Philo of Reli

By Nosael Gy Gleason

Philo of Reli is a compilation of twenty-six short stories. Although loosely interlinked, each story could stand on its own. The individual stories represent moral allegories, set in various regions of the world that delve into theological truths, reinforced or countered by philosophical rationalism. Fictional characters in each chapter bump into each other haphazardly, but ultimately unite in an unpredictable outcome. Atheism, monotheism, polytheism meet the likes of Plato, Kant, Nietzsche and Sartre. The subtle philosophical references in each chapter culminate in poignant moral lessons. The reader will be compelled to question the reality of knowing, of believing, of deciding whether philosophy and religion could be intermarried.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483666464

Book preview

Part I

The Philosophy of Passion

Demas

6

T he clouds could not decide whether to rain or snow, or the direction they were coming or going. Beyond this storm, beyond the desolate garden and the high hills a few thousand miles away, another flux of clouds from the east or west stirred the seemingly still sky. For now, it drizzled instead on the dilapidated lavenders and petunias in the inert plot of land. He stood frozen with eyes closed and mouth open, hair soaked, heart racing from the recent run. Droplets gathered on top of his panting tongue, acidic and sweet like rum.

By having his eyes closed, a more vibrant world sprung to life. He lived no longer in the middle of winter but rather in late spring. Not seeing helped him divert the agony and suffering that pestered him since childhood.

He daydreamt of a butterfly with colorful wings. It fluttered, waltzed, and wallowed in the dulcet pistils piercing out of blossomed flowers, a stark contrast to the miserable reality that surrounded him. If this world represented a small fraction of the heavens, a miniature version, he could not fathom the degree of decay above. Either way, whether below was real or above was real, his ideas and imaginations were now real and true in his mind.

He followed the random flight of the butterfly under the comfortable sun. The images slowed his heart to a relaxed pace. The panting had ceased. In this fantasy no leaves wilted, no stems sagged, no clouds threatened to rain. The temperature never fluctuated, always remained tepid at 534 degrees Rankine, 279 degrees Kelvin, 75 degrees Fahrenheit, 24 degrees Celsius, air-conditioned in summer, heated in winter. The butterfly surveyed one flowerbed at a time. It slowly maneuvered its flight and landing, like a skilled helicopter pilot. It seemed happy and playful, but it irritated Demas. He could not predict the exact flower it targeted. It was his dream, his vision, and he should be the one to determine which flower the butterfly fancied, but even his imagination showed a penchant for randomness. The butterfly, as if knowing his thoughts, suddenly suspended in midair, looked at him directly and hissed with the batter of its wings: Esse est, Esse est, Esse est . . . . He wanted to squeeze its little head between his fingers so that it could finish its sentence, but it managed to fly away from his grasp. From a distance and with an uncanny smirk, as if sticking out a human tongue at him, it finally declared:

Esse

est

incogitatus                    !

Esse

est

incogitatus!

Disturbing, annoying, and infuriating at the same time, Demas thought. He opened his eyes to erase the images of the butterfly mocking him with its talking wings. The cold breeze and the frost on the ground caused him to shiver. He covered his body tightly with a gray overcoat, and knotted around his neck a hand-knitted wool scarf. Although he wanted desperately to reimmerse in the warm day of his imagination, the talking butterfly baffled him. He could not appreciate the literal meaning, the direct translation of Esse est incogitatus: Être est insouciant! To be is thoughtless! Why would the butterfly say such a thing to him in Latin? Was it not Descartes who roughly said the opposite: Cogito ergo sum? I think therefore I am! Is the butterfly suggesting that to pursue the meaning of being, of one’s identity, is a thoughtless endeavor? There had to be more than the strict definition of words and sentences that formed an individual. Words did not make individuals; individuals made words. Modern philosophy had a way of twisting words to confuse people instead of simplifying matters, instead of helping a person to find the ultimate truth. Knowing one’s self and finding one’s purpose was never a thoughtless endeavor. If so, words would become as meaningless as a butterfly talking in an ancient language.

