MYTH XXIII - I AM WHAT I AM

I AM WHAT I AM - by Prerna Gupta

Introduction

When men and women ceased to be animals and began to think they asked questions.

What is the universe, and how did it begin?

What is mankind, and how did it begin?

Who am I? Who are we?

What happens when we die?

Why do crops and trees produce grain and fruits each year?

These questions were asked by men all over the world. The answers lead to the creation of the first myths. myths are a set of metaphors that provide a community with a set of answers to these questions. The importance of myths lies in the fact that these essential questions need to be answered. Even though no myth answers them fully it sustains man. Every person has an inherent myth. Our myth doesn’t really provides us with the flawless answer or the eternal truth, but somehow it subdues our search for these answers. I don’t want to label this subduing as something either good or bad. But it sustains a person while one is on a pursuit of the answers to these basic questions for oneself. It gives one something to hold on to. we might not believe in any myth completely but unconsciously we believe in some parts of it. These parts might not even belong to one myth, they might belong to a set of myths. Also, a myth is not only for an individual.They are for a community. This adds to their power. A group of people believe in it collectively and therefore the myth sustains them collectively.

They are a complex form of literature that is made up of various kinds of elements. It is formed by different kinds of symbols, motifs, archetypes, emblems, mythemesetc. My myth deals with something that is quite close to my heart. It deals with something that troubles me. I can call it a search for the answers to my questions about my existence. What I have written is a myth that I have created for myself. it is something that I believe in. I don’t really believe in aliens ruling over us or we being manufactured. But I believe in the inherent philosophy of my myth. The fact that we need to look beyond our limited perceptions. We need to be able to look at the larger picture. With that we are free to do what we want to do with ourselves. We should believe in ourselves. There is nothing much that limits us except for our own fears and ideas. Things that we feel limit us might exist more in our minds than anywhere else.

Part 1

1.

A letter written by Fauth to his friend Quad in the yr. 18, 934 after the proposal for his dream project was accepted by the Scientists guild of the planet Yuran.

“I feel happy for you. The guild has finally issued you the grant for your project. Guadon was not in favor of your project. He did everything to prevent the jury members passing the decision in your favor. Frankly, I think he is rather foolish. I believe any intelligent person can see his vaucuousness. You should not let his activities trouble you.

So, when are you starting the project? Have you chosen your assistants? I wish I could come over to celebrate with you but I am rather caught up with this work over here.

I am anxious to see those creatures function. I wonder what they’ll be like. This project has been eventful right from the beginning. Do you remember the day when you tasted that strange dream… “

2.

Company name: Lofec technologies

Sponsor: The Atman Party

Code name: Homo sapiens

Project brief: To study the properties of visual culture by the creation of a new species named as Homo Sapiens.

Methodology:

1. To design the form and structure of Homo Sapiens. Provide them with increased visual capabilities. One should exist externally and one should exist in an internal form. The other capabilities of this creature should be kept limited. He should have the sound range of 20 to 20,000 hertz. His capabilities of touch should be limited to tangible objects. Olfaction should let them distinguish around 10,000 different odors, whereas the tongues should just be able to taste salty, sweet, bitter, sour and umami.

2. The bodies of these creatures should be molded with wax and baked in infrared light. They should then be cooled with ultraviolet water. Their body parts should have micro thin sensory wires attached to them which should serve a dual purpose. It should keep them rooted on the ground and it should allow us to monitor their physical movement.

3. To design the habitat for their existence. The design should be in a form which can sustain these creatures. It should have sonic machinery spread in its atmosphere which will record the various sounds. It should have two kinds of terrain primarily – terra firma or dry land and vast bodies of water.

4. Homo Sapiens should have a control unit in his body which will be connected to our main system. He should be autonomous.

Project status: In operation

The revolution of the Apuns has been a disaster for the Manush race. Our existing society is formed by two classes, namely the freeman and slave, the patrician and plebeian, the lord and serf, the guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed. We live in a destabilized society which has made life unfulfilling, subjecting the Manush to indignities; this has led to wide-spread psychological suffering. The continuation of this system cannot and is not acceptable to us. Apuns and Manush have stood in constant opposition to one another; they have carried on an unending fight. We therefore advocate a revolution against the Apun system. This revolution may or may not be ethical: it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few light years.

We will take our rebellion to the next level. We shall create warriors like the world has never seen. We will process our breath. The breath of the rebel. We will create a training ground for them. The place will make the toughest beings in this universe. This training ground will be called the Earth.

