Seeking the Stray: Letters from Father to Son, Part I.

[thesmellypocket 1841]

 

 

 

LETTERS BETWEEN FATHER AND SON:

BOOK I

 

ABOUT THESE LETTERS

Malgath of Sutica (1610-1803) was an Archivist in the Library of the Silver State, specialising in the study of languages. This exposure to other cultures led him to doubt High Elven ideas, a doubt which can be read about in the first two books of his autobiography, "IMPURE: The Confessions of Pius of Sutica" (Book I) and "ILLUSION: The Confessions of Pius of Sutica." (Book II) This doubt led him to embrace the extraordinary life of an itinerant philosopher, travelling the kingdoms and principalities of the world in his burning desire for truth. In it, we see the famous style of author begin to emerge.

 

The following correspondence between father (Gildas) and son (Malgath) takes place during the 'itinerant philosopher' stage of his life. At this stage, Malgath knows that he cannot return to live the life of a respectable High Elf, but nor is he sure yet of where to go or what to do. Gildas attempts to bring his son back into the fold, and attempts to get to the truth about rumours that his son is carousing abroad and engaging in wanton racial intermixing. Gildas does not believe the rumours; he thinks that his son is still reclaimable, that, if he returns now, he will be punished for his dissent, but not destroyed. As you may be able to tell, the two writers are fairly intellectual, and their discussions show the inseparable intermix of the personal and of the philosophic. For how many fathers express grief at son having 'a posteriori' rather than 'a priori' objections? It may be singular in the history of parenting. His mother's letters, more personal and less intellectual, have not been found.

 

-The Publisher. 

 

LETTER I. 

Gildas to Malgath. 

HOW GILDAS SOUGHT KNOWLEDGE OF HIS SON'S PLIGHT. 

 

 

TO my most prized, most dear, most precious possession of my inmost bosom: My son.

 

Yes, these are rather affectionate tones. You have never heard me write or speak thus. But those missed words unsaid or unwritten over a century of darkness, a coldness in fatherly affection which I mistook for noble stoicism, I make up for now. O trials and tribulations of our ancestors! Can any of them equal what I suffer now? All they that pass by, let them look at me and see if there is any sorrow like unto my sorrow. I feel the former losses of life are less than a drop in the ocean, for a father to lose his son, not in honourable or noble death, but by this act of apostasy from our ancestral ways, which all our kinsfolk tell me you have committed. Worse than death! Is my son dead to me? Is he clean gone? Has he forgotten his father and mother forever? They tell me that you ARE, that you HAVE! For the first time in my entire life, tears, tears flow, yea, and in great abundance. MY SON! I formed you like so much clay...Does it now hate its potter?

 

And yet, steadfastly I deny them, remaining loyal to you. I shall not believe until their words have been confirmed from your very tongue or pen. Which is more, what they say contradicts itself. In my emotional whirl I have blessed logic even yet to remember the Law of Non-Contradiction. For some tell me that you have fully embraced the life of an Impure: one tells me that you have married a human female, others that, nay, you have a veritable harem of them, and that in a thousand cities. Others say that you pass the nights in drunkenness. But yet others tell me that it is the opposite: you have become a kind of what the sons of Men call a 'friar', or even a 'hermit', wearing the clothes of a poor Man and running yourself silly in the countryside and desert. The last one is most innocuous and of the greatest pain - that you have gone to write a great chronicle, or an history, or some philological work, abroad? And tell me, son, did you have to go abroad to do that, if you are doing it? Did you have to leave your poor little mother without a word? Her ONLY son, to run away and do something you could just as well have done HERE? And so the former too are at least intelligible to me, I can see you ran to preserve yourself, for none of us could accept those lifestyles among us, but the last? There is no rhyme or reason to it!

 

So, what is it, son? Why have you left? What are you doing? Are you cast off from our country and kinsfolk for good? Tell me it is not so, tell me that yet you can return. Tell me that you must submit to the gaol, or that even it is severe enough to make you banished. But do not tell me you have done something worthy of death. Do not become as one who goes down into the Pit. Shall I be forced to denounce you to protect your mother? For if your manners are grown so scandalous, what shall it be said of us, save we cast you off as the goods of a merchantman are cast off into the wild and wasteful ocean? Shall we not sink, if we do not so? Gladly would I sink, but at least tell me if I must sink, and why I must sink. Shall I ever hear these words from your lips? At least let me read them in that ugly doctor's handwriting that I know to be of the one whom I love most. 

