We come into being as a slight thickening at the end of a long thread. Cells proliferate, become an excrescence, and assume the shape of a man. The end of the thread now lies buried within, shielded, and inviolate. Our task is to bear it forward, pass it on. We flourish for a moment, achieve a bit of singing and dancing, a few memories we would carve in stone, and then we wither, twist out shape. The end of thread lies now in our children, extends back through us, unbroken, unfathomably into the past. Numberless thickenings have appeared on it, have flourished and have fallen away as we now fall away. Nothing remains but the germ-line. What changes to produce new structures as life evolves is momentary excrescence but the hereditary arrangements within the thread.
We are carriers of spirit. We know not how, nor why, nor where. On our shoulders, in our eye, in anguished hands through unclear realm, into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation, we bear its full weight. It depends on us utterly, yet we know it not. We inch it forward with each beat of heart, give to it the work of hand, of mind. We falter, pass it on to our children, lay out our bones, fall away, are lost, forgotten. Spirit passes on, enlarged, enriched, more strange, and complex.
We are being used. Should we not know in whose service? To whom, to what, give we unwitting loyalty? What is this quest? Beyond that which we have, what could we want? What is spirit?
Betrayed by transcendence, we return to the present. We look around, we touch, we taste, we feel. Presently we begin to say, “This is better than that.” We value it, we want to hold on to it, point it out to others, and almost at once there’s a trying to create, to contribute, a drive for transcendence which leads us to betray the present, commit our energies to the future. Love of the present leads us to betray the present; the effort to hold something forever leads us to lose even that moment of possession we might otherwise have.
It is not the disorder and confusion of the marketplace which drives me to the mountaintop; it’s my delight in the marketplace that impels me to desert it. Love of life leads me to betray life; love of the actual sends me searching after the ideal; love of the present leads to the sacrifice of the present to a future that never comes.
