Bad Faith
My desire this year is to attain the iron stomach of a vulture. It is a life-long endeavour. An open aspiration. I have cut my teeth before attempting to deconstruct the enigmatic face of the deep, the jutting boulder of the profane, and the psychic density of the abyss that oscillates between utterance and silence in bad faith. Disowning my power. Shortly after I agreed to accept the guardianship of the holy birds of the dead, I watched a vulture. The size of a two year old human child, bathing its glistening body in a small pool of black mud, plant sinew and freshwater. It returned my gaze, its mouth agape, showing off the sharp hook of its cream beak.
The vulture possesses unheard of mysteries in my mother’s land thousands of kilometers away. I hear them in my body. There is an old woman. She pretends to be deaf and blind. Lethargic. She pretends to fall asleep. It could take hours, days, and even weeks for her to respond. Her name means forgetful but she has been here before the earth sprang out from the primal chaos. She is listening. At the place that you are most afraid to go. At the place that God dare not enter. She does the dirtiest and most crucial work. She arrives only at the beginning of decay. It is rumoured that her children are mad but it is not known if their madness is due to her own infliction.
In Swahili, the word for listening and feeling is the same, kiluba. For true understanding to arise, one must be in contact with the voice of the heart. Jean-Paul Sartre explains in Being and Nothingness that “the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person” when describing bad faith. Bad faith is deception. We lie to others, worse, we lie to ourselves. Uncertainties are intolerable, the malaise of empty handed gestures are denied, an avoidant hope is insisted upon and with it the obfuscation of otherwise possibilities. The overture of past lives clamer, spit, and hiss. The holy birds of the dead circle above but we do not acknowledge them nor do we offer them anything real to eat.
An authentic sacrifice is truthful, its substance cannot be fabricated by a will to “surrender”. Too often as we wade through a psychospiritual process, we become eager to cast out a soul reckoning, to evade it, to transcend it, without allowing it to complete its work. Bones and all. No remnants of what was can remain for an auspicious beginning. The vulture implores us to engage with the medicine of darkness, to undergo our own funeral, and digest that which we have deemed impossible only in doing so can we develop profound compassion, fearlessness and generosity.
Incomplete burial rites encroach into the present… manifesting within our mind, body, and spirit as a deep fear of life itself. We are the only ones who can turn towards what is concealed within us and devour what threatens to consume us piece by piece. Each time we experience an ending, we uncover a spiritual truth, wisdom that has become lost, hidden and difficult to find —that learning how to die well is how we will live well. The mystic embraces the death of the limited self in the name of love.
A visual meditation; an image of pair of hands formed from stone surrounded by floating words. The text reads “the path is still being shaped.”
Sources
Sartre, J. P. (1943). Being and Nothingness. Translated by H. Barnes. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.