DREAMS IN A BACKWATER

PART ONE

III

(1)

It is a supreme irony that in all the world there is nothing more greedy than that vital force which is responsible for animating all the world – life itself.  The irony of course being that the life-force is dependent for its continuance upon the processes of death.  From human beings on down to the most elemental organisms, all things gain and further their existence by making use of the energies produced by the disintegration of other living things.  It might be said that all of life is parasitic by nature; even the one-celled plants take energy from the sun in order to carry on their activities, and although the sun is not "alive" by human standards, it too is governed by similar forces of decay and rebirth:  one star's death eventually contributes to another star's formation.  The cosmos bears abundant witness to the transference of energies from one form of matter to another through the processes of disintegration and reintegration – processes which, given enough time, eventually engender that stuff called "life."

It's only the self-reflective quality life acquires via human beings that imbues it with any moral capacity; it has none on its own.  Nature's greatest law is essentially an amoral one:  it states that energy can neither be gained nor lost, but only changed in form.  Yet there are many who believe that it's only by the decisions we make using our moral faculty that humans have any real hope for survival.  Without the proper exercising of that faculty, they say, towards the earth and towards each other, we shall surely perish.  Then again, there are those who believe this faculty to be of little importance; of the many decisions we might make, these people say, it's impossible for any of us to predict which may ultimately prove to be the right one.  Thus the capacity for moral reflection is revealed to be little more than a sophisticated form of vanity:  when all is said and done, the life-force will be shown to have had its way with us, regardless of how we have tried to direct it.  Should some devastation to the human species occur, it will, in the end, result in little more than a minor reordering of nature – which, like the phoenix, suffers obliteration only to rise from its funeral byre once again.  Then there are those who, by substituting for the life-force some humanly created symbol or metaphor for that force – most commonly, a god or gods – would find a kind of glory in devastation.  For in that devastation they would see an extinguishing of all vanity, by which they mean the belief in any and all moral precepts which are not their own.  In the eyes of such a man or woman do the fires of another's hell burn bright.

Throughout history there have always been diseases which, being sexually transmitted, bring death where a celebration of the life-force would otherwise have been intended.  The most recent of these has, over the past several decades, swept the globe and left tens of millions dead in its wake.  It's been particularly devastating to the homosexual community, whose sexual practices give the disease one of its easier and more widely traveled avenues of transmission.  There are those religious zealots who proclaim this to be a form of "divine retribution," for they believe homosexuality to be a sin, punishable through the vengeance of a wrathful God.  There are even those homosexuals who, in the shadows of their hearts, may agree with them, partly because they have been told of their sin so often that they have come to believe in it themselves, partly because of the fact that they have sought their sexual partners not in their opposites, but in their twins:  and this, they may believe somewhere in the shadows of their hearts, is vanity indeed.

But life goes on, regardless.  Life will always go on, regardless.  Here in my own small town, spring has given way to summer.  The days grow slowly hotter, and the nights begin to lose their cool freshness.  The trees are now fully leaved and heavy with green.  The slow ripening begins.  Already the spring flowers have gone to seed.

PLAGUE