 

Your nephew, the other Gildas, is oblivious to what takes place. I told him you are away to study. He says "When my uncle returns, he will teach me how to speak many languages, just like himself." Do you remember when you first started to take an interest in the Library? You would spend whole nights among the scrawls and scrolls and scatterings, and come back home learning a score of ancient alphabets! Before long, you even far surpassed me in rhetorical skill, and I was glad for it. And, Lithoniel waits for you like a maid at her loom. If you have not grown too accustomed to the passing winds that are the lives of Men, you know she has patience to wait, she has not a heart of passing affection like those pathetic human women you have come to know. But I hear that others seek her hand, and, unless you return soon, it could no longer be yours to claim...SHE COULD BE YOURS! You had the brightest future ahead of you, son...

 

I have failed. I am sorry. But failing in the past shall not prevent my duty in the present. You must write back to me. You must tell me the truth. And you must return to your father's side, where you belong.

 

Your very pitiful, very sorrowful and very oppressed 'abba', 

 

Gildas. 

 

LETTER II.

Malgath to Gildas. 

HOW MALGATH DENIED EMBRACING IMPURE WAYS BUT AFFIRMED THAT HE COULD NOT RETURN. 

Father...

 

The Hobbits say "It is vain to seek the counsel of High Elves, for they will say both 'yes' and 'no.'" I am afraid, despite the great pains it causes me and the greater pains it will cause you, I will have to play the part of a true Mali'aheral and answer both 'yes' and 'no.'

 

So, at first it was a human wife, and then it became a score of them? Some kinsmen are they to say such things, but it does honour to you, my father, that you did not credit them and waited for my reply for so long. Of course I deny these rumours. May they be far from me. I am unmarried, and have not a wife of any race, let alone a score of them, a harem. Am I committed to what is noble and good in what our ancestors taught? Yes. But, am I willing, am I even able, to return? No. I must say no. I am sorry. I am wrestling, wrestling, wrestling with reality, with truth, with the great big Objective, with all the weak little powers of my own subjectivity. There is no other course open to me but to fight it out. To wrestle. Else, abandoning the objective, the subjective, myself, who I am, will forever be lost. I am holding myself, like water, in my hands. And if I open my fingers out, I could not hope to find myself again. 

 

You see, our ancestors told us to seek for many things, and they told us to seek, most of all, for truth.  Was it not you who taught me the primacy of this among all the customs of the State? I have seen things which I cannot unsee. The evidence of my eyes, of my reason, tells me that I must go on. Tells me that something is wrong, deeply wrong, with the way we go about things, with what we believe. And so, in alienating myself in this fashion I am not betraying our ancestors in any wise soever, nor do I betray you. You see, if I return, I will no longer be who I am, no longer your son, no longer a true High Elf. All I am doing is taking the great commandment of our fathers, the greater part, and weighing it against the lesser. The greater tells me that I must seek for the truth. The lesser tells me to reject the supernatural, the transcendent, out of hand. So I take the greater and find that it outweighs the lesser. I am following what is truest, what is noblest, what is highest, and weighing it against that which is of lesser import. Shall Larihei be honoured by a pure body but an impure mind? Shall I take her lesser part to the cost of her greater? I cannot embrace the lesser without rejecting the greater: thus in embracing your lesser part I reject the greater and nobler part of you. That is why I cannot return home. Home would not be home. 

 

Father! You have not failed. It is because you raised me this way, that, at the longest of last, I begin to live. Did you want to raise one to remain a babe forever? Did you not want to raise an adult? If you love me, you must let me go to be who I am meant to be. You raised me to love the truth and never to lie. I cannot live with a lie. I cannot live with what I know. I cannot return and be the one you raised me to be, the one our ancestors would have loved.

