ONCE I HAD a John Lewis sofa, golf clubs and an accountant; I had long hair also and spoke ill of democracy. That's like wearing brogues with a bobble hat, a dress code with discernment. If politicians gushed platitude or rock stars sang Bing Crosby, my ears closed. My time was kept simple and I listened only to Miles Davis. I shied away from disturbance, rarely considered life's meaning or suffocated in backwaters of paranoia and conspiracy – that's clever clogs craziness for those who like to tread on cracks in the pavement. Down such cracks slip tall tales.
Not long before now, unexpectedly, I was thrown into homespun Christian belief, a private equation that involved only me and my God, the Most High. No church attendance, not much else for that matter. It happened after I moved from Bucharest to Sibiu's tranquility. There I spun city streets like a tossed coin. Circular walks around cobbles and close quarters, church towers and cafes leaning in, days spent pacing the solitude I had sought. Solitude collapsed to dark repentance as I confronted the mess and confusion that had enveloped my life. Standing outside Sibiu's orthodox cathedral one evening, I realised the coin I tossed had spun to rest down one of those pavement cracks. A tall tale of eternal life.
One year later, another tall tale: the world banjaxed. Governments took foolhardy decisions in the midst of what they termed a pandemic. Nothing was exactly random but something wasn't right. Not only governments awry but people, not only people but friends, amongst whom I witnessed a desecration of aspiration. Wannabe disciples of Rumi who railed against oil spillage because the earth’s bio-system is, oh, so organic, drove to a makeshift tent erected in a municipal car park to receive synthetic serum delivered by someone likely on the dole the previous week! Yogi friends allowed their syringed bodies to whistle like rusty bellows and histrionic poets recited Corinthian pillar imagery yet swilled council house bungalows through their veins.
My mother's broadside of abuse hit home: arrogant refusal, she said, recklessly selfish. Many agreed with her, followed the science and flooded social media with their condemnation. Newspaper editors sharpened their knives, a Prime Minister announced he was losing patience. Yet nothing could make their hollow medical homilies make sense. Besides, such pronounced fear of death sullied the aftertaste of my new faith, as yet novice and desultory, but I knew it triumphed over all else. Jonah inside the belly of the fish for three days spewed onto dry land; the Son of Man, nailed to a tree, the stone guarding His tomb rolled away. I had experienced a New Jerusalem tumble from the skies with a personalised number plate: the kingdom of heaven was now within me. Anyone pushing a junkie's needle to promise me life must be sham.
A friend contacted me out of the blue with an avalanche of enquiry. “All these conspiracy facts I used to go on about,” she messaged. “Admit I was right. Horribly right.”
I was in no hurry to admit that. The Matrix and reptilian shapeshifters are yarns too fragmentary to account for much in a world where capitalism rules okay. A rapacious elite wanting to depopulate its customer base just didn't make sense: greedy others accumulate wealth at my expense so I have to survive. I reckoned there was time enough to measure out the rest of my days listening only to Miles Davis.
Dissonance and rabbit holes. Outside in, downside up. A relentless volley of text to and fro with my friend and a schooling for which I had no preparation. Every rug pulled from under my feet, every certainty held vanished. Bewildered and bruised, I nosedived into a world of intricate patterns of falsity and deception, of unexplained intent masterminded by wolves in sheep's clothing, criminal turncoats hoodwinked or bribed by the secret societies, any number of them.
Secrecy hides in the dark. “Let us all swear an oath,” agreed the Watchers in the Book of Enoch, “and all bind ourselves by mutual imprecations not to abandon this plan but to do this thing.” Long before the days of Noah, these Watchers, two-hundred fallen angels, planted their seed in the daughters of men, so they say, and took oaths of secrecy. “To do this thing” has been the model ever since for those who tear the world apart. How else but secrecy, or conspiracy, to explain the cast, set list and plot found in the Book of Revelation. Today these oaths of secrecy are like fuse wire exposed, live and lethal.
I can't detect the join still – where it is demonic power ends and man's disobedience to the Most High begins. The definition of conspiracy theory is located at this juncture; the discovery of this unseen line provided for me, and my friend, proof that everything written in the Bible is true. This conspiracy of the dark meant that a big time faith must be acquired and then stepped up a gear.
Strange to say, even now I cannot see any difference between the old me, yet to be distressed by a bucking bronco ride of alarming discovery, and the new. Now the world lies askew, but do I really know any more of it today than I did yesterday? It's the same me, it's the same world, but I am seduced by the tree of life and no longer the tree of knowledge. I see demonic intent and man's rebellion, the motive and the method. I see the desolation and abomination, the alluvion of the world's catastrophe. But I see the light of the world who was nailed to the tree of life and rose again to conquer death. This light can never be extinguished.
But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.
This is my testimony: conspiracy and faith, the darkness and the marvellous light. A wonderful tale, a tall tale, but it's all true.
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