Danse Macabre

Every good writer writes about love…  Well, not love exactly…   Love.  Every theme, every idea, every character basically boils down to that one very human emotion.   You know that every religion says that God is Love… at least they say the good God is.  But love has many facets, and leads to many other essential ideas.  Life and Death, Sex and Birth, Love and Hate… all are part of the great dance… Camille Saint-Saens called it the Danse Macabre, the Dance of Death, and wrote about it in symphonic music.  I reached a time in my youth where I had to confront the fact that people live and people die and I was no exception.

I have never believed in Hell.  The God I know does not punish His creations with eternal torment… especially for reasons like having the wrong religion or making the wrong choices.  I have to admit that once I rejected the notion of eternal punishments, I also began to doubt eternal rewards.  Looking forward to a time after life is just as foolish and just as much a waste of time as fearing it.  We do have to look carefully into the darkness, however, because in the unknown  are concealed many traps and terrors.  Fear is a real thing, and it does an important job warning us and making us prepare for the worst.

We always seem to associate innocence with goodness and purity.  But as important as grappling with the idea of our own death is, is grappling with the loss of our own innocence.  There comes a moment that we are confronted with the awful truth.   It came for me when I was ten and was sexually abused by a neighbor.  Feelings of guilt and humiliation were not totally new to me, but they dropped on me then like a landslide of granite and lava.  That which is child-like and trusting is replaced distrust, fear, and loathing.

Where do we find the answer?  Where do we find release from suffering and pain?  Where do we find peace of mind?  Religion can fuel love and forgiveness.  It does it well.  But it also fuels guilt and self-loathing.  Unfortunately it does that well too.  Psychiatry is an inexact science and needs a lot of further research.  So what is the conclusion to this philosophical quest?  What is the answer?  What are the last steps of the Dance?  I tried to sum it up the best that I could in the final panel of my cartoon Danse Macabre.