Natural Punishment

I'm not drinking that wine again.

To be sure, I was already in a bit of an odd mood when the wine-drinking commenced, and, to be doubly sure, I nodded off over Aquinas's account of the sins that deserve of eternal punishment. But the dreams that followed were so vile, so repugnant, that I hate to think that they came directly from me, so I'm blaming the wine.

I've never dreamt such dreams. I couldn't label them as nightmares, because there was no element of fear, just a profound sense of sadness and pain as I watched the goings-on and, later, participated. Certainly, there was also a submission to weakness: knowing that I didn't have the strength to call attention to the situations or even verbalize what was going horribly, horribly wrong. It couldn't even be called "wrong," really, not in a definitive sense. Everyone was partaking in these strange crimes and I felt as though my own conviction was being called to me from another lifetime, barely remembered.

I just noticed there are Fruity Pebbles all over the floor. Lyra's alternating between dusting with a basting brush and drinking hot cocoa on my yoga mat (she calls it her "sleeping bag," leading me to think that I haven't subjected her to the camping experience enough). The fact of her woke me from my dreams more than once, when I would mention her name and then realize that I didn't know who I spoke of. Every time I would awaken, then, I would check to make sure she was still alive, because I'm always fearful that my dreams are prophecies but thankfully they never are.

Lyra tells me now, strangely, that she dreamt of the two of us last night; that she was stolen by a bus driver but I attacked him with swords, like a pirate, and I saved her. But she was still hurt, she said, so I took a band-aid from my pocket and put it on her knee, and then I told her that I was holding on tight and she'd never get away again, and we were very happy.

It occurs to me that Lyra's image of me and my image of myself are not one and the same.

Normally I would comment on how I hope that I can maintain this disparity, somehow, or more ideally transform myself into the person she believes that I am. I could say that, but I won't, because right now I'm just grateful that she thinks I'm someone worth knowing, someone capable of protecting her and that I've been granted this power to comfort her by simply being the person who's always been.

All this talk of punishment can pervert a person, at least temporarily, the way social workers tell me that they can't look at happy families in the park without visions of domestic violence and molestation. That isn't the life I want to live; I'd like to look past the maintenance of baseline human interaction and see what else is out there, what happens on the other side of the line. Artists try to reach this place, as do scientists and anyone else concerned with the classic trio of "truth, love, and beauty". Owen Flanagan puts it a bit more elegantly, calling these areas the "spheres of meaning", and that our navigation through these spheres is essential to reaching eudaimonia. (You can read his book for yourself, if you have some preternatural sort of patience: "The Really Hard Problem: Meaning in a Material World".) I agree with him about these arbitrary (I mean, fluid) spheres of meaning, at least in respect to individual navigation and individual fulfillment, but as a theory for groups and large communities I failed to see how it could really hold up (except for the obvious "happy people make happy communities" - largely unsatisfying and simplistic). Maybe he covered all that in the chapter I skipped.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that whatever is past the bare minimum of acceptable human behavior towards one another seems, even now, to be the subject of just sheer speculation. We have these notions of an ideal society, or collective nirvana, or what have you, but what we don't have is any evidence that these states are objectively possible and what they would look like, just overly-poetic waxings on the one hand and cult experiments on the other. I think this is a bit of a curiosity.

I'd like to say more now, but it's time to go to the park.