Afrodelic
Loremaster
[!] In the square of Al-Khadir, a Dark Elven figure in a white robe wrapped around his body can be seen handing out missives to any person willing to take the text. Meanwhile, over in Al-Jabrid, a younger tiefling figure dressed in a loose blue and red cloaked wrapped around his body can be seen handing out missives in front of the university. The following is contained within the missive. [!]
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A Missive On Divinity: Tarik and its Lack
[/HEADING]“Where faith yields itself to the temptation of flesh, there is where I rest, awaiting thee.” (Risen, 3:4)
A Query
A Query
O’ ye who grasp at the claws of ill faith, I write to thee. Not with the hope of transpiring a new awakening that dares to make whole the fragmented world that we are beckoned onto. Nay, rather I hope that these words catch you in the dire dilemma that time often binds us mortals to. One where the realization of lack comes to bear on the supposed fantasy of being. Where one can face the violence of this world on the terms it's set in. What gap one finds cannot be filled in any way that doesn’t lead to another gap. And what moments one wills of ecstasy, be it through materialist or spiritual means, shant awaken another mode of being in this world. Rather, what we find then, as the Orcs have long ago prescribed, is a fallen world that speaks to a fallen desire for a flesh that might never come. Here I write then on the passages of divinity that shape to the core our world, and instead offer momentary respite that functions as a query against materialist fixations. In turn, I ask you, dear Anjyarri, what do we do when our society, so filled with splendor and beauty, is not enough? Where do we turn? What do we do with our lives? What values hold true in a stagnant world?
I look now as the ocean water crashes against the desert sands. At times this is enough. Yet at others, that contradiction between ocean and land finds itself incomplete. As though more can be found within the frame before me. The Philosopher once spoke: “Where Good rests is a plane beyond spatio-temporal grasp, instead resting as an unseen form that guides and provides the basis for the material reality that makes itself known to us everyday. In contrast, Evil stands in that same plane, a contradiction that bears forth the necessary conflict for this world to cease. These two forces, presently unpresent, ordering the very cosmos we’ve come to know, yet providing the grounds for things to be while existing in a transcendental fugue that we dare not approach.”
Examining Limits
In response, I dare to think about the limits of Tarik and offer a criticism, as my response dares to question this ordered thought that cannot fathom the necessary ineffability that transcends even the order that is being worked out here. What the Philosopher works through is a transcendental frame of ideality that dares to provide a map. A cosmological cartographic project, as a colleague of mine once put it. Yet the limitation is that how can one begin to graph that blankness that holds together these words? How can one know what holds the very grounds of imagining together? There cannot be a precise modality of knowing what rests in unknowability. Rather, such a ponderance, as is written by my colleague, “dares to open up passages for heretical proclamations.” This is the lack that Tarik must work through to function in anyway that dares to piece together what it means to be. A project predicated on cosmological security yet steeped in the problematic limitations that the Word offers.
I now turn to what it means to seek divinity in the face of lack. And I offer my own cosmological propositions, but I must be wary of what it means to transpose what cannot truly be transposed. Here we work within the grips of limitation, and I presented a reading that is not certain. As my student once put it, “what we have then is not a divine word to translate, but rather the lack of a divine word to translate into uncertain prescriptions.” Thus, what I propound is that our value-system, which is wholly predicated on a forlorn history, must not be revalued. Rather, what must be reworked is our fundamental understanding of what it means to know. And not in a radical movement of our systems of knowing, but rather in a mere acknowledgement of what is required to engage with ourselves in more functional terms. In other words, our current models of thought, from Tarik to even the Cult of Fineall, are proposals that are limited in their scope when it comes to understanding our respective way of being in this world. And in turn, what we must do is begin to write descriptions, in all their forms, that can admit and come face to face what being on the terms we know it. Since there is no terminal proposition of bad/good that we, as a fallen people that are not divine, can begin to ponder. Instead, what we have is a map of a fallen territory, and our work is now to complete said map so that we might know what is not divine.
A Promise
The truth rests in the fact that we can not even begin to fathom what truth might be on divinely scripted terms. Instead, divinity and truth are hidden away in the fleeting moments that faith makes itself known to us. We, the Anjyarri, are a people fallen into flesh yet working to secure ourselves in this world that dares to view us as forsaken. More particularly, we Azari’Lunn, are a forsaken bunch, according to the mythos of other groups, that dares to tarnish and wreak havoc on this world. In response, our work then mustn’t be to act in rash and violent forms. But instead to turn inward, to begin to piece together a puzzle that the other groups won’t be able to touch before us. To know that we cannot know the unknown. But rather, another field rests available to us.
My dear kin, be you Anjyarri, or a foreigner reading my words. I profess to you a profound movement is being born, one that dares to piece together the theo-philosophical reality that is at work within these deserts. To listen to the winds. To hear the call from beyond. And to simply be on the terms we were meant to. Our beings are not faulted, rather we were forsaken in a world that does not want us. In the coming months I, Esebius, shall be working on a series of missives that begin to piece together another model of religious, spiritual and ethical thought that can guide the Anjyarri people. My work is dedicated to my nation, my Sultan, my people. In turn, I beg of ye all, hold me into question, expect more of me as a scholar and writer, and demand explanations for even the most unexplainable. We must sit united in the face of the violence that shapes our reality. As a wise Khaldan scholar once put it: "We are each other's harvest, we are each other's business, we are each other's magnitude and bond.” Rest my kin, know that these words will meet you with a great care. In God’s name I pray for thee.
The First in a Series of Theological and Cultural Reflections Written by Esebius of Al-Khadir