 

Do not worry! I am not a Canonist, nor do I plan to become one, let alone a Friar. There is insufficient evidence to convict me of the truth of their religion. But, you see? I have let it slip. You, and the whole of our family and kinsfolk and race with you, would reject Canonism ipso facto, without beginning to consider its claims, for you reject it a priori. I do not, only a posteriori. I have become open to the great Mystery, the great Objective. Our race will not countenance anything inexplicable to reason. By this wise, we deny the existence of anything beyond our reason. We thus seat ourselves as the supreme beings, denying anything that could possibly be greater than our ability to understand it. We exalt our reason beyond reality. We make our subjectivity greater than objectivity. Tell me, is this logical? Or has there been a thorough empirical study of this matter? Is there any basis whatsoever for this belief beyond sheer racial narcissism?  That is why I say I am wrestling with the great 'Objective.' And, until I have wrestled, I cannot return. It may be that it is as you say, father. It may be that I return a greater proponent of our ideals that anyone who ever lived, in that I was able to reconcile the greater and the lesser, which no Mali of any kind hitherto has done, even our among our own. It may be that I emerge from this wrestling contest, this battle of ideas, this gladiatorial arena of philosophy, as a champion, a champion of everything I once stood for. It may not be, but it may be. But, so far, I have embraced the GREAT MYSTERY, I have said: perhaps there is something greater than my own ability to comprehend it. I do not say that there is something contrary to reason; but there may be something beyond reason. And I must find out what it is, or what they are, or what he or she is, or whether 'it is' at all. Until I do, I remain, and yes, I fight the battle of a philosopher. I am a philosopher. That is my vocation in life. To love wisdom and search for it more that gold, or jewels, precious metals. Can these make a man happy? No. Not in the thousand years we must live upon this earth. That is the life I live. Not hedonism, as you have heard. But philosophy. Am I living the life you fear I live? No. Am I living a life you would desire me not to live? Yes. And so we are back to the yes and no that the little folk accuse us of. 

 

You are my father and I love you. I love my little momma as well. But if I return, I won't be your child. I won't be true to what you yourself have taught me. If you want your son to be your son, if you want your son to reflect what is noble in the both of you, you must bid me remain as I am. I honour and love you more than any creatures upon this earth. And it is because I honour you that we are parted. It is painful. I miss you terribly. But I do not believe that this adversity is without purpose and profit. I do not quite understand how or why I feel this way, that there is profit in this.  But it is not an irrational feeling. It is a superrational one. 

 

Your very sorry, very loving, and tender Little Prince of Taliyna’maehr,

 

Malgath. 

 

LETTER III.

Gildas to Malgath.

HOW GILDAS, OPTIMISTIC of HIS SON'S RECLAMATION, ASKED MALGATH TO EXPLAIN HOW HE CAME TO DOUBT. 

Dear son, 

 

How strange is this feeling of joy mixed with grief! Joy to know you are unharmed; grief to know you do not plan a return. Joy to know you still can be reclaimed; grief to know that you have no desire to be. Joy to know you have not embraced any superstition; grief to know that you reject it only a posteriori and not a priori.

 

While I hope, I live, and while I live, I hope. "It may not be, but it may be." It MAY be! It may BE! IT may be! May it be? Yes! It MAY BE! YES, it may! Look! Come to your senses! (I am one to talk.) You never told me of your...doubts. Do you think that any serious thinking person is without them? Son, you could have come to me about them. Yes, even patriotic, even traditionalist, even as Silver-as-the-Silver-State-Gildas would have been willing to help. I appeared too Silver in your eyes, and you were afraid to come, dazed by the pretence of an overwhelming glimmer of the Sun on that silver, and now you have looked for answers elsewhere. But it is too late for regrets. I may as well tell you now that doubts and difficulties are by no means alien to me. Yes, you read correctly, even me. I cannot bring back the past and get the young Malgath to come to me at the first growth of these intellectual weeds, but, now that the garden of your mind is full of them, I think it may be time for a little trimming. Come, let Malgath the Dialogist as I used to call you, come forth. You may best me at mere rhetoric. But do you think that anyone can answer your doubts better than I?

 

You are right, son. You cannot abandon what you call 'the greater part' this, I concede. But the lesser part may yet, as you yourself admit, be rescued. Is that not what dialectics is? To take the greater and reconcile it with the lesser? Reasoning from the universal to the particular? That, as you know, are we well schooled in, and soon can deliver you from intellectual malady. 

