turns, and looks towards the gate. I will seek an end to suffering.
The wheel burns in Maya’s hands. It is a jeweled treasure wheel, thousand-spoked, with two winky eyes; and now it is on fire. It grows great and terrible, and there are wheels within the wheels, and wheels within those, and it rolls towards Siddhartha like the coldest and deadliest of the killer-gods. And as it touches him, and burns his arm, he falls back; but it is Maya, and not Siddhartha, who screams.
A spoke of the wheel has broken free and fallen to the ground.
There is a hissing inside the treasure wheel of the world, a hissing and a shuddering, and the world has cracked.
Eloi, Eloi, Lema Sabachthani?
Present Time
Sebastien emerges from the shower, wrapped in a towel and using another on his hair. He is almost clean, but not entirely.
The monster is waiting outside.
“I’m not intimidated by relative nudity,” Sebastien says.
“Did you ever wonder,” the monster asks, “why it is that you’re something that can kill monsters, and not something that does?”
Sebastien scrubs at his hair a bit more, then shrugs. “No.”
“I’ve thought it might be,” the monster says, “that we’re difficult to kill.”
“No,” Sebastien says. “It’s just that if you’re someone who kills monsters, then there must always be a monster to kill. You can’t fix anything, you can’t solve anything, you can’t make any kind of difference unless you’re lucky enough to do the matter-antimatter thing and burn out with your enemy in a blaze of glory. It’s safer to be someone who can kill them. And even then—”
It is very important to Sebastien that he not turn away from the monster, and so the pain in him is a crisis point; and in the end, though he does not turn away, he does look down.
“To go all the way means being death. It means being a killer. Even if it’s someone who kills things like you. And it means being part of things like you, even if it’s the part that ends them.”
The monster’s smile is brilliant and white.
Today You Will Be With Me In Paradise
539 BCE
It is the seventeenth god.
Belshazzar pulls the seventeenth god from Nabonidus, a great and terrible phoenix shape, a yellow and red effluvium that pours forth from Nabonidus’ chest and mouth.
“Go,” says Belshazzar, and it is gone. It seems to Nabonidus that it is following Mylitta into emptiness, as if Nabonidus’ own strength is pouring after his victim into the void.
Belshazzar leans down again. His face is terribly earnest and clinical.
Nabonidus is weak.
“Wait,” he says.
“It is necessary,” Belshazzar says. “We do not know how long until her heart will cease to beat.”
“No,” says Nabonidus. His word is binding, and Belshazzar stops.
Nabonidus is weak.
“Lift this burden from me,” he begs.
So the teeth of the devouring god close around him.
The nature of the monster ends.
Tre Ore
March 25, 1995
The idea that comes to Martin is as inevitable as the rain.
“This is a place that takes everything from you,” he says. His voice is thick and heavy. “I came down here, and I was strong, but I can’t keep that. Not in the Underworld.”
The woglies are closing in on him, but Tantalus stands up, and the water washes in, and over them, and they grow still.
“I have to give up more,” Martin says. “Somewhere, there is something I am clinging to, that I have to give up, and it’ll be the thing that hurts the most to toss away.”
Tantalus looks at him. “Why would you surrender the thing you love the most?”
“Because there cannot be a poor rich man,” Martin says. “There cannot be an earthworm in the sky. There cannot be a man who is not a man, or a bird that is not a bird, or a void that is not empty. I am the architect of suffering, I am its source and its foundation, and I am good; and because these things cannot share one form and nature, I am severed from the world. My purpose fails because it is a contradiction, and contradictions cannot endure.”
The woglies are buried in the water, and they do not speak.
“There is no birth,” Martin says, “that has no pain.”
Into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit
540 BCE
Mylitta leans over White Lion, her face in the creature’s fur.
“This is the secret of the monster,” Mylitta whispers to him. “It is not random. It is not chance. And none of it is blind. The line of Amiel could not escape her oath, but they could twist it, and they know the secret of the gods. They know that we exist for a reason, that we respond to purpose, that we are bound by the laws of our nature that we cannot break.”
“Leave here,” says White Lion. “Leave, before he shatters you.”
“So they chose a dharma for themselves,” Mylitta says, “that we could not answer. They chose a dharma that redefines our truths.”
“Leave here.”
“That is the reason for Belshazzar,” Mylitta says. “He will not answer the monster. He will break the question. He will destroy what it means to be a god, and I shall have my Elli.”
She is silent for a moment.
“If he is weak,” she says. “If he is weak, before I die.”
Tre Ore
March 25, 1995
Martin opens his eyes. He releases a burden, or accepts it; they are one and the same.
“It’s not the monster who’s hurting Jane,” Martin says. “I won’t claim that. I won’t be a passive observer. If I’m going to shape the world through suffering, I’m going to be the one who shapes it; and the monster’s responsibility won’t ever negate mine. It’s my job to make sure that suffering transforms.”
There are fewer woglies now. They are skating off through the water, like toroidal tropical fish or evil aquatic froot loops that have been startled by a splash.
But one remains.
“Do you have the right?” it asks.
“Ye—”
Martin comes very close to nonexistence.
Then he shakes his head. “That’s not important to me,” Martin says.
It Is Finished
539 BCE
There are some who say that Chen Yu broke the world. There are some who lay the blame on Belshazzar in Babylon, or Siddhartha Suddhodana’s son. A few blame Mylitta, or the monster, or even Maya, for all that there was nothing she feared more.
In the end, that the world should break was inevitable.
The weight of its suffering was not a thing the world could bear.
David Goldfarb on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:
rpuchalsky on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:
Ilanin on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said:
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Archangel Beth on November 30, -0001 at 12:00 am said: