Nor certitude, nor peace

For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Matthew Arnold

We wake to Second Life as though stumbling on a new world where all things are potent and possible. We reach deep into the entombed secrets of our soul, dare to pull on those threads that originate in forbidden desires, and dance in disguise with the abandon of bacchantes. Then in time our joys become lonely celebrations, our loves do not bind us, our shadowless light illuminates nothing, and we shuffle uneasily among crowds we do not understand, who pursue their unknowable purposes in parts of our world that we have yet to visit or comprehend.

I am incapable of saying if I love or hate this place, or love and yet hate. It disturbs me at my core, shifts my solid soul within my immaterial body. Formlessness made visible, the weight of flying in the airless sky. Mutable, deathless, ungrowing.

One has suggested I am not who I seem to be, but the expression of another mind, its cloaked desires flowing unbidden, unwanted to spoil the calm surface of a reflecting lake. I answered I am not even the wind that ruffles the water, but who am I really? A mental picture passed from one person to another? An evanescence, an apparation? A memory of someone long buried and forgotten?

Who is this other whose mind I am meant to reflect? I have a history. I remember people I have loved, places I have lived. They are more real than anything in my present, but they passed away before this world was born. I know who they were, but who am I that has lost them forever? What is left when a mind becomes filled with old books, old ideas, old habits? When everything new is lit by an ancient sun that has shone forever?

Spare me your memes and your social networks! Your debates and world visions. Your religion and your science. I dined at those tables. I would rather a bowl of spring water, an apple from my orchard and a companion in my garden to share them with.