Purity

I believe in innocence little darlin’, start again

I believe in everyone

I believe, regardless,

I believe in everyone

– Joanna Newsom, ’81

 

Last week it was brought to my attention by someone who often prods at my mind that I was a medieval monk in a past life.

In truth I volunteered this metaphor, but their prompting drew the image from the depths of my psyche. Despite my visual anonymity on this platform, rest assured that I do not have a tonsure. I realised that I surely must have been a medieval monk in a past life because of the running list of sins that I constantly compose within.

They reach very far back indeed. I have never been able to conceptualise my age, but from my rough calculations they begin when I was six, maybe seven. I remember them all so clearly, each and every sin—not Christian sins, but sins against my own moral code. The list is so deeply engraved into my personal worldview that it may be the only thing in my life to withstand the unending onslaught of time.

What I did this morning is unknown to me. The last nice thing someone said to me, equally forgotten. The last kind act I did, now foreign. When I look back to the confines of my own small life—minuscule in the long brushstrokes of history—all I see are the Sins, not seven of them, no, no, there are far more.

The mind is a book blown constantly by the wind, the pages turning with no rhythm nor divine reason. Yet when I examine the text how perfectly can I see all those images and piercing words, the memories of such horrors that came from someone within my own self.

I am fascinated with the idea of purity. Not sexual purity—no, that bores me. I like to turn within my mind the idea of moral purity, something I can never achieve. Gone, gone is my innocence—all my bones, they are gone gone gone, take my bones I don’t need none!—that pure, saturated, glowing, unidentifiable colour is now covered in stains that will only grow larger with time until they are all-encompassing and devour me from the inside out.

You’re too harsh on yourself, the other mind said, who looks into my own. Harsh? I have no conception of such a thing, I am what I am, flawed fundamentally. Somewhere in a distant land of objectivity there is a voice that tells me I’ve made nothing but minor human sins, inherent to the condition of being alive, but they speak to my head and not to my heart and my head is turned in the other direction, ears closed.

How cruel is purity—how I crave it and how I can never assume it, can never draw it over me like a healing cloak, erasing the unwanted mistakes of my past. My past—is that really me? Every second, every millisecond, a new self is born, and so the selves that have sinned are long gone, you may say. Yet the Sin, the intangible archetype that swims invisible through the air, is everywhere, fractured and omnipresent in every moment and every reincarnation of the self. There is no escaping it.

And so I was and am a medieval monk. I read through my sins, the list grows longer. I cry with repentance while I smite myself, my own god. All the while more sins bloom.