Sparks

That night I saw the world in a completely different way than I had ever seen it before, illuminated by a pale gray sun, small, miserable, and crippled. Darkness was emerging out of every nook and cranny. Wars and plagues were raging the whole world over, Rivers overflowing their banks as the earth quaked. Each and every human seemed like such a brittle being, like the merest eyelash or speck of pollen. I understood then that human life is made of suffering, that suffering is the true substance of the world. Every single thing was screaming in pain. 

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"Don't be fooled by all that gilding. Scratch it with your fingernail, and you will see what's underneath," said Reb Mordke, and he dragged me into filthy courtyards, where he began to show me a completely different world. Ulcerous, ill women begging outside the bazaar, male prostitutes dressed as women, ruined by hashish and sick and poor, crumbling mud huts on the city's edges, packs of mangy dogs scrounging through the trash, in between the bodies of their companions, starved to death. It was a world of unthinkable cruelty and evil, in which everything raced towards its own destruction, toward death and decay.

--The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk

Pretty bleak stuff, right. Ah, but now I remember, or I begin to remember. Jacob Frank, acolyte of Sabbatai Zevi before him, a 17th century Jewish Messiah figure ultimately captured by Muslims and given the choice of death or conversion to Islam. Zevi chose conversion (so much for his term as Messiah). Frank, like Zevi, believed that only descent into the realms of utter degradation could ultimately save those trapped therein (the trapped 'sparks'), lead them back out again, and thereby bring about the Tikkun, the repair, the restoration of the world. Or some such nonsense. 

The strange thing about all of these strange philosophies is that the deeper you go, the more confused you become. It's like falling into one wormhole after another. Maybe. I've never actually fallen into a wormhole, but I imagine it might be something like this. My son, Holden, seemed to have things more or less straight in his own mind, but then again his mind was not so much straight as it was labyrinthine. For me, the gospel was always both a simpler and a more elegant path to follow. 

Nonetheless, it seemed good entertainment at the time, and an avenue by which I might keep a handle on my son's journey, to somehow know something about what was going on, just trying to keep my head above water, and hoping that he could too, or at least that I might be there to rescue him when his arms grew weary.