There be dirt

When I was meandering my way through Orson Scott Card's 'Ender' series, I was warned beforehand that 'Xenocide' was really no good, compared to the others. I should read it, I heard, to continue the story, but should not expect the qualities I had loved in the first two books.

But stumbling my way through the book, little bits and pieces and concepts would stick in my head. One thing, amidst my self-disgust and trouble with forgiveness was the trials of the godspoken. When the concept of the godspoken (which turns out to be a human-created strain of OCD, neutralizing the point that could have been made) was first introduced, the reader was told that "the first message of the Gods was the unspeakable filthiness of the one they spoke to."

The sentence paints a harsher picture than I would have painted with the concept, but the concept itself is the same. We are unwell, we are filthy. We are aware of it because we understand that there is such a thing as well, as clean. Those who hear the voices of the gods would know.

Reading over my high school year book earlier this week, people flattered me with assertions of my free spirit, or of the beauty I see in everything. But if I am free, it is only because I first realized I was a slave. If I see beauty in anything, it is only because I have dug my way through the atrocity that is on the surface.

I still have problems forgiveness. There is a paradox in that we recognize horror only in contrast beauty, and our beauty only through coming to terms with our filth. In the same book Card described "the decency to be appalled by my own brutality." We are not beasts, we are self aware enough to be ashamed. Our shame is not a result of punishment. Our shame is a result of goodness.

All this in mind, last week my sonnet, number XXIV, was on the terrible frustration of both the desire to be pure, and the inability.



Sunday Sonnet XXIV

Because my hands aren’t clean I cannot touch
The broken body of True Purity.
Because my hands aren’t clean I want this much
The body broken for scum such as me.
Because a beauty beats amidst this bone
I will not end this battle with defeat.
Because a beauty beats but isn’t shown
The twisted glory makes darkness complete.
And I am wrought with half hope, half despair
United both with Christ and prostitute.
Yet even shadows light in open air
And we are fully saved, but destitute.

Yet once God claimed that He’d make all things new,
So promptly Christ was born, and prompt withdrew.