“I am neither priest nor virgin enough to play with the inner life.”
–Jean Paul Sartre, from “Nausea”
Something wonderful and strange happened to me in the jungle of South America. I was cutting through the thickets with a machete while deep in thought channeling the energy of Butcher Ding, with vines dropping everywhere and sweat on my brow.
I had been thinking how great a glass of water might be, not beer or soda but water. For the wise like water, and however wet the jungle might be, little water existed for me to drink there. My arm was growing tired, too. But I kept chopping, never taking my eyes off the vine, never allowing the focus to slip from waving the machete in front of me.
The jungle had been slowly consuming me for days on end, instilling in me a state of delectable, constant survival that many cannot maintain healthily. Originally I had gone in looking for treasure, prepared to give my life for the adventurous pursuit, even lose friends—which I did indeed do. When I found it, or it found me, everyone had left and I was alone. When the supplies ran out, some persisted another week but most turned back. I couldn’t blame them, of course, but I had to keep on moving. After another week of foraging and hunting, everyone else left, calling me obsessed and blind.
But I’m not blind, because something was there. And the something was worth waiting for. And everyone who gave up will never see the amazing thing I’ve found, trekking the jungle alone.
I’ve never had a problem with waiting; not in lines, or for mail. Something about waiting entices me even, I love watching people confront impatience and fidget. I love watching surface the insecurities provoked by impatience, the discomfort rendered by a lack of and anticipation of stimulation. No one anymore has an attention span for anything but bright lights, and this comes out strongly in an outlandishly comfortable situation like waiting for a crème-brulee.
Back in society, the people dealt with waiting almost universally by looking at screens, absolutely nauseating—especially when I saw two people waiting together, staring at their own screens. How many cafes, bank queues, and stoplights are occupied by the vain stares into the electronic abyss of enticing dopamine? I do not miss the mindlessness.
Those people are one reason I left society to look for the jungle’s treasure. In the jungle, no room to sacrifice your attention to the digital gods exists; for if you desire to escape, only constant vigilance will suffice. I never hated the people who willingly sacrificed their life forces to these digital gods, and I could understand how you might think I did hate them, but my escapade into the jungle was not what you think. No escapism, thrill-seeking, or profiteering propelled me here, that’s a fact. All that propels me here is to find treasure, my treasure.
That’s also why I brought people with me; maybe they have a similar vision of treasure and can help. Maybe their vision of treasure would be sleeping on the ground like Diogenes or Confucius. Maybe I could find the other joyful aesthetics and share in their company because I know that true joy is always shared—but that few know what true joy is.
When the last man left, my first lieutenant, a sorrow pervaded his eyes like a man in mourning. His face was dirty, writhen with bug bites and bright red splotches. He begged me to return with him but I couldn’t; something was out there for me, I told him, and then he begged to no avail. He embraced me fearfully before leaving, like a man seeing his brother for the last time before some great battle or war.
Out in the jungle, alone, there is no one to rely on. The only thing which can go right is continued survival, by any means. In the jungle, alone, for g.od knows how long, I have survived by killing, sleeping, and immunizing myself from the madness of worldly desire. Something about the suppression of want, the cold rationality of ingestion and resting equaling surviving, the thrill of watching Darwinism defeat all of my colleagues, something about these things arouses an animal deep inside me which snarls as it claws through the jungle.
But that animal inside is no passion, and no refute convinces me otherwise; the animal is only the rawest resistance to attrition of life, the fiery, lively component of my inhibition to die.
The first men to go home were the ones who used to talk about food. Roasted meats, frothy ales, sweet cream, the men who spoke of these would sit around the fire with emptiness in their souls and their minds far away from their bodies. They were the last to hear twigs snapping or branches rustling. They were the same people in town, sacrificing their life’s energy to a foreign, uncaring god, and the same people suffering from victimhood to black jaguars.
I will never be them, I will never sacrifice my inner sanctity for anything the world has to offer; the aesthetic, the resilient soul insusceptible to taunts of kitchen smells and wild sensations, this is me, and I prove it more each day in the jungle by living without the essentials of protection and coddling.
Yet I have a decision to make, one to be explained below on this page of a journal—the only friend I have left.
You see, as I cut the vines, a fairy appeared to me. I had to blink the sweat out of my eyes to see it clearly, and self-check the vitals to make sure I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating, and even then I did not believe it was real. With wings like a hummingbird, eyes like an owl, and charm like a smiling girl, the fairy enticed me. I dropped the machete and it flew closer to me, almost touching my lips with its petite body no bigger than a liter. And it beckoned me on, to a place under an especially thick canopy where mushrooms glowed and vines dripped. The fairy told me to sit on a bed of moss, and then into my ear she whispered with a voice so tantalizing it washed over my body like a boiling wave of broth:
Here is the mythical spot you sought
Here is the place you knew existed
But that no one else believed
Here you are finally home
Here is your treasure
If you take a seat
Everything will be given to you
To survive and to live well
There is nothing you will ever need again
If you only come in and sit down
Your treasure is here
And your kingdom too
Take me as your wife
And the jungle will be yours
If you give me offspring
I will give you wine
I will give you the juices of the vine
If you agree to my rules
Your riches will have no limits
1. You must never possess
Not me nor anything
Never possess hunger
And never thirst
Never possess lust
And never covetousness
2. You must always confess
Your deepest feelings
What you desire
You must free yourself
By speaking its word
And then letting go
3. You must forsake your previous life
Let all believe you died
Here in the jungle
And never try to return
Follow these rules
And everything will be yours
If you uphold me
I will grant you wealth
Power
Immortality
Join me and be free
Of pain
Of irrational suffering
And cruelty
Join me
And take your treasure
Your birthright
Your orgy of life
The fairy dismissed me afterward and sent me to contemplate next to a stream. I loosely held the machete in my hand, rotating it in a way where the sun periodically glimmered off the blade. Smudges of green and brown covered the machete, with the most smudging lying at its curved tip. The flesh of plants, juices of life stained my blade.
I begin to contemplate my purpose for entering the jungle; was I really in pursuit of a treasure, or was my treasure just to outlast the crew I brought in here in some egoistic surge to the finish? But if that were the case, why would I continue to press on; I won, and am neither blind nor strung out as to miss this.
What actually is a treasure to me? I do not seek money, nor fame, nor comfort. I want nothing of the corporeal nor of the vain, and I certainly want nothing inflationary or satiating. My only treasure is honor, honor as virtue, honor as transcendence of but lasting residence in this material world and its sacrificial nature. My only treasure is to be the aesthetic philosopher, to watch the world consume itself and to interject, and to be victorious in the quest for strength of mind, body, and soul in the face of debilitating societal countenances.
Now, what I must do is apparent. The sweet words of this fairy are nothing but the nectar of a mistress prophesizing madness as virtue. How can your orgy of life ever align with my ideals, how can relinquishing my desires through words ever equate to my defeating of desires, and if I forsake my previous life what will there be to combat? A blank slate?
If I give in to her spell, into her enticement, and never emerge from this jungle, then everything I gained will be left here, in the fairy’s Eden but, in reality, left amidst utter desolation of the isolated jungle. No matter how enticing, this fairy proposes only a shortcut to hell. What I must do is obvious, and I thank you, journal, my only true friend, for making apparent my future.
Now I will stand tall, approach the fairy with my verdict, brandishing this blade covered with the juices of life.
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