Is Adder Adder?

Photo by Mikko Löppönen

Good and bad as concepts are relative, right and wrong, in turn, are absolute. We’re constantly walking the quagmire of our personal choices, as Uuno Kailas expressed it, truly “across the swamp” to reach the heights of mountaintops where there is nothing to break the void filled with light. On this journey our only map is the way we feel about things, the compass being determination, in other words these are ethics and moral. To know the direction is one thing, to choose the path is another, and all too often we are influenced in decision-making by the quality of the route to pick, despite of the possibility of being led astray with this hesitation. In the end of the day it is just a question of how much we value the trek we’re on and to what extent we are prepared to face distress for its sake.

Coming to this it is my conviction that I go where I will, not where I might or might not seem to be able to pass through. No matter how hard or slow it may be this way, it is better than to diverge, for even the tiniest error in reality takes us further away from the destination and therefore is, when taken for a solution, unambiguously wrong. By false reasoning it is of course possible to justify what ever pointless drifting, but why not rid yourself of such “sense” and abandon hope that’s unavailing. Being torn apart, defeat or annihilation – don’t these all become most inessential when we turn our eyes to the mountains far-off?

Martin Faulks describes the devotion of Grandmaster Hatsumi Masaaki to his art by calling it selfish focus. What might seem, under superficial study, indifferent or even like lacking “good” purpose is in reality nothing but following the (only) right path without second thoughts. What can one do but to breathe life to where it can be breathed into? The mountainsides that bathe in sunlight are inevitably in touch with the mire of the deep. Without the latter, the ferment, the submerging in the bog eyes and the everlasting battle among those who dwell in darkness the individual shall never be placed to answer the ultimate question, the one most important.

There are signs and portents carried in the wind. The Grail does exist.

The tension between two infinities is the Sledgehammer of God. It pounds both matter and un-matter, crushing and twisting until spirit and flesh have become one, and from this union alone emerges the power of intention that bends the universe straight. An outside observer could only see this process as monstrous.

As we travel the oceans on The Pequod we are, nevertheless, still on the swamp (the name of the tribe Pequot is derived from an Algonquin word paquatauoq, “men of the swamp”), roaming the marshlands of our destinies. The battle in the deep goes on, worlds keep being born of the clashing of fire and ice.