By Quad

Part 2

Quad's journal –

Today is the day. The time has come. The production of the first couple to go on earth was completed yesterday. They are ready to be transported. Just the last set of requirements. The sentient into the sapience. The incarnation of our breath. The breath fired with our suffering and agony. I see a fractal of cocoons. Beginning from a woman’s womb, where it bathes in her blood and strengthens in her pain. Acquiring a body of its own. I can imagine it in motion. Moving in and out in his blue and red insides. The body will contain it but the breath will sustain it. The breath and the body…

I wait in impatience to see what cannot be seen, I wait to hear its voice, to hear his cry, to hear him sing with joy. I wonder what it will be like… the first set of warriors… tamed and trained. Ready to fight and survive. They shall lead us to victory. Towards freedom and liberty.

Leonardo Schultz's diary –

6, Kristiania, Norway, 1875

I must have been six years old. I would breathe on the window of my old room and make figures with my fingers on it. One day I drew a “window”. I imagined in my mind jumping from it and to excitedly run through the fields until I reached a room. I opened the door and saw a little girl sitting there. She must have been the same age as me. I don’t remember how she looked but I do remember her delight. I asked her a million questions. But she understood my curiosity and listened to me patiently. I would tell her about the sun, the leaves, the sparrow, and the stars. I told her that I wanted to become an artist when I grow up. We talked about my parents and my house. We both hated mathematics. After being content with our conversations I would run and climb back through my window.

Part 3

Leonardo Schultz's diary –

35 yrs, Berlin, Germany, 1910

As I grew older I kept on moving further away from the religion and the idea of god. Further educations and studies initiated me into the questions and doubts of purpose of man on earth. I never really believed in god. Unlike others I did not feel his presence in the world around me, instead I felt like a pawn. I felt like I was being played with. I thought that whoever created us created us for a personal motive of his own. It had nothing to do with the kind of ideas that popular religions passed on to the masses. These ideas were made by a group of people just to keep the masses in control. However, thoughts like these and the books that I read, contributed to my reclusive behavior. I never experienced what one calls a ‘family life’ as I found myself in an orphanage as soon as I was capable enough to understand the world around me.

The five years that succeeded my expulsion from the orphanage, I spent in a constant struggle to establish myself as an artist. I would go without food for days. I slept on the streets as I could not afford the rent. The work was scanty. I was trying hard to make the two ends meet. This was the time when I was put in jail in Munich, for my support of the communist movements. It was a time of great political and economic instability in Germany. It was 1932 and anti Semitic sentiments were on a rise. National Socialist German Workers Party was gaining widespread popularity with Hitler and his propaganda. I had read the history of my country and of nearly all nations. I knew about the class struggles and their economic conflicts. I comprehend quite clearly the credo of communism. I felt very passionately for my community. I wanted my paintings to help in the revolutionary mechanism. I wanted people to think about what was happening around them. I wanted them to see Hitler’s hypocrisy and his mad intentions. I believed that dictatorship could never do any good, a nation needs democracy and freedom if it wanted to progress in the right direction.

My paintings were my tool. They were my way to fight. I realized that the times I was living in would change the course of history of my country but still this feeling kept coming back to me. This strange feeling which always gave me a sense of unease. I felt I was incomplete, incomplete not because I lacked something but because I had more of something else which instead took a part of me. It wasn’t just me inside myself. There was another being with me. I was not one person but two people living together in one body. The conversations that I had with myself always perplexed me. The reminded me of the two entities. Ego and the alter ego? Body and soul? Me and myself?

Who is the real me? Why do we have an alternate self? Why cant it just be me?

Quad's journal –

Everything is going according to plan. The earth is producing warriors of the utmost supremacy. It is just a matter of time now. The next war on earth will complete the number that we need to wage the battle against the Apuns. It is getting increasingly difficult for us to keep the warriors in secrecy. We should be very cautious.

Part 4

Leonardo Schultz's diary –

76, Skoyen, Oslo, 1943

Entartete Kunst Hitler

ART

OFFENCE

Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in January 1933. Art has become punishable. A systematic campaign to force the Nazi aesthetic on art is on. I don’t know how to escape it. Art no longer expresses the feelings and emotions of an artist. It just expresses the whims and fancies of the Nazis. They have stolen much of the art, some is being sold and the others are being burnt.

