Jan

You have asked me if I believe in God, in retribution. I cannot ever explain creation.I am NO true believer; God is someone to turn to when everything is bleak and dreary and the end of the world seems imminent. We might as well have gone down the crater of the volcano and got ourselves devoured by it. We saw God there, in the immensity of Volcanic Power. We also saw the fertile fields below, the people at their daily chores. There was design to all we saw, the cycle of life, the beneficence of time. But there is no beneficence in my kind of life, only cynicism and perhaps a dogged willingness to take all punishment. I cannot wish this kind of life on others, to you most of all. What then can I give you? Nothing!I cannot even be kind so I should not expect kindness. Yet must be near you, an addiction as I understand addiction to be, a craving for something without which life becomes only drudge but torture. I have seen alcoholics suffer when the alcohol is withdrawn from them. But you are no DRUG, no OPIUM you are Life and to be away from you, even just the sweet air around you, is to perish. You are to me the beginning as well, which is also Love. The beginning, too, of a knowledge that sears, that will shrivel me. And what am I to you? I am rottenness to be shunned, a desperation that must be rejected. I am not life, I am the end. Perhaps, this then is a death wish, my recognition of the inevitable, the consumption that draws the moth to the flame. You have installed, you said, an electric incinerator in your garden which attracts insects. There must be some mechanism in those poor things which compels them to die, just as there is in me now this love which could also be my damnation. You must accept it in pity. What is an insect anyway?