Twelfth Lemon, fallen from the tree

Lemonade Lessons 17 by Sparkeye

Evil is real and inevitable.

Many people consider injustice as evil, or a source of evil.... and by the same logic consider justice as source of good. But frankly, I can't conceive of justice or injustice being big enough words to grab onto the totality of horror which hundreds of thousands of people in every God-forsaken land are in the midst of at this very moment. Not that I have experienced this kind of evil.

I will defer to something simple and everyday to explain why evil is real and inevitable.

First, there is the fact that meaningful structures are fragile and may come apart easily. Ecologies come apart for altogether unforeseen reasons - whether the reason is some obscure nematode dying out in a backwater swamp, the transfer of the jovial mailman who once held together a neighborhood, or the loss of a morning ritual that held together someone's head. Such passing phenomena may be considered as "evils" because of the losses they cause. But this is not the evil I'm talking about. Ecologies can change and recover themselves in some new form ⎯sometimes even a richer form than before. There are other things that can work like cancers, that mutate themselves in order to destroy whatever they meet. I'm not sure if they always give themselves away by smelling of sulfur.

But by the way, if you are about to walk into a black hole of anti-matter, a vacuum that can do nothing but fulfill its need to destroy everything involved with it, I would suggest that running from it is no better than pushing everything behind you into it. Instead, you should respect it, like one does a very thin path on a very steep cliff. This is a ghould idea. "Ghould" is pronounced like “should,” and combines "good" and "ghoul." I mean to say that this is a "should" that has you between a rock and a hard place. You got no choice. This is what "exorcism" is about.

It is the reality of evil laughter which convinces me of the actuality of real evil. Not that we hear evil laughter on an everyday basis. But the evil laugh is a laugh which describes something more than contempt. Much more. In it is a chasm, a vacuum in a sound which asserts its own existence forcefully, and ironically asserts that you must soon be drawn into it. At that point you will be minced and shredded, and with only a small addition of acid, pulped and anulled. After which you will be made over into something else.

In studying evil laughter as an example of that which could truly be called "evil," it is clear that this has nothing to do with justice or injustice.

I also have discovered that even this real evil may sometimes have a moebius-like existence ⎯ being evil in the local sense and not in the global sense. Or visa versa. And this is where people think evil is relative, or a matter of perspective. This is when it can get very dangerous.

Now the example I am going to use to describe what I see as a surface condition of evil is exceedingly “tame”. In fact, it wouldn’t even rate a “1” on the Richter Scale of earthquakes, which at their worst produce the crashing and gaping holes I described above, to respect quite carefully before they bring on an earthquake that either crushes you above or below, dropping you to your doom. We are merely talking here of the nature of underlying faults which can cause these gaping holes in the earth around us.

I should start where it started. I married outside of my religion, but in due deference to my family, my wife converted before the wedding. She had no immediate family other than a loving brother, who was happy she was off on her own.

It was years later, when my children were still in the lower grades, that my wife changed their religion without my consent or knowledge. I happen to like the religion which they were changed to, and I understood perfectly what her reasons were.

She herself had gone back to her own faith in order to pray to saints and light candles for her brother who was dying a pitiful death. There was no way to deny her this, nor her desire to want her children to share that faith -- which is indeed a faith. And I could understand her perpetrating this act of deception with her own leap of faith⎯ for she prayed that it would work out for the best. But she also knew quite well I could not give my approval. To do so would be to alienate myself forever from my parents and family who did not have the same feelings as I did about either Catholicism or prayer.

But once my kids were Catholic I was in the same predicament. I had to choose between my children or my family ⎯or lie to both. I lied to both.

About ten years later, after my mother was gone, and after I'd had a violent break-down caused, in part, by the stresses of living this simple lie, I told my father that my family was Catholic.

His reaction was immediate. Leave them. Forget about them as if they didn't exist. I convinced him otherwise, and we got on with our lives. But had my mother been alive I would have had to tell my parents to forget about me, instead. More likely, it would never have gotten to the discussion stage. They’d just never know why I was being carted off to a psychiatric retreat.

