A Fleet of Shards.

Gabrael,

I’m in the hospital now, writing down the closing chapter of this story. While I do this, I look back upon the project you asked me to undertake, exploring what led me to you, but I feel that I’ve only provided a veneer.

You asked for a concise record of my probation and instead I give you a jigsaw puzzle of my parts which, if put in the proper order, like the permutations of the name of God in Sefer Yetzirah, will make me whole again.

I feel an overwhelming compulsion to schematize my experience. I have digested and regurgitated these events countless times. They are jumbled and rearranged, reinterpreted, and recontextualized by events running both directions in my timeline. In the process, these disparate events become me, my alpha and my omega.

We cannot understand a thing until we make it in our own image. For my own part, I can’t seem to avoid putting myself in a hall of mirrors…and, it is only through our own darkened mirror that we can see each other. Those events, those mirror reflections that do not resemble us disappear. They hide, unnoticed, as a part of our shadow.

When we see our reflected opposite in that mirror, we are pulled up to its surface, maybe through a fascination with what stands on the other side, if we could only break through. So far in my experience, the result of this action, this attempt at reconciling opposites, is either frustration or assimilation. If we do manage to appear through the looking glass, we merge with our opposite there on the other side. They become us, we become them. Our union and dissolution is at first bliss, but afterwards there is nothing to be done. And, if you are like most other Americans, you are still here, alone no matter how many thighs or oceans you have parted, existing in spiritual exile from the world out there.

Thus I see this account in many ways as an attempt at valid communication, where the hall of mirrors of my ego will reflect a bigger picture, a birds-eye view. If I cannot understand, relate to and experience another as they are in themselves, without the intrusion of my perception, then perhaps we can relate through what I create.

The story you have before you is, at first, the mere appearance of the events that have transpired, and it was only when my imagination began to run wild, when the white walls of my room became a blank slate for my projections, that the real story, what you’re looking for as my appointed teacher, become apparent. Even then it was clear, at least to me, only as a sidelong glance, a fleeting mirage in the corner of my eyes. Whenever I look directly at anything, it disappears. I’ve learned that these projections, these ocular hallucinations, playing themselves out as the external circumstances that create my life experiences, were simply references to inner truths. Not the truth, but my myth, my truth.

To you, I hope, these phantasms will appear clearly. This is, as you know, why I first approached the Order.

These painful, somewhat lonely realizations have led me to yet another conclusion: I have not yet managed to turn around from this inner journey and come back into the world of events, a prophet, a warrior—a Yes. I spend days looking out at the world, internally and externally silent, lost somewhere in the gap between possibility and actuality, the past and the future. The moment passes me by. My soul is catatonic.

What am I waiting for?

It is slow, gradual pressure that is the formula for both genius and earthquakes. Life tells us our secrets in these cracks, the way events conspire with each other in hidden grottos. This movement is at times very subtle, over a long time, like plate tectonics. If you don’t have the right eyes, you might miss these patterns altogether. Although our lives do not occur in geological scales of time, it is still the gradual pressure and our minute reactions, our habits, that actually speak of our true natures. Our true will and intent is contained in potential within each of us, though in many it is buried very, very deep.

I was young at the time the story begins, still half asleep in the dream of my childhood. We were all too young, but who amongst us can predict precisely when the pot is finally going to boil over? There is a time, for some of us, when we are able to step outside the events that formed us, the environment that shaped us, and in that moment, we look back upon the sum of our experience and ask “where was I in that?” Where in the equation do you express yourself, not as a reaction but as a whole person? And, should we be unable to find ourselves in that equation, do we then become, as the sleeper awakening, indifferent to the events that composed the whole of that dream or memory? Do we turn a blind eye upon our past when we step forward?

Love is the law;

Alexi