CHAPTER TWO
SAMWISE GAMGEE, HUH
“This lasted a minute
It could have been more.
This lasted some seconds
Guess now we’ll never know.”
Sheva was still considered a child according to the laws of her nation. She knew more than any grown up though, not just what was happening to her but why it was happening to her too. If you heard her full story, you’d definitely credit things other than those she uncloaked and give reasons contrary to those she revealed. You see, Sheva believed in the end it was especially because of her. All that was happening was her fault somehow and that existent proposition ate her up inside, with every seeming happenstance that should have always somehow in hindsight, been avertable.
It was her fault she expected good in the world but found none, for what was good about this world that wasn’t marred by some sort of evil? What was good and what was evil in any case? How was that even perceptible for one who would have to unlearn actualities she was taught promised an Elysian destiny? Without them, what did she have to assuage the inescapable perdition of being human.
It was her fault she had taken all that she was surrounded with as gospel truth; as the pattern and print of each and every other person and society, yet it wasn’t so. For what did each and every person and society crave but individuation and distinction? And what in that craving did not stem from a feeling of eternity placed in the depths of every self-concept? A desire to immortalize all we truly comprise- dogmatic ideology. It is the insatiable need and imperative to do something that lasts, the requirement to be remembered; to live and live life to the fullest; to make meaning of all the supposedly meaningless; to be happy– whatever that meant.
How then could such individuation and distinction by imperfect and fallible creatures ever be anything but dangerous, destructive and self-appeasing? It could never be otherwise. Humanity is a cursed and miserable race and if Sheva had learnt anything from all that was around her and what she found when she looked deep inside herself, was the same accursedness and depravity. It made sense that everything humans touched would shrivel into worthlessness as well. How could she have ever believed otherwise; such credulity. Such naivete. No. Never again. It would never happen again. At least not to her. She had learnt her lesson for the first time and this first time would be the last time too.
Sheva was an Elderly, the first born in one of the most renown child gardens of their small nation, Kindred. Her principals ensured by all costs that their kindergarten stood out and indeed time told that they would, because somehow by their circumstances, it was easy to. It came easier than other things, than many other things.
As part of the creme de la creme of her upper middle-class society, it was no surprise that Sheva had been exposed to a lot of Kindred history and teaching. As an elderly, the promise of the perpetuated knowledge of Kindred heritage fell to her. It would be her job someday as principal to teach the children that came after her. She knew it all in her head and could recite it all by heart. She was to be a “good example” to her fellow Kinder. She was expected to lead and guide according to the sacred principles of the nation kindred; to be teachable, filled with wonder and obedient to truth.
Sheva was of a social and academic pedigree where entrance into maturity was not just a guarantee but an expectation. When the time came, the Principal Council would grant her passage to kindred heaven- adulthood. That was the dream of every Kindred; to be declared an adult. Life was not worth living apart from that possibility.
Her country had enjoyed peace for many years and her time was the reign of High King Principal Rex Garalius. There had been the great war where many were lost amongst the three nations of Druid Nations United, Africa and her own, Kindred.
The war was begun by the Druids who claimed that the only way to complete and whole living was through philosophical enlightenment. Their greatest pursuit was therefore knowledge. They were the biggest, strongest and most sophisticated nation, because so vast was their knowledge. In great conviction, they set out beginning a militant crusade for the forceful conversion of the other two nations that unfortunately saw things differently.
The Africans believed one lived to uphold their cultural and familial legacy. To them the best end was employment; a way to consistently earn a living and be successful in life providing for your children, that they would want for nothing and that they would in old age support you too. That was the dream; their dream- the African dream.
To them the philosophical pursuits of the druids were unhelpful and deterred them from their blessed tradition, not to mention that the Druids had militantly impressed their beliefs of destination in such a way deemed complete sacrilege. The violence was unimaginable, the bloodshed never ending and spanning over years and years; the death toll to levels wiping out tribes and African traditions. Remnants of such African tribes are referred to a hybrid with a compromised and polluted African culture; bearing the dark melanin skin of African, being referred to by rich and meaningful African names, but being nothing like a “True” African was supposed or expected to be.
In the end, the Spears and Arrows of the Africans could not defeat the sophisticated technology of the Druids. They were a rich culture of interconnectedness and community, but there are so many other things they didn’t know. They were killed in the thousands.
The militant crusade of the Druids came to the nation Kindred a few years later after Africa was subdued. The Principal Leadership abhorred it completely for they alone had the power and authority to declare a child learned, wise and knowledgeable; fit for adulthood. No such attainment of knowledge would do such a thing. This was their stance and from it they declared war. They alone declared a child to be an adult; otherwise, that child remained a child, damned to dwell in a literal Neverland cursed to never grow up. The Druid philosophies would puff the children up to deem themselves of understanding apart from the declaration of the Principal Council. They had to protect their authority for the good of the children of the nation. Generations would be lost. The order or life destroyed and eventually forgotten. The sacred principles were sacred for a reason after all. They would not have it.
So the Druids killed the children of Kindred by the thousands too for even knowledge that they had, the Principals did not seek to apply.
