~On Permanence & Perseverance~
Jacob Morin
07/23/2024
Love in Dying is a novel I intend to write, about two people so madly in love with each other, & so in love with their children, & so committed to defending what they love from the violent colonial invasion of the Roman legions into Gaul.
It’s a story about war, about violence, loss, rebellion, & death. But more than anything else, it’s a story about love.
I was writing on some other note about the story the other day, how it must be relevant to the modern world in order to be understood & appreciated, & most importantly, useful (as any good book should be).
There are two major ways the story is relevant today.
The first is resistance: rebellion, revolution.
Now perhaps more than ever, we stand on the precarious edge of a drop into two devastating sides.
One side is a fall into complete global authoritarianism via the continuing onslaught of capitalism.
The other is a fall into the complete & utter annihilation & extinction of all life we know to exist in the universe.
Of course, this is the same fall, the same outcome; two sides of the same grimy coin.
Both outcomes are equally objectionable. It’s nice to imagine we could build a ladder towards the salvation of some heavenly paradise, or build some ship & sail to a new land to rebuild from lessons learned (or a spaceship to a new planet, if you want to be sadly more realistic).
But, it’s naïve. I don’t believe there is such a paradise, nor that magical land. We are stuck on that wall, & no one is coming to save us. We must save ourselves.
We have no choice but to dismantle the wall & let the oppressive systems come crashing together; to burn it all down & rise from the ashes like a phoenix. I’m talking about revolution.
But… victory is not guaranteed, nor could it occur overnight.
We, being the working-class, the so-called “global South”, the oppressed, the colonized, the penniless… we must be organized, educated, trained in fighting & first-aid among so many things. Most importantly, we must be united.
We are not ready for that yet; I don’t know when we will be. The amount of cooperation & work needed would be staggering, & it would take years to reach that level of cohesion we are still so far from. That is scary, because we don’t have that sort of time.
If I were to play prophet, to predict the future, I’d say things are only going to get a lot worse before they can get even marginally better.
That wall is going to crumble on its own, under the pressure of the world, long before we are ready. We are going to be thrown into that chaos unprepared. It’s bad enough right now… this is going to be war, famine, pestilence, fire.
The best we can do is unify & educate as much as we can, to mitigate damage.
We’re going to be running defense for a long time; then again, we always have been, so I’m not hopeless.
That’s where the other reason for relevance comes in: love. Without love, no one would strive towards anything, or defend anything they care about. There would be no art, no innovation, no medicine.
This will be a love story, but it’s not sappy. It’ll be very brutal, at times. So many soldiers die. The husband’s brother dies together with his comrade. The lover-man himself dies, & by Druidic magic, speaks to his wife one last time through a mirror in a puddle of bloody rain. He is transported across time, & their dead spirits will be led by the god Cernunnos as psychopomp, into the cavernous afterlife, together in death as they were in life.
Their legacy & love live on. Their daughter becomes a mystical healer. Their son fights in victory against the Romans at Teutoburg Forest. So time goes, as it always has.
There is no great victory for them, yet. The Romans still killed so many Gauls, & will continue to afterwards. War will plague Europe for centuries. Its people will become poisoned with hatred & greed, & throw the world into a long march of ruin & despair whose outcome & continuation grinds along now.
That is the very same battle we fight today. No doubt the seeds of that existed in Gaul & the other old lands; I have no intention of romanticizing the past. But there may be something to learn from it, about ourselves. Something that can help us today.
Where once there was love, may there be again.
And if something is loved, one must be willing to fight for it.
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