Chapter seven. Beggar leaves City with a mad poet who has started an alternative community in the mountains. Explores concepts that logic and reason alone cannot propel human development; passion of believe or blind faith is also necessary for evolution. Compares the fate of the individual vs. the ‘needs’ of society’s historical destinies.
The First Day
In the market place, they sold their gods. The God-Merchants. In a circle of stalls at the centre of the Market square.
So the crowd would continually mill round and round. Deciding. Puzzling.
Most of the time there were ten or twenty of these merchants hawking their wares, in all garb and disguise from close and far lands. Hatted, bearded, naked, robed, all heights and widths.
And the Gods too, of every image and construction.
Multi-limbed, ugly, beautiful, gold, silver, clay, slender, bent. The only consistency in the whole mirage of display seemed to be that the merchants never fit their own wares.
Tall, thin in plain robes, held aloft in a bony grasp a fat plump sleepy image that promised more docility than greed. Or some enormous spread in velvet robe, held clay moulded to humble reflect.
The barbarian, who roared in fur, offered an ebony lamb. A naked merchant offered a cast of gold. In a form to the shape of a lion’s head. The devout placed their heads in it when it was suspended by a thread high in a tree. There prayers were made for a blessing.
A small yellowish man in dark cloth offered a stone god shaped in the curl of a man. Those of wealth who would wish to make restitution carried the Stone upon their shoulders as a symbol of their love of man for a few minutes each day.
And more. Ugly men traded in beauty. The noble demean in shoddy; the whole in broken; the broken in whole; the quarters in crumbs and the crumbs sold a universe.
It was this contrast which gave all a sense of validity to the crowd. Though not openly said it was understood. As all that they sold was false, then they themselves must be true. And thereby granted to the people the illusion of faith. As merchants, they truly believed in the falsehood of their wares.
As false. Utterly. And in so doing, sold their own perfection of truth in tiny bits. Till all the falsehoods were depleted. Then more must be made and sold to convince again the crowd of the Merchants’ ultimate evaluation of Truth.
For the crowd had come to purchase faith, belief; not a god as such. The false god offered was never to be debated as true or false. For the danger being that a shred of truth might be found within the god. And thereby, by the unwritten Law of contrasts, a shred of falsehood be found in the merchant. And the totality of belief or faith would shatter.
This faith, this belief could be called The Great Mask covering The Tiny Spreading Grin. As any individual in the crowd would move towards death, they would begin a smile of escape or anticipation like someone who knows they are being released from a death bed or leper colony. An impatience, an eagerness to shed the hands. Hands, which in all shapes and grasps, have plucked at an individual since birth. Like crows at some dead thing, they have torn piece by piece, the nobility, the dignity of individual existence.In this vast place of disease, always the clutching, wrapping, prodding, pulling, pushing of hands. Hands not to heal the one but rather hands to bind all together and the Species.
The Species must not die even at the cost of the individual's death. The Species in its frenzied, grim face,· looks upon all as a total greater than the sum. And, therefore, the total is more worthy of worship; more demanding in its need.
When a man meets another man, he becomes one of men; no longer a single solitary Man complete upon himself. He must give up a portion of himself to absorb the portion of the other man offered in hand. All thoughts, all spoken words must be reworked to fit the presence of the other man.
As the crowd grows, each man sheds, drips, decays more parts away from himself, till strangely enough, the man feels as if he can't be distant of the species or he w11l unravel and his very putridness will now be exposed.
Ah, but Death, sweet, noble Death brings back to the man its lost twin, Hope. A promise of a journey unique, outside the Species, senseless to its demand of sacrifice to the collective life (at all costs imaginable).
Death promises a place outside the hands, never mind some vague concept of hereafter; that is small in its importance.
What is vast, of great consequence, is the few breaths, a word, seconds as a Man. To be totally alive and alone with the dignity of oneself. And the short time leading to this; the visitations, the faint raps at the window, these are a delightful mapping, a hint of the great Vacation to come.