Although his Latin was decent, for further translation Demas resorted to his Palm PDA device that contained a digital Latin-French dictionary. He learned that Être est inconsidéré! To be is inconsiderate! was another way of translating the three-word phrase. It probably indirectly implied that existence forced a person to selfishness. In order to live, one must love himself or herself first; otherwise, he would not care for himself, not provide sustenance, not clean or clothe himself. But Demas found that interpretation inferior as well. An old man with advance memory loss does not bathe, feed, or preen himself like birds. He is no better than a mindless carcass and yet he still lives; he still exists.

Demas continued to ponder a solution to the riddle. It finally made sense to him—Être est spontané! To be is spontaneous!

Esse est incogitatus!

Demas took a long sigh. The frigid air made him cough. It still drizzled. He placed the PDA device in his coat pocket and walked to the enclosed section of rose garden, pulled out a white handkerchief and wiped off his face and head. A tall trellis made of cedar wood stood in the back, wrapped by leafless stems of honeysuckles flanked on either side. The roses were trimmed short to three main branches, aligned in perfect rows and columns. More Latin names popped from the ground almost every four feet: Rosa canina, Rosa gigantean, Rosa spinosissima, Rosa rubiginosa, Rosa glauca, Lonicera sempervirens, Lonicera japonica, Lonicera sempervirens, etc. Things appeared so orderly—all manmade—or a divine decree.

He knew with high degree of certainty that nothing happened by chance in this chaotic world, and nothing completely happened by fate or predestination either. The crude understanding of anarchy, that everything evolved from an unexplainable pattern or architecture, had been proven wrong. The scientific truth was that everything must be established from a basic element, a higher form as Plato believed, an indivisible substance, whatever that may be, and everything must materialize for a reason and by necessity.

A house or a community in India that was pummeled by a south-west monsoon wind, the Nairutya Maarut, could not have flooded by chance! There must have been a reason for it. Months before, a tropical storm formed from a few fast moving clouds. A year before that, migratory butterflies started a chain reaction evoking miniature atmospheric pressures by flapping their wings half a world away near the equator. A couple of centuries earlier, the monarch butterflies established a new migratory path toward Ecuador. So on and so forth, a causal determinism of one circumstance begetting another. Everything follows something else. If things come to being without a reason, then nothing will serve a purpose; and without a purpose, nothing would be necessary.

But, could natural disasters such as tsunamis and earthquakes that eradicate thousands of living creatures be explained? Can God murder? The sane mind would argue that It is God’s will, that We are not supposed to know everything, only God does.

Demas sat on a concrete bench and tried to warm up by rubbing his arms. A warmer raincoat would have been nice, but he did not expect the day to turn out this way. He started to think of the events that forced him to run in the rain. He drew the same conclusion, that each occurrence, each event that tries to influence the world, must emerge from a cause, a concept peddled by Western philosophers a few hundred years ago. In the Eastern cultures, the specific causes were believed to be passions and sexual desires without a universal moral order, without truth, without God. Truth was subjectivity in passionate inwardness. Karma proved to be more rational than fate. Karma, samsara, was at least under the sovereign of one’s will and not God’s will. Passions and desires had to be controlled in order to secure a prosperous future. Irrational acts had dire consequences. No matter how much the scent of a honeysuckle moved a person, no one took a gun to it or invited it to a duel because it smelled. Passions had to be curbed. Careless deeds made one’s future bleak.

With time, a plot grew to plunder passion, to obliterate it completely. Desires, compulsions, cravings, and lust had to be suppressed; they were viewed as destructive forces to a person’s mind and soul. As the French used to say: Il faut tuer les passions. One must kill the passions. Ironic, as the French created passion. But even they knew that emotional hunger indicated an emptiness that needed to be fed, and love was an offshoot of lust, an aggressive energy channeled via sublime romance. To some, lust was a good thing. In the absence of desire, there would be no pursuit of love.

Demas also believed that reason was a slave to passion, and passion the governor of self. He postulated that chaos occurred for the betterment of nature, for the utilitarian of mankind, for the advancement of civilizations. Even Charles Darwin’s evolution could be explained by chaos: genes and molecules randomly combined to perfect the eminence of the human machine, particularly the human mind, and with mind came the soul, with soul the spirit, and with spirit came God. All natural motion moved toward an appropriate end or purpose, and individual fate was unchangeable by human endeavor. Free will always followed a determined cosmic order.

