Has Nature, our mutual mother, treated you so poorly, little brother, that you hate Her with such pathos? Were you expelled from Her gaping cunt, stretched out and tattered after having given birth to countless worlds, as one of her most hideous children? Is your face a deformed blasphemy against beauty itself? We're you born with misshapen limbs, a warped spine? Do women look at you and quickly look away in disgust, desperate to forget the memory of a thing that serves as testament to the terrible fact that a tortuous shape is no less real than an comely and orderly one? Has our dread Mother bound your spirit to flesh with sores weeping pus and blood, crying on your behalf long after the light in your eyes have flickered out and their wellspring of tears boiled away?
If so, well, I can commiserate. I'll admit I've harbored similar fantasies. Wouldn't it be a lovely thing if we were all pure spirit, if our beauty was determined by the loftiness of our thoughts and the we could make the cosmos resonate with the music that rings in our skulls but are unable to share in the flesh because our throats have been ravaged by circumstance and our fingers twisted and bent by mercurial Fate? What a marvelous cosmos that would be, in which the fleetness of thought carried one to magnificent worlds inaccessible to those gifted with even the quickest and strongest limbs. Recognition of beauty would be an authentic participation in its glories, rather than a guilty act of voyeurism indulged in by those who can only steal glimpses of it with furtive glances while they languish alone in those dark places where every proper incarnation of beauty refuses to tread. Just as old men chant their prayers hoping the saints will ferry them off to some Paradise where their limbs no longer ache and all of their wrinkles are wiped away, we monsters dream of some ethereal realm in which we could actually be considered lovely and, consequently, be loved. We close our eyes and chase that fantasy below that horizon, trying our best to catch the sunlight before it disappears entirely and hands us over to the night.
Sadly, we eventually have to open our eyes, don't we? There will never be a world in which the spirit matters more than the flesh because it's the flesh that gives birth to the soul. The same wicked Nature that imprisons the abomination in the wreck of a body that renders Earth tantamount to Gehenna is the same that fashions the diseased brain that allows the thing to hear the whispers of angels that our sadistic Mother reserves for the ears of Her lunatics. For all of their purported hatred of the flesh and all of the sins arising from it, the orthodox Christians still condemned the Gnostics who taught the gospel of pure spirit as laughable heretics. The Haitians consider a soul without a body to be lost, a cosmic aberration, a zombie just as isolated and meaningless as each star shining alone in the midnight sky, and so have to craft govi jars to house the spirits of the departed if they're to have anything resembling eternal life rather than an endless death freezing in the abyssal waters of Guinee. The body serves to delineate the circumference of the soul and, like it or not, it's in the hands of childish, idiotic Nature that God has entrusted the compass with which it's drawn. And if something grotesque thing like myself claims a preference for the songs of angels over a woman's sighs, of the glories of the spirit instead of the flesh, it's only because, having been born a monster, even the jealousy of a demon coveting Heaven is infinitely less absurd than an abomination's dream of falling asleep in a lover's arms.