 

If you truly love me, and truly desire to return, I beg you to explain how it is you came to this impasse, and, walking together, let us both emerge champions of Progress and Health as you said may be. Then, can you and may you not RETURN? Oh, some punishment may you face. But not death. Not death and perhaps not banishment, but the path to be accepted again...to re-gain citizenship. 

 

I await your response to my challenge, O Malgath the Dialogist. 

 

Your father,

 

Gildas the Logician. 

 

Letter IV. 

Malgath to Gildas. 

HOW MALGATH EXPLAINED HIS INTELLECTUAL and PERSONAL JOURNEY TO THIS POINT.

 

Most redoubted father (and most famous Logician),

 

You have asked me to explain, in order that you may reclaim me, as you would suppose, for Larihei. I accept and embrace this challenge, as truly, I desire to be reclaimed. I would have the greater and the lesser reconciled; I would possess both Larihei the lover of truth and Larihei the lover of the Silver Laws, if I could. I will prefer the former to the latter, the greater to the lesser, but will possess both if I may. And so, if there were any means by which both could be reconciled, readily would I take that means and more readily yet would I return home, whatever punishment the State would lay out for me to undergo, for my love of truth, and of my family, are greater than my fear of undergoing pains. Thus, I shall unfold the history of how I departed from the 'Lesser Larihei' in favour of the 'Greater' one.  

 

I.The Sense of Disturbance. Of Hypocrisy. 

 

My first rejections of some of our traditions did not come from this place of love. Originally, it came from pride and self-righteousness. For, inasmuch as personal reason is exalted as the highest quality, my own exercise thereof became my constant preoccupation. Viz., what I thought my reason told me, that Purity was a complete scam (DO not be angry, I do not hold this view any longer), was always going to be higher than any submission to an external authority. There was a sense in me that something was wrong. We were supposed to be pure, but we were not. That I only noticed when I grew up. Video meliora proboque, detiora sequor, said one man. [Publisher: "The better things I see, and I praise them, but it is the baser that I follow."] And: non enim, quod volo, hoc ago, sed quod odi, illud facio...Non enim, quod volo bonum, facio, sed, quod nolo malum, hoc ago. ["For I do not do as I would, but what I hate, I do...For the good I would, I do not, but the evil I would not, that I do."] Looking at these statements, nay, in my very heart, it seemed to me a much more realistic estimation of myself and those around me than I had hitherto seen. We strived for purity, and yet fell short. There was some manner of disease in our wills, which prevented us from loving what we ought to love, and prevented us from doing what we ought to do, but instead, make us take a perverse pleasure in what we ought not to do. There was something in us, a beast in us, rebellious passions that refused to submit to reason. Barbarism was not something behind us; barbarism was something beneath us. Impurity was not something brought here as some foreign force into the public forum; Impurity was and is something within us, almost seeming native to our soil. 

 

I looked around and I saw hypocrisy. I saw men who fell short and condemned others for falling short; men who preached and did not practise; men who were severe with all other men, but not with themselves. And, when I had doubts, I was afraid. I saw severity everywhere towards them that doubt, towards them that did not fit the ideal. And so, I felt, deepen within me, something was not well. I did not know what is was, and no absolute scientific proof of this as an alchemist might have of the interaction of elements. It was not that it was without enough substantiation for science; rather it had too much substantiation for science - so common and obvious! And yet because of this, nowhere could I turn, in no way could I explain the deep feeling of disconnected in my heart. (It was around this time that I suffered that illness that almost carried me off. I have since described the illness to doctors, who reckon it one not occasioned by the imbalance of the humours or the poison of the air, and they think it was as one caused by disquiet of heart. Tension in the mind affecting the body.)

 

II.The Hedonistic Rebellion of my Younger Days. 

 

The first expression of this rebellion was total and wholesale. Seeing hypocrisy and aroused in indignation, and frustrated by inability to express what I had seen in rational thought, I raged against everything I had known. And so I embraced hedonism. There is no truth. No right and wrong. No purity and impurity. Only pleasure and pain. Avoidance of pain, seeking of pleasure. Live for the present moment! Get the greatest possible thrill, the greatest kick, the greatest sensual pleasure, out of any given experience. This manner of living I termed Life on the Basis of the Pleasure Principle, as if I was some great original thinker. I have now discovered that, for all their inferiority, humans discovered this apparently original philosophy centuries before I did, and rejected it out of hand. Be not afraid: one half of the 'philosophy' was pleasure, the other was pain. So, I did no more than petty crime. I did nothing guilty of death or banishment.