The accidental discoveries in the past benefited only the human race. Alfred Nobel, in his quest to relieve heartaches, created dynamite, whereas Harry Brearley, a metallurgist, in wanting to improve rifles and gun barrels, came up with rustless stainless steel cutlery sets. Penicillin appeared from nowhere, ushered further medicinal innovations and a better understanding of the microbial world.

The rest of the animal kingdom never profited from these innovations. A hummingbird would never need a microwave oven, but it randomly pollinates faunas and floras to beautify nature and to allow trees to bear fruit. The magnificence of millions of marigolds across the Mexican plains of Los Mochis right before the Day of the Dead celebration, in contrary, creates a romantic scenery for two lovebirds to kiss and make up, but not for sparrows and squirrels and crickets that cheep and peep and tweet nearby. After all, what do they know about love? They do not carry reckless licenses for romantic interludes!

Demas tried to make sense of his stream of consciousness, the jumbled thoughts that suffocated his mind. He believed in a higher definition of randomness, that microscopic dissections of chaos demonstrated a basic pattern, that ultimately the building blocks of good and bad were one and the same. He knew that every accident, every meaningless random experience, could be rationalized. Every good and bad occurrence took part in the All Mighty design, the providential plan of whatever He willed for us. He endures the free will of a person and incorporates it into His own overarching operation of the universe. In general, though, two things would happen to a person when facing a life-altering event, it either hastens the person’s pace, escaping the everyday monotony, the slog and the rot, or it slows the pace by showing the finer things in life, the once neglected heart of a spouse, a storehouse of colorful roses, or an old precious friend with intimate secrets that are forever lost. But therein lies the rub: speed is relative. The speed of change, whether the heart accelerates or the head decelerates, depends on the complex interplay of the actual incident, the initial intent, and the final interpretation over a set period of time. A husband, for example, who brought a bouquet of flowers home to his wife after work, had the intent to win her over for a passionate evening in bed. Her interpretation was that he wished to apologize for what he did the night before. Their timing was never synchronized.

Time, in its common understanding and not the convoluted model of Einstein, travels in one direction, straight, not bent or broken, and definitely not in a continuous circle, and what goes around does not come around. Birth and death are two distinct points in time. No two days, no two minutes are exactly alike. The past events teach us where we come from but not where we are going. In a blink of an eye, that direction changes and time does what it does best; it pretends to jump and skip and hop in our minds but it always advances, always ticks away, slowly, sluggishly, as if it needs to stretch from its own slumber; it steadily brings on a new day and just as slowly ends it. The eternal hourglass lives even if we don’t—the hypocrisy of an endless life.

Plato was wrong. The only thing remains after death is not the person’s soul, but rather time, an idea created by the devil, a figment without a beginning or an end, with universal appeal, agreement, acceptance, with followers who unwittingly worship it by keeping appointments and meetings, sleep, eat, make love, and work synchronously as if in group prayer, constantly surveying their watches and calendars for openings between the infinite cycles of the sun and the moon, of consciousness and unconsciousness, between idealism and realism. True time, when viewed as omnipresent, omniscient, boundless and intangible, forgiving and punishing, in reality can be and is God, the parent of good and evil.

If true, then God is not pure love. Love has its own continuous seasons of summer and winter, moments of unquenchable desires and extinguishable fires, cycles that come and go, come and go, infinitely changing and reforming but never vanishing, always returning to its original state of loving somebody and being loved by somebody.

It is said that when someone loves another person for his or her own sake, then the life of godliness flows through that someone, because true love does not seek its own interest. A woman surrenders her heart to win the heart of another, even if it causes pain. When love enriches a person and transcends all her understanding, when her selfishness is replaced with humbleness, love changes that person, but the person does not change love. Those who fail to change have never been overcome by the power of love. But Demas wondered why love, if so magnificent and sublime, hurt the most. Why was love so tainted?

Demas had no reasonable answer. With cold eyes he watched the clouds slowly abate the last breath of the afternoon sun as the day transitioned into early winter darkness. Instead, soft florescent lights brightened the entire garden. Demas knew that his time at the garden was coming to an end. He sat restlessly, not wanting to move, wondering what God had in store for him next.

