Chapter 12: Tribulations Part 8 - Saints and Martyrs

I'm aware I have a habit of straying from the story at times, but it is with a purpose. There is so much I wish to say, and much of what could be considered rambling provides an insight to how I view this world. That is the purpose of this book, to share my own personal philosophy...an introverted observation reflected outwardly. It is all a part of my madness, my thoughts, my feelings, as well as the story of my life that I have revealed so far and will continue to disclose until I've reached the moment my madness was silenced.

So, that being said, I beseech you to tolerate my rambling a moment longer, as I explain a very important detail about my personality - a detail that illuminates the central cause to my madness - and clarifies the reason why I found it so unbelievably hard to assimilate into society. Allow me to annotate the reason why my mind never established a recognizable separation between reality and fabrication.

But first, there is something I must get off my chest. I ponder over the events of my past daily and consider myself blessed. Of course, my life could have been easier, even less dysfunctional. But I am who I am, and that will never change. All I can hope for is that tomorrow will bring a chance to reconcile the pieces of myself I find scattered.

The most beneficial by-product of my past was when I developed my unwavering thirst for knowledge. For fourteen years I was fortunate enough to have a loving mother, as suffocating as she was, and I realize there are those who have not been so fortunate. I inherited her curiosity for all things; it is the greatest gift she could have ever given me. Even now, many years later as a free man, I surround myself with books. I study day and night, poetry, mythology, psychology, philosphy, ideology and theology; every -ology I can secure by natural means. I am a self attained expert in many subjects, all of which satisfy my quest for omnipotence. I realize this goal is unattainable, but is it really a foolish attempt? Even if I never reach that plateau, the path to enlightenment has not been without its benefits.

I am self aware, spiritually, physically and mentally. I believe in God, though we've never met...perhaps in a dream somewhere we might have. Perhaps, I am as cynical as Voltaire against organized religion, for I believe that much that has transpired in this world could have been avoided through tolerance. I believe in humanity, as broken and unorganzied as it is, but I'm impressed to believe there is a need for change. I love those around me, but they are ignorant. Mankind is quickly approaching a dead end and will not know where to go without the proper guidance. I love those around me, but I also hate them. I hate them for the pain they cause each other. I hate them for they're blindly seeking the truth that can only be found inside of them. The world is the unified church of self interest, a parsimonious dogma. We all sacrifice our inner peace, self destructing through our search for self righteousness. The world is madness. There is no meaning of life. We are all saints and sinners. We are all martyrs for our cause, followers without a leader. We must be sanctified as one soul, but there are those who must take charge and lead the march of peace. We must lay down our weapons and scepters and embrace one another as brothers and sisters. But where are our leaders?

Where are our free thinkers, our Transcendentalists, our new-visionaries and philanthropists? Where are our philosophers and intellectuals? This is a call, an evocation if you will, for a new movement: to rise above mediocrity and normality and transcend beyond the plains of static conformity. We are standing on a world divided and crumbling beneath our slanted feet, foreshadowed by the luminaries of our past. We must outthink ourselves, discover a new path to enlightenment, and become illuminaries of our cause.

We are spiritual, enigmatic revolutionists of our art and life, emissaries of the flame of new thought, and the pall-bearers of our own deficiencies. We are not perfect, but we are persistent, and we can change the world; in the very least, the manner in which the world thinks. I am an avid reader of those who revolutionized the cognitive thinking of their time and I can only ponder where such writers exist today. It is a new age and time, and much that has been written is still meaningful, but society has evolved. We are faced with new tragedies and ingenuities every day. Embrace inner truth and decide what you will be, a saint or a martyr.


Do you know the difference between saints and martyrs? People believe in saints. I've studied catholicism and the words spoken by many saints and popes. They were great inspirational speakers, and it didn't take long to realize that I would never be a great speaker myself. The fact of the matter is the voice inside my head will always be more emphatic than my own. Expressing my words through ink flows so easily that I find it strenuous at times to stop. So why do I find it so difficult to express myself verbally. Why does my brain freeze mid sentence, or my voice crack as a grown man, why does my pen react more quickly than my tongue. I am a mute by choice, forced to remain so out of fear...fear that I won't be taken seriously. Then again, perhaps I should clarify. I can answer intelligently when questioned, but I have a habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, inserting the wrong word while searching for the appropriate one to say, or blurting out absurdities before contemplating whether or not they are appropriate to speak out loud. I am the patron saint of blunders, so I choose not to speak unless necessary. Maybe it's because I lack practice, social interaction, or perhaps I am the victim of acquired impracticalities. Is it the human tragedy of habit, or the nature of false benediction? I pray to the soul of my mother, Saint vedette, the patron saint of phraseology. She will never be sainted by the church, but she will always be a holy martyr in my eyes.

Instill my heart with peace, Saint Vedette. Quiet these doubts and silence my thoughts. Loosen my tongue and bring me to rest peacefully beside you. But Saint Vedette does not answer my prayers. Perhaps Saint Allen will in due time, when it's already too late. Because he is the patron saint of fate and fate has a habit of fault, by being unpunctual. Perhaps that is the definition of human tragedy.

