The Nature of Things (Part Two of Two)

A Story by Paris Hlad

Here, I hope you will enjoy a charming digression, for the thinking I speak of is championed by my lover, a belle femme and visionary genius who will speak to this subject a little later. We have loved wildly since I, an intrepid rebel, could no longer endure the limitations imposed on my existence. I fled the madding hive upon a magic night and came to sleep enfolded in the wings of my first love. Oh, how our hearts did beat as one beneath the blushing cheek of heaven, for the moment that I saw her, my hope was hung upon her favor - Which is not to say, that my hope was hanged, as that would be a completely different metaphor. She is the lepidopterous glory of my garden, and like me, she has made life only about herself. And that has filled my heart with even greater passion. For in her, I see myself, and in myself, I know there to be a resplendent love of me! Her name is Myrina Gabrielle- I am her loving bee.

But I stray too much from the task at hand. Suffice it to say that the common fluke is ignorant of the harm he does and is reasonably comfortable with the rules of the Garden. To him, life is an unanswerable riddle, and ultimately, a meaningless experience: He will know pleasure and pain, and then, he will die. But he is agreeable to that construct because it provides him a significant advantage over the confetti bee in virtually all Garden activities. Indeed, his rejection of things that are beyond the purview of his corporal senses, allows him to appraise the potentiality of physical objects with greater clarity and deeper insight than the bee. Moreover, he is free of the desire to meddle in things that neither require his meddling nor could even be meddled with, since those things which are immaterial seem to exist only in the minds of others. He triumphs by his ability to simplify, which is the essence of genius and the theme of all successful mortal campaigns.

However, the common fluke’s practical advantage is realized only because the confetti bee must compete with him in a game in which the bee is outnumbered and perennially the visiting squad. And unlike his more comfortable rival, the bee does not find the rules of the Garden reasonable in the least, particularly the part about death. Moreover, the bee is often distracted from his efforts by considerations of the role he plays in a physically non-existent world, while the fluke is ever focused on the empirical challenges at hand. To be sure, the common fluke cannot safely acknowledge even the possibility of a spiritual world, as to do so would significantly diminish his advantage and possibly bring about the collapse of his personal universe: Either his pleasures and pains are subject to chance, the actions of others, and his own decisions or they are not. And there is no room for compromise on this issue.

But the confetti bee cannot forfeit a game that he is required to play to the death, even if it is rigged. He must abide by the rules of the Garden, despite his intuitive sense of the eternal. Unfortunately, he can too much admire, or even covet the worldly skills and dazzling sophistication of the creature he too often tries to emulate. That dooms him to navigate life in ways that are contrary to his nature and causes him to experience life’s vicissitudes with more profound and longer-lasting consequences than his rival. This is so because the confetti bee believes that his fortunes in the physical world are in some way connected to the smiles or sneers of a spiritual realm that he cannot help but imagine. Thus, his participation in physical reality is congested with incompatible notions like guilt, honor, and nobility of purpose, all of which are couched in a debilitating sense of personal inadequacy and acute feelings of social isolation.

However, it is important to remember that although the confetti bee is destined to be a loser who “lies infinitely low" beneath the rules of Conqueror Worm, all things, including the Worm, “lie "infinitely low" beneath the rules of the Gardener.^{^[1]} Yes, if there is a Garden, Conqueror Worm will prevail, but everything in the universe must die: The bee, the fluke, the Garden, even death itself. Conqueror Worm may be a god now, but like everything else in the physical world, he, too, is destined to perish.

Once nothing is alive, death no longer exists. And that is much to the confetti bee’s liking, for he is convinced that such a state is the one for which he was created. No one knows why he believes this. It seems to be a congenital grace that skews his perception of physical reality, and sometimes even influences his interaction with others. Ironically, an existence that features death may be to the pleasure of the common fluke as well. For, as he ages, he yearns for a finale in which he will no longer be a stooge to callous physical forces. And when death comes, he will be free from a paradigm of waxing pains and waning pleasures. He can call it quits, which, to him, could be the consolation that waits at the end of a pointless, though occasionally entertaining journey. Also, there is no reason for him to suspect that an eternal state of nothingness is less than transcendent peace, as paradise may simply be the obliteration of life’s perpetual ups and downs.

[1] Paris believed that a confetti bee should not try to carry the world on his shoulders because he cannot make physical reality significantly better than it is. To him, a bee is too small and has never really had a good understanding of what “better” is anyway.