Three fictional

I thought about the internet participation project of three fictional characters I identified.  I thought characters in books and films were best suited.  Edmund Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo, Andy Dufresne from Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, and Severus Snape from the Harry Potter stories.

Maybe it feels a bit linear of the core of where I am at in the current season of my life reflecting on the predecessors.  Each character bears secrets and is wrongly accused, imprisoned, imperfect, struggling the bigger picture and ultimately a man who has lost even the idea of love in a woman who is either murdered or converted into a stranger.  These are ideas in my story that are central to fuel my art.  I can relate to their fictional portrayals in ways that are my most powerful tinder. 

Dantes is a simple man of faith on the verge of all his dreams caught into a web of politics.  He is betrayed into the Chateau D’if made to awaken with the Abbe to understand the world he lives.  There is a path of revenge found hollow and ultimately in the novel he does not live out his days with Mercedes.  There are parts of me that resent and relish the lie of the movie version, how the public would better taste love eternal, but nothing in reality reflects this notion.  There is darkness and acceptance, struggles of faith and power that are in the pith.  Dantes journey of faith is feeling forsaken, lost, wanting answers and never finding anything but the minds of other humans in books and a path farther into the openness of that darkness away from the definitive. 

In Dufresne you have a bit of the professional accountant in me of trying to talk sense and details into the face of a brute on the roof.  Dufresne’s relationship with the law feels kindred to mine with the corporate realm.  What is legal and what is right are separate brothers.  The world is madness and we contort ourselves to fit inside it.  I appreciate Dufresne’s planning the arc of a man of libraries and earthen rocks.  The idea of a duality in identities appears in all the characters of what the public may think and who a person is inside, judged and there is nothing to say to defend oneself, a human simply must be.  The risk of becoming the evil that condemns a person is present.  The lines within a person are constantly tested, blurred, and ultimately an act of balance.

Snape is a secret keeper, pledged into a dual life at the loss of an unrequited love.  There is a psychological illness in Snape’s behavior.  He was the pariah of the schoolyard teased, intelligent, finding his own magic spurned into darkness and an inability to let go and respect himself enough to learn how to un-love a person.  Un-loving a person is an act of will, to divest energy and in this sense Snape’s confliction breathes in his inability to disconnect wishing to protect and harm the son of the woman he believed he loved always and the man who spawned him.  There is such madness in Snape's nobility and sickness. 

There is also a measure of digesting loving a person in a different way than ownership or having to be with them and being happy for them for having the person they love who is not you in their life.  In my own experience I have found gardens to love two women in this genuine separate way with whom I know I cannot and do not wish to be with in the traditional couplehood form of love.  Our paths are not meant to diverge in order that we each can be the unique human we need to be.  Understanding this is one of the highest forms of love I can imagine.  

One comprehends that love is not finite.  Love is not restrained within a contract or contextual prism.  Love is recognition of the interconnected whole within a being, another, the self, a former or current lover, a child, a stranger, or a friend.  This is all love is.  The remainder are shells of ego applied and layered to appease societal navigation and the genetic perpetuation drive.  The compulsion of gametes is hormonal biological force.  Love transcends the body into a dimension beyond our traditional sensorial paradigms and evokes the interdimensional mathematics of what existence is.  

There is no limit of energy, of what can flow through us, there is only what we block through attempts to control an idea of love balancing within the self.  Love balances in the whole of the universe, not the individual, to attempt otherwise produces excessive entropy that destroys human relationships. In this love permeates through pain.  People we love hurt us, a potential most deep.  In this we often compute how if this person hurt me in this way that I should not love.  I will flip a switch.  I will stop, but love is not allowing a person to do whatever they wish to you as an individual.  One can love and say,"No, this behavior is unacceptable."  We can no longer continue this other behavior because of choices a beloved has made, yet we still can love this other.  We may never see them again, but we can still love them in a way that recognizes the segmentation between social arenas, the body, and the divinity in the mass and energy we are independent of geometric tangible perceptions.  

When we simply love a person for who they are flawed and beautiful, not because of what they give us, but seeing the divinity of the universe inside them and cherishing that spark and force for the moments that energy affected our path, this is love.  One is forever grateful or bitter or stoned in prison for how one accepts this reality.  I would like to believe Snape loved Lily this way and not obsession or clutching, but with open hands in appreciation for the glow of a young girl sitting by a young school boy in the grass letting him know it was ok to be who he is.   

I can identify with Snape's isolation in not offering an explanation, to do what needs doing, which was for the greater good through an act of darkness.  He had to protect the child for slaughter at the proper time.  He had to kill Dumbledore. The confliction of these acts are carried in Snape.  We are creatures of dark and light, evil and good, and to paint a human as absolute in one derivation is falsehood. 

Maybe there is an old Catholic whisper in atheist me that seeks martyrdom, the masochist in a man who struggles with figuring out how to ever open his heart again.  How do you want love over alone; they both hurt.  A person wants to be witnessed, the seed of emotion and identity are wrapped in false packaging of past.  Past is a narrative, whispers by a burning fire, smoke drifting away one keeps conjuring into tales of now on the canvas of revolving moons. 

Dantes, Dufresne, and Snape struggle with self-acceptance in prisons and contracts of principle.  None are perfect, each trying to escape from those prisons in the self only finding more questions.