Parables

Visitor

A ghost creaked open my windowpane in the depths of some cold night.

You might be surprised to know I was not scared.

“Hallo,” I called. The ghost did not respond. I sat up in my bed and observed the ghastly thing. Her right eyeball swayed as she swayed, because it was fully outside the socket, hanging on by a thread. The other eyeball was blood red, and looked to have been opened up by a some sort of jagged object. Her left arm was MIA, and her right arm was littered with open, ugly sores. The dress that thankfully covered the rest of her distorted shape was tattered, and used to be a pleasant sort of floral print thing. Her face held the expression of some sort of unending sadness, and I instantly felt pity for it. “How are you tonight, milady?”

She seemed surprised by my tender and considerate tone. “Are you not scared?”

“No,” I answered back. “I am not scared, you were once a woman, and only now has ugliness and death taken hold of you. It will only be so long that I will join you, and perhaps I will look just as wretched as you.”

Her mouth creaked a cobwebbed laugh, and
it seemed as if this were the first time in a long time her mouth had been used in such a way. “You are the first in many years not to be frightened by me. Only a few were not scared, and they were mainly angry. Another merely indifferent.”

It was strange, but interesting to me, that as she spoke and we spoke her body seemed to right itself. Every time I blinked, something fixed itself. Her exploded eye closed in on itself, regaining its proper form. Her eye that had been hanging pulled itself back into the socket. Her left arm reappeared, good as new, and the sores disappeared as if a strong wind blew them away like pebbles.

It was a long time before our conversation came to a close. What had been a horrid figure now was a beautiful woman, who seemed at ease with herself. She smiled as she left, and I wondered whether she would come again, or if, perhaps, this was just what she needed to enter the next world. I chuckled in wonder, and hoped that if I died, and ended up much like her, that someone should be so nice as to talk with me, and treat me like I had once been a living, breathing, beautiful part of life.

Building

The people of Babel took it upon themselves to build a tower one day, a tower that would meet God in the heavens. They built, they built, and they built, but the tower never was tall enough. Whoever stood atop it never met God, and no matter how many floors were added, no substance of It was found, only a little less air, and a little less hope in the hearts of the builders. They continued to build nonetheless, floor after floor, as high as they could make it. And it wasn't until much later, when the tower fell on itself, and the people gave up on their little project, that they understood that God was the tower, the idea of building it, and the yearning for something to believe in. That building the tower justified their belief in God, and in some ways, through the building of it, they had already met It. Only then were they satisfied, and only then could they truly see God.

Ignorance

I had read once about this madman, a man who had searched the world for the scroll of life. On this scroll was the secret of life, an unraveling of all the myths and falsities that plague our lives, and this is what he seeked. He was a very respected man, and wherever he went, he was treated like a king, and he declined invitations as much as he accepted them, so as not to embarrass himself with the riches of his fame.

Anyhow, this man finally found the scroll of life, and after reading it, lost his mind in some ocean of pain, and he destroyed the scroll in a fit of this suffering. He wandered the world then, this time without purpose, and the peoples and kingdoms that had treated him like a king before now treated him like a wolf, because of the madness he now bore.

They say his face never lost this look of icy separation from the people he had stood above socially, and he did nothing except wander until the day he died. There are many myths as to what the scroll of life said, but the predominate myth is that the scroll said nothing at all, and that the secret was that there is no secret, and that, is that. Others say that the scroll of life would say something different for each person who read it, however no one will ever know what the scroll of life truly said, and from the looks of it, this is a good thing.

Samurai and Their Silly Games

A samurai confronted a peasant on a gravel road.
“Are you a man of the Emperor?” the samurai asked, fully confident of an affirmative answer. This had become a game of his, playing with the fears and perceptions of the lower-class.

“No,” the man responded dully. “I am a man of the fields.” With his wisdom, the farmer noticed the confused and angered expression of the samurai, so he explained further, “I have never seen this emperor of your, though my land seems to lie in his jurisdiction. However, I see these fields every day. I tend them, sow them, harvest them…the earth has become who I am.” He shrugged his shoulders indifferently. “How am I even to know this emperor exists anyway?”

The samurai was much angered by this last question and even drew his sword. “Of course, the emperor exists!” He raged angrily, firing back with a spirited argument, while the peasant eyed the spectacle emptily.

After the samurai was done, and he was breathing indignant lungs full of air, the farmer asked again coolly, “So you have seen this Emperor then?”

The samurai did not even answer this question, unless you call a quickly raised and even more quickly lowered sword an answer. The peasant’s head fell obediently to the earth, as the body wearily followed.

Of course, the samurai had never seen the Emperor before, and he was maddened that this man, this commoner, would have him question something such as this! However, he could not fight the pain of ignorance that ate at him, and he would never play a game such as this again.

The years past like a meteor in the sky, and soon the samurai was old and gray, and his family had either died or left to faraway, more prosperous areas of the world. Not a day went by that this old samurai did not think of this farmer, and the words he had said. And it wasn’t until a visit to the capital city, where his son lived, that he finally saw the Emperor, or rather his idea of the Emperor materialized in reality, that he had killed another man for.

The Emperor was around four feet tall, a meager seven years of age, and though brilliance may have shone in the young Emperor’s eyes, the old samurai could do nothing but shed ancient, frozen tears of shame.