Chapter 6: Conduct imagined as a person

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There is a person -- to be described as a person, maybe in a thought experiment -- a person whose face and race are masked. Even his (his?) identity is masked. For that matter, his existence is masked, not so much by pleasure, masked rather by the daily round of calisthenics -- of chores -- that one calls one's goals, that long checklist that shapes one's day in chunks of discontinuity, until the phone rings and even this minimal movement forward is blocked, stopped in its tracks. The daily round. All right, there is a person masked behind all that.

Who is this person? He is a healer, a helper, a great spiritual guide, perhaps a warrior but definitely a sage.

His gift is altogether available. His gift to a given mortal consists of pain, discomfort, a lack of ease and a sense of discouragement, a healing sense of personal brokenness. All right, pain, a lack of ease, that is what he gives you, but it's a healing lack of ease in a world like this where such a thing as true ease can not be lightly bought nor sold.

For those people, and they are millions, who have lost the feel for what they are living and doing -- for those who have lost the spirit of the Place -- this person steps forward and offers, well, what exactly? What does he offer? A way to move safely through the negation that is that missing feel. A way to move back into feeling -- or if it isn't back, maybe it's really moving forward, maybe this motion is something entirely new, and so it is a gift, this throbbing. This person leads you into a sense of rightness that feeds a mortal and keeps her alive. It is a rightness that is appliqué, applied from the outside, but still not an intrusive thing, because the pain is you and yours. This generous masked person, this mysterious guy, knows how to keep a mortal alive. He holds the world's why safely in his closed hand. You cannot exactly see it, perhaps you can't even feel it, you definitely cannot say you know it. You only know of it but that's enough. You are left with the sense that this mysterious austere person, who cannot be embraced and flattered, can at least be trusted. Feeling nothing else, you do at least feel that. So you follow him, you follow this masked one, you commit to "entregar", to abandon, because you have retained this minimal essential thing, the sense that the person can be trusted.

Give him the drabbest name you know. Call him conduct. He is like Christ's angel, he actually wishes the best for you. He may offer pain but he offers no fear. "Do not fear". He places your hand within his own perhaps drab and clammy hand. You are not comfortalbe there and you shift there most awkwardly. You move through your grim day, not knowing why you do anything you do. Depressed. Your knowledge is withered and your heart is just a stone. Your soul has hibernated, your eyes are too dead for tears. Yes, but your hand is held.

You persist in trusting the hand that is pulling your hand.

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