 

The greatest crime of such a philosophy was not, as I would later discover, that it is wrong. It is that it is, as I would then find out, boring! You see, as a very ancient one expresses in the words of a woman attempting to persuade a man to adultery: "“ Aquae furtivae dulciores sunt, et panis in abscondito suavior." [Viz., stolen waters are sweeter, and bread in secret more pleasurable.] There is a kernel of truth to what the Foolish Woman says, viz., that there is a kind of greater sweetness to illicit acts, and that, one living according to the Pleasure Principle ought therefore to pursue them. I wanted them, but lacked the courage to truly pursue them. But it is for the reason I explained hitherto. Viz., that there is a certain disorder in our faculties, whereby our passions are not subject to our reason, and thus, we take pleasure in what ought not be be pleasurable, and, often, we take no pleasure in what ought to give us pleasure. This philosophy, therefore, the philosophy of Stolen Waters and Secret Bread, is one that prioritises the thrill of the moment to the exclusion of any conception of right and wrong, of being rooted in a past, or of working toward a future. 

 

But such a philosophy would always bring boredom after a time. Why? I shall use two analogies. The first is a narrative. Take, for instance, the narratives you liked to tell me, of dragons and heroes and all sorts of matters. Now, let us say you stopped telling me a narrative, a story, but, rather, a series of disconnected sentences speaking of different events. "The Hobbit walked to the garden", "The cow jumped to the moon", "the Orc sat down", and so on. Such, by its mere variety, might for a short time bring amusement. But it would ultimately not bring true satisfaction of heart. The type of tales that we love tells us about the innermost desires of our hearts. No, a narrative needs to be a narrative. It needs to have a beginning, a sense of purpose and quest, an ending or consummation. The second analogy. Suppose music. Now, music is truly satisfying by the interconnection of notes, one leading to another and proceeding to the next, so that there is harmony, order, goodness, as well as the overlapping of various instruments. Therefore, if someone were to take a lyre and play various, disconnected, illogical notes with no sense of progression, the novelty would at first amuse us, and then annoy us. 

 

As I say, the music and stories that we love, are like a mirror telling us about what it is we desire. Our lives must be a narrative and a symphony, not a series of disconnected events. There must be order, reason, goodness. At the end of the story of Hengst and the Dragon, does he 'go town with the lads for a night on the piss', or merely have sex with the princess and then leave her? Surely not, and it would leave a nasty taste in our mouths if it did. He gets on his knee and he marries the princess, and so it is in every fairytale because any other ending would not satisfy us; it might shock us, but swiftly would it bore us. And so with the hedonist. Wanton fornication, as an example, is not just wrong. It is boring. For it is like playing with sex. Would children play at fairytales when there is a real dragon in their own front garden? Of course not. The fairytale ends in marriage, anything else seem cheap, unworthy of the narrative. And so the truly thrilling, truly romantic, truly satisfying action is not the adultery in which the man loves and leaves; in which we take a novel, perverse but ultimately unsatisfying pleasure, rather it is when we get on one knee and marry the woman. Marrying the same woman and remaining true to her to the last breath, that is the stuff of legend, that's the stuff that captures the hearts of the child in us. I was sick of playing at the game of life when I could be confronting myself with the reality. Living something cheap and unworthy when I could know something worthy and beyond the price of jewels. 

 

And so, I had to seek for something more satisfying in life, something more wholesome, something that could weave itself into a kind of song, a kind of narrative, a kind of direction, than merely, the next pleasure. "Stolen water and hidden bread" could not bring happiness, honour, chivalry; romance. I had to play a musical piece, not just notes, life had to be narrative, not just events, and the story had to consummate in marriage of prince and princess, not a mere cheap pleasure.

 

Dear father, I must return to finish this account at another time. For, although a philosopher my vocation, I am a teacher my profession. And so I must return to my students, for the time is busy. And yet, I will finish what I have written, soon.

 

Your loving son,

 

Malgath. 

 

CONTINUED IN THE NEXT BOOK.

 

Edited January 9 by thesmellypocket

[Hunnic 347]

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