Locally, there was nothing "evil" in my wife's act. Globally, however, it was in a context which could only be charged with a violent conclusion. What devoured my insides was truly an evil that lasted until both my parents were dead. This is a very simple example, which might be charged with some high drama in the pen of a mediocre dramatist. It did not devour me. Now I chose it as an example only because it has the correct structure, and yet it is altogether simple and non-threatening.

A thoroughly modern answer to this type of dilemma is called "counseling." There are times when this might work. Unfortunately, both my parents' respected the symbols of their culture and meaning (their idols) more than they respected my freedom to choose my future. Similarly, my wife's love of her children and respect for the symbols of her culture were more important than her respect for my responsibilities as a son. For either party, to submit to counseling would cost more than the sacrificial goat, which was me.

Cultures are the way we keep the memory of ancestors alive by channelling, re-enacting their habits, even without knowing their names keeps them alive in spirit, which is an acceptable challenge to death. It is subconscious of course, but very powerful practice to hold onto. Or at least, to believe you are holding onto.

I could be cast aside more easily than either of these idols of spirit. In the final analysis, justice was done. I was taught a lesson about the disintegrative nature of conflicting symbolic structures, and the continuing stresses of interfaith marriages even this late in 20^th century American culture. No harm was done except a watered-down imprint on myself and my children and the eventually broken marriage. But this is commonplace.

When there are symbolic issues at stake, and there are idols involved on both sides (which many people have been killed for), there are "relative justifications" on both sides with some violent overtones.

This is the simplest type of "evil" which rational beings will try to minimize and tell us that solutions may be found. Indeed, solutions may sometimes be found. I will leave it to you to extrapolate such simple faults out to their major ground-shaking earth-breaking conclusions. Wars around the globe are fought with high-minded fervor over symbols which seem to have the power of anti-matter, and the reality for those on the ground has become commonplace terror with a breath of fresh grief along with revulsion at the end of another day.

What is the clash of cymbals when their faces cannot reflect one another, symbols whose meanings are incompatible? The entire structure of the value of life seems to be at stake on each side. Locally, it is. Globally, it seems avoidable⎯and there are many gooshy-minded liberals who would tell us that evil is all relative and entirely avoidable by rational means and proper education. I would like to remain a gooshy-minded liberal myself, and so would beg their pardon if I choose to disagree on this point.

There are times when evil is locally and globally evil. And this is a real de'evil of a thing to get a hold of. This evil especially must be respected as one respects a very narrow path on a steep cliff, as I suggested before.

LECTOR: I think you'd better warn them.

AUCTOR: Of the steep cliff? Of what lies below?

LECTOR: Well yes, literally below. That is, in the next several paragraphs.

AUCTOR: What's bad about it?

LECTOR: You will never find an editor to make it understandable, that's what.

AUCTOR: The discovery of a simple logical dilemma - which can be correlated with the problem of evil is very important.

LECTOR: Cut it in half.

AUCTOR: You're unfeeling. The problem of evil is very important.

LECTOR: You already said that.

AUCTOR: I'll bet you don't even believe in ghosts.

LECTOR: I made no allusions to your illusions. They have nothing directly to do with the pure origin of evil, anyway.

AUCTOR: It's the germ of evil in every definition, the inherent disassociation and incoherence within everything which is my most important contribution here. I suppose I could make most of it into a footnote.

LECTOR: That's not a bad idea. And put all the stuff about inherent randomness in the footnote as well.

Well, one of the simplest, and most original of principles behind even the first and second lemons is the problem of things being distinct from what's around them. It's a problem of drawing boundaries, even boundaries between the local and global that I've been so fond of mentioning.

And the problem is that something cannot have its own boundary definition completely described unless there is a way "inside" to reference what is "outside" the thing trying to describe itself. But the only way it can have something "outside" inside it is by having something entirely random, that is, distinct from itself, and underivable from itself by any rule whatsoever.

