I met the most unfathomable man on the road today. Barring my way, he stood firm between two mid-sized boulders. He challenged me:
“What do you believe?”
And I could see most certainly that he believed, saw his belief—a specter—clutching at his shoulders, staring down at me. Damn its piercing eyes! Its insistent smile! Well not for I! Not for I who knows all too well what that clutching belief does… The hidden tyranny of truths and principles that keep me from being, doing, and seeing precisely what I want!
And so I responded, as I do “I am the wanderer” but of course that did not satisfy him! It barely satisfies me myself. Yet it is all I have to say.
“No! I must know if you are for or against me! So I may know whether to lift you up or lay you down” his knuckles twitched to his side, as if expecting something to draw. Oh but alas he was not that kind of believer. Convinced, of course, that he would die for his truth—that the entire world would end before his belief would end. But unpracticed in dying; and in the deadly situations required.
But well that is all the better for me I thought.
“Out with it, mongrel!” The man declared.
I smiled playfully. “Oh, but I am not. A mixture of uncertainties, of nothings, is not a mixture at all!” See how he sits in his little cage, his small world kept smaller by that specter. See how it wounds him. Oh, but not I…
“You… what. Oh, fine then, I will call you differently: idiot. Blathering idiot” he said.
“Well I take some offence to that” I replied.
“As well you should! As well as I take offence to being toyed with! Everyone must have a belief, you know. Some concrete supposition on which to base their world—their reality—, and I don’t appreciate you holding out on me as to yours” he said matter-of-factly, as if this was all so simple and straightforward for him.
“And why do they need that?” I asked coyly.
“Uck, fine. Sit with me. I see this will be quite the chat.” The man sat on one of the boulders, and bade me take the other, continuing “with no firm belief, there is nothing to ground a human life. All the things that are, that you see or feel, and all the things that happen—the whole world, in essence—, what are they if you can have no conclusions about them?”
“Well nothing much, I suppose”
“Exactly. Without a firm belief, you have no logical foundation on which to build conclusions about anything in life, and so the whole world is—as you put it—nothing much.”
“But what is wrong with a world that is not much of anything? Why must we force it to coincide with our beliefs?” Let him continue, I am starting to get curious…
“What is wrong, my friend, oh well everything then is wrong. The world is meaningless—no matter its actual state. By not believing in it—in some form—you have completely severed everything about it, completely erased its importance and by extension the importance of everything you will ever do or think, or that will ever happen. You have created a travesty! Human beings must first admit to being before going on to the human, and the one without belief has surely failed in that.
Let me put it again: you come to everything in this world with some belief in your heart, and it is this belief that interferes in your perceptions to give them meaning. It is this belief that then your thoughts revolve around, it is this that rests at the core of your being. Without this belief, there is no world for the human being.” he said.
“But is there not something special and incredible in this unspecified world? To live at last without the influence of learned beliefs, to be able to make choices in freedom! And so to live in a world full of potential, that can still be anything! Surely that is the real world.” Oh perhaps I reveal myself too much…
“oh, you are a daring one my friend; with a taste for insanity itself… you know most people guard their sanity jealously, hold it close—and do horrible things for its sake; doing all they can to make their beliefs real.”
“as well they perhaps should,” I replied, “if it is as essential as you claim.”
“Oh I do not think you sincere for a second” he glared at me wryly.
“no, no, perhaps not…”
“but be careful,” he looked at me seriously, “To rest in insanity—or better worded, perhaps incoherence—a moment, well that is only natural. That is the time when you can truly reassess and change your beliefs; when, as you say, the world is filled with infinite potential. But to live there? That is a dangerous thing; like attempting to live outside of life. To say
‘I am forevermore like the stone, no longer thinking or acting, but merely tumbling along.’
‘In betrayal of my heart, that beats and beats, I have decided not to follow its example.’
‘Like the almighty mountain, I have resolved never again to acknowledge the momentousness of my actions.’”
“But is it not just as dangerous to be fixed by belief, to do anything, to die, for your belief, to cling to sanity to the point of insanity. To harm others, harm yourself, and so on?” I will have to mull his proverb later.
“Perhaps, but at least they live—at least their twisted worlds have meaning; rather than being flat, tasteless, and unacknowledged… and besides, if you are so concerned, then surely you must believe something!”
“…yet I remain unspecified. I am, did I not say before, The Wanderer” I said.
“ah, yes, back to that. A strange creature you are, Wanderer. If you are to be a human being, then some day you will have to find your home. The place and the thought where you will finally admit your being, find certainty, and become human again.”
There was a silence between us. I looked at him again. He was less threatening now, more relaxed. I was less skeptical, more disturbed. I could no longer see the belief on his shoulder.
He looked at me “I will not bar your way”
I got up to leave. “But we will meet again” he said, “you the potential, and I the realization”
