The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Eleven (Fragment)

[The following is the twelfth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, and here is the eleventh–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Rawmios had a new teaching for his followers. This is what he said: “Your focus determines your reality. If you focus on the good, you will be happy. If you focus on the bad, you will suffer. Life is a mix of good and bad: though we desire the good, we cannot escape an experience of the bad. We must not imagine the bad to be any bigger than it really is. In the Unity of Action, good and bad alternate like the crests and troughs of the ocean: sometimes they alternate quicker, other times, slower, but they do alternate. When the good comes, prepare for the bad; when the bad comes, patiently wait for the good to return. We don’t like the bad, but we mustn’t despise it. The bad flows into the good, and the good flows into the bad.

“We must not focus on the things we know we cannot have: we would suffer such pain as to go mad. Vainly hoping to gain the love or respect of those who will never give it to us will drive us mad. This is the First Error: mad thinking. Mad thinking denies cosmic unity by thinking we can have love and respect, all from one area, and no hate or scorn also from that area. Reality, however, is fluid: love and hate flow in and out of each other, as do respect and scorn; also, these opposites move from place to place, often going back to the original place, but never staying in any place.

“In the Unity of Action, all things are in permanent flux. Therefore, instead of fixating on one place, vainly hoping to get what we want, always from that place, we must be willing to follow what is good as it moves from place to place. This does not mean we may divorce at the first sign of a marital problem, or repudiate friendships or family whenever any difficulty arises: often enough in these situations, the bad will flow back into the good quite soon; but if it rarely flows back to good, and then only briefly good, we must leave to find our love elsewhere.

“Another aspect of the Unity of Action is the Echo Effect: whatever we send out will come back to us, as the echo of a sound we make rings out back to us. We must not think the evil we do won’t come back to us, just because no one knows what we did…it will. Suffice it to say: if you want something to come to you, you must give that something to others.

“To maintain unity in the universe, an excess in one direction results in an excess in the opposite direction. If our attraction to someone beautiful has us come too close to the desired person, that person will push us far away. […]”

Commentary

As can be surmised by the reader, what we have here is only a fragment of a larger chapter that has been lost. Perhaps the rest will show up in future excavations, and then we can translate it and put this entire chapter together, along with any chapters after this one, to complete the account of Rawmios’ life. For now, though, this is all we have, and what will come after is the next book of the Tanah–“Migration,” which will give narrations after Rawmios’ death.

As for this fragment, we explore further the dialectical unity of opposites, and how one cannot have one opposite without the other. This unity of opposites is a recurring theme throughout the Tanah, as has been expressed either directly in the narratives and their philosophy, or indirectly in the untranslatable nuances of the original language (their rhythms, the connotations in the imagery, the musical qualities of the diction–alliteration, rhyme, assonance, etc.).

Another idea Rawmios touches on here, the “Echo Effect,” is what the Hindus and Buddhists would call karma, or where in the Bible it says that we reap what we sow, or the idea in physics that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. With this idea is the injunction to do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Perhaps in the lost remainder of this chapter, and any other lost chapters after this one, he developed this idea more than the brief account of it we unfortunately only have here. Maybe one day we’ll find it.

Since this is just a fragment, we can only assume that there was supposed to be another concrete poem to finish it off. The poem, if it ever existed, has been lost, too. One can only speculate on how the poem expressed, in the visual arrangement of its verses, the “Echo Effect” and the wavelike unity of opposites.