1.jpg

Demas knew, years later, with all his heart that his meeting Justus served its divine purpose. It had to. It was no fluke. It couldn’t be. There was no other explanation for the reunion but supernatural. For some reason, the wind took them away, and the wind brought them back together, but the sun warmed them closer. Darkness had no chance between them. Only time offered clarity to the jumbled incidents in spite of the countless passing years. Patience, sometimes out of virtue and sometimes simply out of not knowing, produces patterns from arbitrary and improbable events.

Their story, of the same bloodline but different lifeline, began at their departure, with their hearts and minds conforming to the unique traditions of their social upbringing. Justus strictly trusted his own thoughts; Demas revealed only his heart. One spoke from the kindness of the heart, the other from the constraints of the mind.

Demas was the last child of twelve, although he never knew his siblings or parents—he was given to a foreign adoption agency at the age of two months like a dog’s litter sold to the neighbors. The last half of the dozen were auctioned off, according to Demas’ interpretations of the hazy adoption records, for a meager sum of money that helped feed the six eldest children. He despised the fact that his life had a price, but sacrificing himself to save his brothers and sisters from starvation allayed the mental blows as Demas grew and matured in understanding. His heart, however, never accepted the kitschy story of family being divided for money, even though his mind rationalized that giving up one child made it easier to give up five more. It was always like that—the original act made the subsequent acts painless; the original sin made it unproblematic to continue sinning. The first pack of cigarettes would lead to the second without the accompanying cough.

A French-Jewish couple from southern Switzerland, recovering from their own tragedy, adopted Demas. At the age of twenty-one and being seven weeks pregnant, Madame Deliah Berechiah was stabbed in the uterus during a botched robbery while vacationing in New York, ending her young self-esteem of being a fertile wife, and humbly accepting the knowledge of never bearing children again. She required multiple surgeries to repair the womb, but it took almost a decade to restore her frayed soul.

Her husband, a devout quiet man with long forelocks, fell to his knees every night wearing his prayer shawl and phylactery, given to him by his wife on their wedding day, reciting the Kaddish after the lost child. What God giveth He also taketh away, he accepted without truly believing. Three years of such prayers gradually transformed from urging God to reinvigorating his wife’s health to urging God to having her womb mended for another miracle of birth. He reasoned that if the all merciful God could breathe life into Sarah and Hannah with shriveled wombs, it would be much easier for Deliah with a torn womb, his beloved wife and a holy servant. He only had to wait patiently for the appointed time, believing the ancient words of Nevi’im that those who await the LORD shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.

A couple of Sabbaths after Passover, Rabbi Shimoon, who for his own selfish reasons of wanting to stop hearing the continuous self-pity and dreadful prayers of Monsieur Berechiah, convinced him to consider adoption. They read together from the Talmud during one of their studies. It mentioned that raising someone else’s child was equaled to having physically begotten the child into the world. After much deliberation, much vacillation, much hemming and hawing, Monsieur Berechiah finally acquiesced like a child pushing aside the greens on the plate, left until the end, eaten only after a stern look from the parent.

Being an ultraconservative Orthodox, Monsieur Berechiah had plain and staunch views of the world, sometimes interfering with his life, most of the time interfering with his marriage. He never deviated from the laws of kashrut, abstaining from terayfa, and he abhorred candelabra with electric lights—only regular candles sufficed. Likewise, the child could not be a mamzer, an offspring of a prohibited marriage.

Obstinacy was Monsieur Berechiah’s prime character but easily softened by his wife’s tender voice. The rough edges of a man’s pride never stand a chance to the constant caresses of a woman’s passion, the heat that could melt the toughest steel, bending and molding pride into modesty and kindness. A man’s cold winter is no match for a woman’s summer gaiety, and a wife surely possesses ways of humbling her husband. Deliah did exactly that to Monsieur Berechiah, and for a good reason. Demas almost instantly became a blessing to the parents.