These being the Tiny Spreading Grin, which the Species abhors. Since its collectivity and perpetuality is nailed to each individual's cling to life.
So the Great Mask is worn. To masquerade belief in Death as a journey of all mankind. A progression of the Species upward, upward. Not a Death as a division, a parting, a subtracting away as each man finally tastes ultimate aloneness and therefore freedom from tyranny of submission.
If none wore masks, the oozing open wounds of the very bowels and hearts of a Man would lie in full view. All would see the wounds of all. All would see the tiny spreading grin of all. What man would hold another to stay his own Great path of Healing? What man would not help another as he would wish the other to help him?
And like grinning children holding hands all skip to the Abyss and take a laughing leap to Joy to Hope to Death.
This, the bitch Species cannot allow. Hence the suckled instinct in belief, in faith beyond just an individual Man. It was meant only to bring faith in the pack but the sap was too sweet the mob too bitter.The pack howled for more, broke free, went awry, and came hungry to at a closed door to grovel for a master.
So the man sits. So all sit, wearing the Mask of faith in a door to open.It never does. It is only until the last dark night that the spell can be thrown off the dog, the Mask ripped away and a wolf resurrected. A Man reborn to die. To run wild through the unknown forests, his teeth flashing a mad release of glee in the naked moonlight.
So the Merchants and gods and hasty built stalls and a milling crowd. Each one in the crowd moving from stall to stall in an ever decreasing spiral. For when they would stop to peer at the wares at each stall, both merchants on either side would pitch their sales, in a unique way.
Unique to the selling of gods. They would roar and shout condemnations and every demonic or superstitious label upon the one buyer standing before their neighbour's stall; accuse the looker, the buyer of all sins and vices because he dared to even look upon their neighbour's god.
In this way, the crowd was shamed to shuffle on and on. As soon as a man moved from one stall where, as he stood, those merchants on the right and left had destroyed his entire reputation, he would be greeted by silence from the merchant who had just declared him loathsome. For now that merchant was busy declaring the vileness of some new occupant at his neighbour's stall. That occupant furtively looking to purchase, but actually more attempting to escape each fresh spew of abuse.
As more people pressed from the outside, the inside was pushed tighter and closer to the stall, till someone would be shoved hard against a table and thereby, by chance , inherit the purchase of his god.
Two such men, their freshly bought gods in hand had just elbowed their way back out of the crowd. One a tall man, with a lean nose, was dressed in a long striped robe. He carried a tiny idol shaped like a turtle. Another man, shorter, fatter, kinder looking than the other; he carried a one foot long golden grasshopper. This man was dressed in a loosely wrapped white robe and wore a small white cap.
As they walked to the exit of the Market square, they fumbled and turned these purchases. Their faces had an unsure look as if undecided that these gods were agreeable to their wants or lives.
As if now wondering if they were indeed too large for the mantelpiece waiting undusted at home. Each had a hesitant finger probing the hollowness, scratching at the go
ld fleck or ringing its head for trueness.
Yet neither would put words of doubt to those furtive checks; would not speak to his neighbour the unholy vowels of disbelief. Each within himself acknowledged his uniqueness in simply wearing a mask for the sake of others who needed the falseness of this strength in the Ir lives. Each believed himself too kind to strike down another’s altar and thereby cause another anguish in his emptiness. Each knew that they had strength of integrity to go alone but they also had much compassion of heart and therefore allowed themselves this pretense. A small lie for the other, the other who likely could not bear the jar of contemplation spread thickly on his daily bread.
So in exactly the same spirit that civilizations are born, each man dusted the frown of himself from the brow of his god, placed his neighbourly duty upon his own face, tucked virtue under his arm and strode lighter stepped in soul.
Side by side they walked and talked of the latest grape harvest and how that may affect the people in their choice of mayor. As they came to the exit, there was, leaning against the gate, an odd look of a young fellow.
He was obviously poor, dressed in rags. Except for a red coloured turban, which with his cocky hint of airs, gave him the appearance of a sultan’s prince. A small thin beard too, and deep dark brown eyes, almost mystic, suggested a learned man