And if my prayers go unanswered by Saint Allen, then I will cast them before the naked feet of Saint Gilbert, the patron saint of nonsense. Even as I read the words that were just written, I wish to scratch them out; what utter nonsense. The truth, to be phrased so bluntly, is that this social conundrum is a practiced action, and in my case practiced to perfection. I was locked away for fourteen years without genuine human interaction. I had my imagination, true, and my mother, but how honest can one be with one's mother. There was always a sense of respect in our speech, of formality and politeness. I was only able to speak candidly to myself when I was alone. So, I was cursed from the beginning, destined to be a social jester.

Yet, why do I even bring this up. I'll never speak to you face to face, nor would I ever want to. So what is my purpose. What do I wish to express? I am thirty six years old now, and I am quite at the end of my patience. My rope is bound to snap at any moment, so what is it that I want?

I want to scream from the bottom of my lungs, until my voice is lost among the clouds, or until there is no more air to breathe in this world. I want to run and never stop, until my legs give out, or until I fall off the face of the earth. I want to peel away the layers of clothing and skin and expose myself for who I really am. I want to close my eyes and simply breathe, but I cannot, for fear of what awaits inside my head. I want to be relaxed and erratic, independently normal. I want to take you by the hand and look you in the eye without saying one word, so that you may know all the suffering in this world. I want to just be myself, but how do I find myself when so many others tell me who I am? I want to STOP..........and freeze the world, just to have a moment of silence. I want to live, without questioning what it means to live. I want to learn to dance - read Dostoevsky and Chekhov in their native tongue - lose twenty pounds - become the most prolific writer that has and ever will be known - live in a world void of material vices. I want to witness a new Revolution of the Mind within my fellow human beings, and have an intelligent, philosophical conversation in every language at once. I want to be free.....I want....I don't know what I want....

Nor have I ever known. From the age of five, I acquired a self awareness, but it was never so evident as it is now. I can remember being happy, locked away in that basement, not knowing what it meant to be locked away. That thirty by forty space was my entire world. Of couse, at four years old, I began sneaking up the stairs and peeking through the keyhole. A fact I never confessed to my mother, and I remember distinctly that I didn't like what I saw. A strange and fantastic place stretched beyond my safety net, but I didn't want to be there. Perhaps, it was because there was a noticeable difference in my mother and grandfather Gilbert when they were on the other side of that door. They acted differently in my basement universe, that much was evident, and I certainly didn't want any part of these oddities. I wanted to stay away from whatever caused them to act so devilishly in the land of the Saints.

And yet, beyond it all lingered my guardian angel, the red haired eight year old girl who would grow into the woman that would bring me blankets while I slept beneath the city bridge and who watched me in quiet admiration as I read for hours into the night within the public library. Gabriella has and always will be the only positive light within this entire world of darkness.

I'm aware I have a habit of straying from the story at times, but it is with a purpose. There is so much I wish to say, and much of what could be considered rambling provides an insight to how I view this world. The "outside" seemed so far away for a boy of five years, marooned in a sea of uncertainty, king of his own basement universe and alone in his fortress of books. My mother, martyred by her own madness, was my sole confidant and teacher until I learned to read. By the time I was five, I was already reading on my own; befriended by the characters of these books. They were my brothers and sisters, my friends, my saints and comrades. They provided an ear to listen and gave advice when it was needed. Tom Sawyer was the first, followed by the Mad Hatter and Peter Pan, and eventually the likes of Mephistopheles, Raskolnikov and Pip as I became older. As the years passed, I read more and more important books, the characters becoming unbelievably real to me. They were a solid comfort in dark times, always there when I wanted to talk about things I couldn't discuss with my mother.

On my ninth birthday I finished my two hundredth book, "Peter Pan". How I felt like the boy from neverland. I honestly believed I could do anything when I was that age. But with each birthday my interests grew darker. I began reading Poe and Dostoevsky at ten. The day I left the basement at fourteen, I had read nearly every book on every shelf, a total of three thousand eight hundred and seventy two.

How could I possibly ever feel alone with so many friends. I believed in these saints, the saints of Twain and Dostoevsky, Cervantes and Barrie, Goethe, Dickens and Melville, as much as I believed in the martyrs of my bloodline, Vedette, Allen and Gilbert. Whether I wanted to believe in my family or not, they were all that was tangible to me at the time, even if I was setting myself up for disappointment. And what was I to do to change the path I was on? Hasn't anyone ever let you down? Honestly, how different are we from one another? We are all the patron saints of misfortune.

And so, I came to realize that many of my interactions in reality were not that different in comparison with those I imagined, and it drove me further into madness where the comfort of my stable and all too real companions awaited to console me. During the three brief years at the orphanage, I became withdrawn, a recluse. I neither spoke nor responded to anyone. When it was eventually time for me to leave, I received what was left of my mother's blood money; twenty two hundred American dollars in all. The very thought of it made me cringe, knowing the indetererminable amount of pain it caused her. I couldn't for the life of me use it, even if she had wished it. Mere minutes after I had collected it, I walked directly into a catholic church and donated it all for the poor. And so I began my life on the streets, a life I could have avoided if I had used that money to secure lodgings somewhere and procured a job. But I couldn't bring myself to do it, not only because of the nature of this money, but because the job, the lodgings, however large or small, the very normality of life would have caused me to feel confined once more.

There is freedom in homelessness, when chosen, and not the hopelessness that spreads across our alleyways and churches. I could see my life continuing in no other way. I don't know if my mother would have approved or not, but I do know she would have loved me just the same either way.