"Some desires seem best served by being denied their denouement."

Pagans, philosophers, scientists, and poets have been diligently considering TheGreatMystery at least since the beginning of recorded history, and probably much longer. While great progress seems to have been made, our inability to report that we're even close to solving TheGreatMystery might say most about the nature of that mystery. TheGreatMystery persists, perhaps more amused by our machinations than informed by them. Competing theories seem to simply thicken the plot.

I greatly admire the Jewish Talmudic tradition, where sacred texts are endlessly studied and discussed with the intention of gaining greater insight but without the expectation that TheGreatMystery encoded there might ever be resolved. Younger faiths hold the conceit that their leaders figured it all out and the followers willingly submit to the resulting superior understanding, though evil seems as likely to result as any discernible good. Nobody can wreak havoc like a true believer convinced of his own immutability. Those who firmly believe that they've solved TheGreatMystery seem to profoundly demonstrate the falseness of their assertion in their resulting actions. Give me the humble and humbled wiseman's demeanor any day.

Our great churches and social institutions seem to stand as testaments to TheGreatMystery. Dealing in analogy, they project dot-to-dot puzzles never fully resolved. I could follow dots all my life without even revealing the expected picture still hidden within. Still, these searches might be worthy of any of us, fruitless though they always seem to be. Every generation has sparked some who insist that theirs was the last generation, that their time was the end time, that the hinted promises would be fulfilled before their blessed eyes. Each has thereafter passed into TheGreatMystery with promises unfulfilled, or seemingly so.

I suspect that the searching, the pure (mostly) motive force, sanctifies all such assertions, given that nobody takes them too awfully seriously, since taking such assertions too seriously usually turns out to produce awful results for everyone involved. I could argue, perhaps unsuccessfully, that all human endeavor centers around TheGreatMystery, in whatever guise it might present itself. We're born, we live, and we reportedly die in an unbroken chain going back to before anyone recognized that there was even a chain to be unbroken. We toil in expectation, hoping to leave behind legacies to our presence here, as if that mattered in the scale of everything. We make mammon matter given that we have nothing else at hand to transform. We seem to be holy to the extent that we continue the search for holiness, not depending upon whether we find the end to that searching.

Cluelessness might serve as an alternate term for resolution. Unlike a good Sherlock Holmes novel, our existence isn't dependent upon any of us finally finding out that the freaking butler did anything. As long as the search continues, preferably in ernest, our presence here seems sort of justified. We're seekers or we're all depressed over the fact that we don't seem to be smart enough to resolve some run of the mill GreatMystery. Humbled without experiencing true humiliation unless we insist upon experiencing it by the way we frame our stories, we stumble forward, sideways, even backward with the endlessly renewing sense of a fresh breeze blowing through our hair. Some desires seem best served by being denied their denouement.

©2018 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #CluelessSummer, #PureSchmaltz