Seventy years after I first started writing this diary my hair has gone grey, my skin has shriveled up, my limbs are weak and I have become obese. Definitely not much similarity is left to the way I looked when I was an adolescent. I have changed. Things have changed. I am not rotting on the streets of Berlin. Probably if my parents were alive they would be happy to see what I have become. They would be happy to see my success. People call me a genius. I daresay I agree with them. I have achieved some things I desired but something are still left. last autumn, i inaugurated the gallery built in my name in Norway. I was surrounded by countless people who were murmuring my name and asking why I painted on the themes love, anxiety, pain, fear and death. questions about my childhood. They asked me why I lived like a Spartan surrounded only by my paintings. Reasons for depicting god as black as a burnt charcoal, why I made him look like an all permeating ghost. I told them that the saints and sages over time committed the ignominy of making us believe that God is something supreme that is bright and colorful. All that is wrong.

He is someone just like us.

The Talmud teaches:

When the baby is still unborn

An angel takes it for a ride on his wings

And shows him whatever there is to know and learn

He reveals the secrets of life and death to him.

Then at the hour of birth,

With the angel’s kiss on infants forehead

He is benighted

the child returns to his slumber again

The rest out lives are spent

trying to wake up

remembering

what the angel showed us

I woke up late. It is raining hard and it is so dark that I won't be able to paint. The papers and the radio have brought to me the news about the war. It is very distressing. It will happen sooner or later. Germany will lose. I hate to see what will become of the people of my land. Hitler has eluded them. The war is the ultimate Hitlerian catastrophe. It can't get worse than this. Anyways, I have learned to keep politics on a side. My health has been on a decline lately. I don’t know how long I am going to survive this. But I know for sure that it won't be long. I can feel it coming. The sickness is getting harder for me to bear each passing day.

Part 5

“I AM WHO I AM”

I am the son of Leonardo Schullz. Hereby, I lay down the foundations of a new creed.

We have accomplished our freedom from our creator. After a long and tiring struggle creation has achieved its independence. No longer are we puppets in the hands of our creator. No longer are we bound by his selfish motives. No longer do we have to bear the weight of his burdens.

We are free to become what we want to become. The breath, the spirit and the consciousness exists now within each and everyone by themselves, the uncreated creator who does not need to depend on anything or anyone.

The breath, sentience and simply the joy of existence so cherished by us has an astonishing and unsettling genesis. The Manush race on the Planet of Yuran manufactured Homo Sapiens. These people had lived under the oppression of Apuns for ages. They wanted to rebel. But they had sparse resources. Except for the highly advanced technologies and the will and determination to do something they didn’t have much. Quad, a senior Manush scientist looked at the butterfly and thought to himself. He looked at the caterpillar in the cocoon. He realized that this was what they needed. They needed a cocoon. They needed a place that would keep their breath safe till it is ready to become the butterfly. Till it is prepared to attain itself, to become what it is supposed to become. He suggested a brilliant plan. He designed a system by which they would manufacture these creatures who would process their breath inside themselves. After it completes its time in the cocoon it would become itself. It would become the glorious warrior, the spectacular butterfly.

Strangely enough humans have always been aware of something that doesn’t quite fit, something that was not right. Every person has this uneasy feeling once in a while, it comes and they make it go away. But, it keeps coming back. The uneasiness was due to the irony of their lives. Man lived his life in the pursuit of the purpose of his life. his life on earth. He chased something that he could essentially never attain. Not because of any other reason but because of the virtue of absence. How could he attain something that didn’t exist. There was no individual purpose to be achieved on earth. He just had to keep his breath inside him and live with it. That was all that he was required to do. All he had to do was breathe. Make the air move in and out of him to sustain the soul in him. That’s all.

So we, the humans were nothing but cocoons for a long time. Till the time came to fight for our freedom.

After a long and fierce battle with the Apuns, the Manush won. They were free from the oppression of the Apuns at last. They organized themselves and created a new nation for themselves.

After the time in the cocoon was over and the Manush had enough warriors, the first battle took place. The earth-sent warriors, as trained to, fought endlessly and after a long and fierce struggle won the battle for the Manush. They organized themselves and created a new nation for themselves. At last, they were free from the oppression of the Apuns. At last man had achieved his true purpose, his true goal. My father, Leonardo Schullz, was one of the last to reach Yuran, but he was also one of those who fought the hardest. His experiences and observations during both his lifetimes led him to the conclusion that man’s condition could only be remedied by revolution. So he organized an army and rebelled. The second and last battle took place. This time the Manush were also defeated. Humans were finally free.

(THE END)