Sheva didn’t need to be an adult to understand what she had learned already through the story that is life. A child, an African and a Druid all experienced it. What the devastation caused by such a war as the great war told you in the history books was the same thing every day experiences did- that the war, the true war was inward, existential and spiritual not physical and territorial. It was human nature to want. It was human nature to avoid the learning from the lessons that taught you the discipline of discerning what it is you actually needed. She knew this struggle in herself. She saw it in every principal’s obsession with power over the gullible and credulous kindred. She knew the cycle. She knew its sure result.
II
I am human.
So are you.
So is he.
So is she.
What makes me “me”?
What makes you who you are?
We are the same like this and different like that.
I look at you and see me.
You look at me and see what you do.
Here we are reflecting each other in some great and global hall of human mirrors. Humanity is the current that connects us with a coherency so consistent, we know all are equal and born free. Yet this current of humanity, is the same that shatters the glass into shards and tiny pieces of slavery and inequality.
The current hums.
Its buzzes.
It sings the song of a dangerous life. A selfish life. A living beauty.
It is this sophistry that keeps us living, and not just alive.
It keeps us seeking.
It keeps us lost, so that maybe, one day we may be found.
Nonetheless, the facts of life and living are intangible and hard to grasp, hard to understand and most importantly hard to accept. Reality showcases its tenacity and vitriol, until your small, feeble mind is sulfurous contents of its kettle for tea. With every sip, reality watches you wonder, which is truth? Which is the lie? Reality sips again, and then sardonically, tick-tock-tick-tocks your life away.
It creates a disparate conundrum that sets us all to seething until even after the dream, we wake up and hope that everything is still blue.
That’s what makes us foolish.
That optimism makes us foolish.
That optimism keeps us living. It becomes foolish to live, so we cling onto life more and more with all we don’t understand that we may die. We die so that we may be reborn and truly live. Foolish, I tell you.
You live.
You die.
He is famous.
You are not.
You are in love.
They are too.
The deeply etched fear of being ordinary keeps us in this cycle that we have termed life. It is play, end, stop and repeat, from our first breath to the last. The same questions. The same fears. The same weakness and nature. The same guilty pleasures; play, end, stop and repeat. The quest never ends because we cannot stop seeking. There is no giving up or giving in, because then you won’t live or die.
The human tedium.
You see, one begets the other.
We crave death and life in equal measure.
You hoped for the recurring symbols, motifs and people in life to get you through it. You always imagined yourself the protagonist on some great mission and purpose awaiting their archetypal sidekick. The Principals looking out for you the way they should, garnering understanding in those they governed; not just promoting accumulated knowledge through an unhelpful authority and a purported activation spell unlocking the wisdom in that knowledge they claimed to have.
Sooner or later you’d understand that best friends are over rated, love is chemical process that coincides with the considerations of social and economic compatibility as well as a mutual self-interest because even those you loved succumb to societal constructs. There was a safety and certainty in that. Outside the authority of the principals, life was wasted and dangerous after all, it was indeed dangerous to remain a child; and if that was your fate what a life wasted yours was.
It was about self and not others most times therefore, because people had to survive. After a war, the remaining generations knocked it into the next that peace at all costs was of vital importance. A crucial imperative. It made people afraid and controlling. They acted like the war they were trying to avoid was already going on and never in fact ended.
In the end all humans were as greedy, as afraid, as self- preserving, false hearted and perfidious as they came; druid, African and kindred alike. All that was eventually left was the bitterness, despair, anguish and defeat from it all. You reach the point in life where you aren’t just feeling completely and utterly alone, you were.
Sheva had distanced herself from so many people and things over a long period of time, it had become the irrevocable norm because of these realizations. All these notions formed alone in her mind and it was outright treason to share or claim that she understood what she was not declared to understand. She was lost in her mind; in how she felt like the only one going through life in its expression to her- completely absurd.
Why was everything around her so irrational and she the rational being trapped in the disparity within the contradiction, to act like she does not see it or feel it as acutely as it existed? Or was she the irrational one instead? She needed human connection; a conversation, a social context, event, gathering; anything with someone, with something that saw what she was seeing and feeling. In desperation and on many occasions, she interfaced with some that weren’t as desperate to see or understand what she did. They weren’t like she was; serious about deep and fruitful connection to understand, express and survive by the identification of truth.
She felt and knew those kinds of people in herself now because someone had been that kind of person to her, and the cycle goes went on. It shall go on. Like them she had to survive too because of the social construct. It was a prison she needed to escape, but outside it, there was no form. Understanding became scarcer in a dimension like that.
Life was the norm. All because we constantly fell for the archetypical fallacy we now endure. We were eventually maddened by the torture of constant relational impasse. It sucked and you’d blame the pretender; you’d blame their uninvolvement, their uninspiration, their indifference. You’d also blame the lack of control you have over the whole situation.
But most of all you blame yourself like Sheva did.
She blamed herself.
Life and its cumulative choices could be that intense.
She should have known and seen it coming because she had everything she needed to, to see it coming. Just like Druid, African and Kinder, she knew what she needed but always went for what she wanted and the truth is the two rarely coincide.
She wanted Freedom; but freedom came with responsibility and the responsibility were the consequences of her thoughts.
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