They received Demas a few days after Pesach and after undergoing the ceremonial milah I’shem giur and brit milah for the conversion of a non-Jewish child. Like most Jewish ceremonies, it was solemn and powerful, with only a few people in attendance: the moil (the ritual circumciser), the godfather, and the sendak who held him tight during the circumcision. With the immersion in the natural water, mikveh, Demas was given the Jewish name Amitai Yosef ben Avraham Avinu. The only other person in history with a longer name that Monsieur Berechiah remembered was Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus Numantinus, the first Roman convert to Stoicism. At any rate, the newly circumcised Amitai Yosef was then placed in the Chair of Elijah in order to complete the ritual. For some unexplainable reason, the parents hardly ever called him by his Jewish name Amitai. Instead, they insisted on using Demas as sort of his nickname, even though thoroughly Greek and definitely not Jewish.

Either way, Demas genuinely brought joie de vivre to that home, and the parents poured their love into him as if he were their own flesh and blood, lacking no warmth, thirsting for no embraces, hungering for no kisses. Having Demas take on their family name meant the world to Monsieur Berechiah who now had an heir.

The upbringing of Demas consisted of daily prayers in Hebrew, and endless conversations in French. Unlike the other children, he knew of no Walt Disney characters, no superheroes, no radio programs, no typical children’s games, or stories by Dr. Seuss. Monsieur Berechiah, not owning a pencil-sharpener, whittled a stylus every night before edifying his son in the rudiments of Judaism and piety. Demas cherished those moments, growing in wisdom and stature and in favor with God, memorizing the Hillel psalms for Passover and participating in all the Jewish ceremonies.

The opportunity came one day for Monsieur Berechiah, who by then had become a respected Rabbi, to lead a small synagogue in San Francisco. The family migrated there when Demas turned ten-and-a-half years old. Being precocious in mathematics and sciences, he was automatically placed two grades ahead regardless of knowing only hello and bye-bye in English, which sounded like a whiny parrot in distress. The parents were reassured by the school administrators and teachers that he would assimilate rather quickly.

Children often do. Besides, mathematics is the universal language! the counselor added, to which the Rabbi refuted by saying, "No, my dear goyim, that’s purely Pythagoras. Torah is the universal language."

Within six months, Demas eased himself into conversations with the teachers and other children as much as permissible—his accent proved to be a great source of ridicule. The teasing and jesting affected Demas unwittingly, manifesting in a form of stammer, at times incomprehensible to the untrained ear, most of the time a nuisance to himself and the listener. Only in the English language did he persistently stammer. Reading ancient Hebrew texts and speaking French at home posed no difficulties. The stuttering at school separated him from the rest of the cliques. Of course, his unfashionable outfit, his uncanny mannerism, and his stooped posture as if in a perpetual funeral procession did not help matters. He became a scheleil, the sort of person that if yogurt fell on his head, nobody would take notice. Often his books were knocked out of his hands by a few school bullies. The girls pinched him in the arms and the boys picked on him. The debasement of his name to Dumbass became a common ridicule, encouraging more physical and emotional abuse.

A band of boys pitched him into trash bins on more than one occasion, tying the lid with a rope and rolling him down the street like a wine barrel, leaving him there all day until the school custodian discovered the bin with him curled inside like a ball. The kids cruelly mimicked his stuttering. The coup de grace, the ultimate blow to his soul occurred one midmorning when he was assigned to read the ghost of Hamlet’s father in front of the English Literature class. The mispronunciation of difficult words coupled with stammering raised a gale of laughter among the students and the teacher alike. His best line was the very last: Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me. But for that split second, perhaps because of the first two words, it turned on a switch in his brain that forced him to mistakenly pronounce the sentence entirely in French: "Adyeh, Adyeh! Amlay, rehmehbehr meh."

In spite of the sneering laughter, Demas continued to stand and read to the end of the paragraph, and instead of running away, he returned to his seat, pulled out the Hebrew Scriptures and read silently to himself,

hebrew.jpg

"Blessed is the man that walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of the scornful."

Such was the daily routine of Demas, battling the constant malevolence and inequity of the world, mostly keeping his head bowed in order to avoid the gaze of others, humbling himself for the sake of underrecognition where all other teenagers desperately wanted to be popular and recognized. His parents never became aware of these atrocious moments in the life of young Demas, what he went through and what he felt, because he never told them.

By the time he graduated from high school, having matured for six years with all the children who either alienated him or abhorred him, he peevishly entered college. Demas made certain that the college he chose separated his youth from adulthood by a minimum of a thousand miles, and that the classes were filled by no fewer than 100 pupils. A large classroom assured anonymity, limiting new social interactions, hiding his identity, erasing his past. He chose one of the largest campuses in the country 3,000 miles away from home, with classrooms held in auditoriums.

