vespidazed

Battery Acid (Jolteon)

  • she/her

Profile pic SpoonyCatt@twitter

🔞 34 y/o + plural + bipolar 2/PSTD

Headline will be name of person in icon.

Just some bug therians chasing a kinder world.

CWs: frequent drug use talk.

(Kisses @QuakeRoc, @NONBINARY, @QueerFurries, Beas, @FlyFeline)


hellhounds
@hellhounds

When I was alive, the idea of Angels were terrifying. Heaven scared the shit out of me.

I didn't get how you could have any kind of perfection. I especially didn't get how you got perfection in a place that people insisted was in any way exclusive to who it did or didn't let in.

I couldn't imagine a place that could lock out a loved one and still call itself perfect.

You got enough faiths and myths promising it in other shades, too. Not a one ever gave me an answer to what that meant, either.

You don't have a frame of reference for perfect in an imperfect world. The only answer I ever got was some handwaved "better than this."

I came back again to the thought of an exclusive, perfect afterlife. A place that could have you, and maybe not others you cared for. And even if it did have them, perfect would insist it had them at your best for you, not necessarily the best for them.

I got to thinking of heaven as a place where you just got locked in your own head, watching illusions of what you wanted to experience. Perfection through falsehood. Ultimate, blissful hyperreality.

I didn't want to spend forever staring up at an empty sky, watching shadows of what I loved. That's all I could see in the idea of a heaven. Infinite, empty, disconnected contentment.

When I arrived here, when this place offered itself as imperfect, all I could do was break down into tears of relief.


pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

decades ago I learned of a poem by American writer Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning", that (in part) explores this paradox about the notion of an eternal Heaven or Paradise: for the idea to have any appeal at all, it needs to contain such things as we value here on Earth—trees, fruit, rivers—and yet all of these things, on Earth, are inextricably mixed up with Death. fruit exists in order to fall, and propagate more trees; rivers empty themselves into the ocean, and are rivers no more. so...what happens to these things in Heaven? how can they make any sense?

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?

this image of fruit that never falls and rivers that never find any shore feels (to me anyway, and to Stevens) strange and unnatural. "Death is the mother of beauty" is Stevens's thesis; he can't imagine life and beauty without the participation of Death, and yet if there's any one thing that Christians seem to want more than anything else from their Heaven it's the complete absence of Death—for they have equated Death to sin, and love that Bible quote about the wages of sin being Death. which perplexes me, because Death comes to everyone certainly? even the people who aggressively advertise themselves as "saved" all eventually die, but I suppose the terrible thing is that it must always take them by surprise.

at any rate Heaven has never seemed quite so tempting a destination ever since I learned about "Sunday Morning" (and that was, gosh, more than twenty-five years ago). ironically I still experimented with Christian conversion anyway, but it was God I wished to find, not Heaven; banking on the certitude of Heaven always felt vaguely sinful to me. isn't that equivalent to pride? isn't it prideful and therefore the worst possible sin to assert that you're guaranteed a slot in Heaven? but the hardline Christians don't do much else with their time, it seems sometimes.

~Chara of Pnictogen


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