From: sienna@yabbs
To: all@yabbs
Subject: Matter of Perception
Date: Wed Jul  6 20:56:50 1994

This is something I wrote a ewhile ago...maybe art....maybe 
rambling...interesting I hope, and from the ehart...so enjoy.

    Jenna had a revelation. A thought. A random whirring of her mind which 
led to other, more cpomplex thoughts. She was struck with the fact that 
she will die someday. Of course, this wasn't the first time this 
revelation had come to her. Although she was only twenty years old, her 
life had been filled with indescribable pain and trauma. She realized, all 
at once, how totall small she was in the scheme of things - how totally, 
and utterly, insignificant. And for a moment, free of regret and nearly 
without emotion of any kind, she understood that she belonged completely 
to herself. Like her childhood, she had been torn apart and glued back 
together with shame, self-hate and shock.

    She frightened herself with the depth of her anger. It had the 
violence of all unfinished things; of everything interrupted or left 
undone. In this violence there was a sense of yearning - the yearning for 
completion. For an end. For that which is absent, and would, if present, 
bring fulfillment.

    Jenna sat staring out at the rose garden, absent-mindedly hugging ehr 
knees to her chest as she wondered where this anger came from. 
    "Where does it hide?" she asked herself. Some massive knowledge seemed 
to move inside of her, thrusting powerfully up from the depths and 
darkness where it had once been jailed...and all at once, she understood 
that her very existence depended upon keeping this knowledge buried within 
her - in a golden casket within a silver casket within a leaden casket.

    Her anger is a wild beast with claws and teeth, a tiger, and this 
tiger threatened to surge into her conscious mind and destroy her. She 
began panting from the force and threat of this emotion locked away within 
herself. She became aware that she had not fainter or dies, which was how 
she felt, but it was, just then, and only for a second, as if her mind had 
been hurled through some dark barrier. And then, just as quickly, it was 
gone. A thick shield had slammed itself back into place, where it 
belonged.

    Jenna thoughtfully twisted her long brown hair around her forefinger 
as she contemplated her existence. It seemed like she set up situations 
destined from the first to fail. Her thoughts bent towards her 
relationships. She didn't understand this world. All about her were 
creatures of another species, more instinctual, more brutal than her. They 
walk past her...unnoticing, uncaring.

    "It has to do with *inwardness*," she thought to herself. This was as 
close as she could come to a connection. Thise creatures, they were 
external. Her thoughts, though, they lead her inward, and inward is where 
everything important lies. She felt as though her entire life could be 
seen as a demonstration of this priniciple.

    "What matters most about my life took place entirely in my childhood," 
she mused out loud. The world in which she went to work and then came home 
in was the world of public life.  In that world, at least according to 
people like her father, one either "counts," "amounts to something," or 
does not. For one dizzy moment, she could see herslef totally renouncing 
this worthless, superficial world to become a Magellan of the interior.

    Ordinarily, Jenna went through life as if she were inside a 
transparent bubble she herself had created to protect her from pain and 
ridicule at the hands of perfect strangers.
    "Too bad," she said to the sparrow who had flown to the windowsill, 
"that I haven't yet been able to conceive a transparent bubble that can 
withstand the pain and ridicule at the hands of those who say they love 
me."



Part Two in the next post.....