LECTOR: You promised to...

AUCTOR: There was no way around it, sorry.

And the lemon would seem to be that we have to carry some kind of absolute unmeaningful garbage inside us at all times, simply because we need this as a basis to point to that which we can't touch, that which is outside of us.

We incorporate this into everything we say and do that has to do with our boundaries.... With confirming ourselves. And there must be a piece of garbage built into every perception we make and every inference we test.

LECTOR: Where's the footnote? I scanned the whole next page and haven't found it yet!

AUCTOR: I didn't need it. You seem to be breaking up the interminable prose just fine.

LECTOR: One of these days I'll have to teach you something ....

AUCTOR: You might point to this principle and say that everything we do requires a bridge of faith. Or you might say the opposite, that there is always a component of dissociation in everything we say or do. In order to reference anything on the outside we use that which has absolutely no connection to us.

In every definition we create, there is something which is random and disassociated, which can never be recreated from a rule. For this reason I will lay a bet that we can never ever make a copy of ourselves, no matter how many zillions of copies of our DNA we generate, we are trying to accomplish the impossible.

LECTOR: I'm glad you've gotten back to sex.

AUCTOR: Are you excited by all those zillions of sperm? I think it's a rather strange phenomenon, that nature reproduces in such incredible numbers. The argument that this evolved out of necessity doesn't seem logical, for it would seem that one big white sperm cell shot with the accuracy of a cue-ball into an egg and dropped in the corner pocket would have done the trick quite nicely.

LECTOR: So what good would that do you? Big stick, plenty of eggs, and no cue ball. You can't even make it in the corner pocket!

AUCTOR: That's enough from you!

LECTOR: Tell me about evil! I want to hear about true evil!

AUCTOR: Believe me, you don't.

This disassociate principle is also where the evil of things bigger and sometimes overpowerfully real - more real than us - can get inside and assert itself. That's about all I can guess about it. What we feel is evil could be from a primal principle, as simple as this:

"Everything is absolutely unique to itself, and carries inside its own piece of the outside - of a "separateness" which is beyond its understanding and structure."

Somewhere in the gut of history, the Judeo-Christian lore tied the origin of evil to a fellow called Satan. The story of Satan is that he was really the very highest angel and closer to the creator Principle Mr. God than anything or anyone else. But he wanted more, and got thrown the hell out.

To return to my demonstration of this dimple in all things, if this is truly a principle within the very nature of the "one and only" as that old Mediterranean folktale suggests, then there is still a dimple within His absolute and uniqueness. Now the One-and-Only (that we often call God) has no definition whatsoever. Yet if ever there was something to define about the absolute then there must also be a pretty horrendous and dangerous something inside and outside those boundaries. And that's the D'evil.

But d'evil is not as simple as the opposite of "The Force" in Starwars, i.e. "The Dark Side", or as Manichaean as thinking there is good and evil in everything. That would be silly and overly simplistic. It's good enough to satisfy the questions of a three-year old. But if we don't have anything better to answer, we better take it or leave it.

"The devil inside the definition" is more like what happens when some gap, a cynicism that laughs at good faith, finds its copy inside of you and and begins ripping you up. That gap, that alienation and cynicism is evil.

It is not evil intrinsic in the cause. One can come to understand and sympathize with the cause of the greatest evils ⎯I grew up trying to consider the birth and growth of Nazi Germany, and understood that under similar circumstances I, too, might have joined up. It is the violence which the definitions of that movement did to so many other peoples’ definitions of the world which unleashed so much evil.

To be defined we need "boundaries." Defining those boundaries will always call forth an outside from our insides. It is always there. But when something else does the "calling forth," what comes forth is an image of that something else reflected inside of you, and this is what will rip you apart.... whether it turns to loathing and hatred, or obsession, or raving of some kind or another. It's my guess that this is where the true nature of evil comes from.