It was not until the sophomore year in college that he met Justus in Advanced Physics. Demas could never forget the dramatic introduction to him. Justus flung his writing pen on the book in front of him, which bounced on the floor next to Demas. The instructor, having a way of grating the students, allotted the first five minutes of the class to calculating the centripetal force of a moving object. Justus, out of frustration, sighed and hurled the pen harder than he had intended, but seemingly unembarrassed by his action. The entire class briefly glanced in his direction to observe what caused the bang. Demas waited until the students resumed their attention to the physics problem before fetching the pen and handing it to Justus. In the process, Demas with a single short glance realized the frustration behind Justus.

Use the—the formula on—on page 316—teen, in a stammering voice Demas guided Justus.

Since it was an open book test, Demas saw nothing criminal or unethical in letting Justus know of the page number. It was similar to the time his father tried to assemble a bicycle for his ninth birthday, having all the right tools but not knowing the difference between a crank and a derailleur. Demas directed him to page three of the manual, much like his guidance of Justus to the correct solution.

Even though Justus could not solve the physics problem in time, he thanked Demas by offering him a cup of coffee at the student cafeteria that afternoon. Before meeting Demas, Justus was extremely discouraged by the way the professor taught the course and had every intention of dropping the class. He found the physics instructor with his weekly pop quizzes downright annoying. When Demas offered his assistance, Justus accepted happily without minding being tutored by a person two years younger than him. They studied three times a week over coffee, lemon tarts and veggie wraps on top of strewn textbooks and notes, until they completed the Physics course.

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While in college, Demas could not keep kosher, finding no restaurant around the campus with a trained slaughterer or an owner who actually kept Sabbath. It bothered Demas gravely at first, losing twenty pounds the first month of school, sustaining only on water, fruits and dates and the mashuga nuts mailed to him by his dear mother. Out of necessity and starvation he began to eat at the school’s cafeteria, initially tearing his stomach apart, but later regaining the weight from eating the greasy, starchy, salty food.

Although Justus belonged to Phi Theta fraternity, one of the trendier societies in college, he took pity on Demas and routinely took him to swanky places. Justus, out of good intentions at first, took it upon himself to save Demas from the swamps of his solitude. He repeatedly asked Demas to look up and stand erect like a soldier with honor and confidence, ready to kill and conquer to which Demas would softly say, It’s good to—to look down. I—I find things—ings that way. I—I wouldn’t find coins if—if I—I looked up—up.

Justus, not comprehending the true philosophical undertone behind Demas’ words, replied warmly, You will find the eyes of people if you look up, which are like gems worth a thousand coins, whereby Demas countered, But—but most—most gems re—require skillful refinement, and—and once—once polished they become a—a source of—of greed and—and envy.

Whatever do you mean? Justus wondered. Being a dual Biology and Philosophy major, Justus had developed a vast interest in the metaphysical nature of things.

Rarely, do the—the eyes—eyes reveal the—the nature of the—the gem, answered Demas. "The gem’s chara—ra—cter lies in the—the center, under all the—the dross and impuri—eh—ties. ‘Take away the—the dross from the—the silver, and there shall—shall come forth a—a vessel for the—the finer.’"

Demas took a heavy sigh. It exhausted him to speak longer than a few sentences at a time. He exhaled faster than he could inhale, as if panting, as if having run after a rabbit chased by a rabid bat. The English language he despised, and expressing himself in it, he absolutely detested, especially by having intense thoughtful contests with Justus. More exasperating was the fact that they always conversed about serious topics. No room for gaiety ever existed.

They frequented one of their favorite sites, the Botanical Garden. In the dead of winter, the garden was barren and drab. Only the scientific Latin names of withered plants on small gray plaques remained nailed to the soil, like miniature tombstones but without the religious markings. The drabness of the garden kept the visitors away, making it ideal for the two friends to study.

Occasionally Justus brought along his girlfriend, Amy, although often she refused to accompany them. She did not care a great deal for Demas, thinking of him as dull, much like the dead garden. Justus enthusiastically responded, But come spring it will be so beautiful. He had confided in Amy