Doing right and changing one's mind

Here’s the next picture from my book of 900 Drawing Prompts. (The previous prompt appeared on October 30.) This one's called “Lion”.

Dear diary,

I’ve never been wealthy. And being lower class used to bother me, until I started telling myself: It doesn’t matter if you have no money, so long as you have intelligence. Yet now that I’m kinda slow, cuz I’ve passed middle age, I tell myself: It doesn’t even matter if you lack intelligence, so long as you have compassion. The only problem with this new stance is that I’ve never been good at acting on my compassion. Not that I’m miserly or disinclined to feel respect for others; on the contrary, my heart overflows with love for all this world – I strongly agree, when I read at the end of William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “For every thing that lives is Holy” – but I often fail to act on my warmth, because of shyness. I worry too much about what people will think of me.

Plus I don’t wanna be that fool who thinks he’s helping when he’s really harming. I’m afraid that my generous intention will move me to, say, mow my neighbor’s lawn for him while he’s gone. Then, later in the afternoon, when he returns, I’ll be at the window in my own house, watching to see his happy reaction to my anonymous favor; but he’ll start trembling with rage and cry out so that the whole neighborhood hears him: “Who chopped down all my begonias!?” Like the lady who lives on the top floor of the building complex, in the movie Rear Window (1954), when she yells at the entire courtyard, addressing everyone collectively (even the audience), upon discovering that her cute little dog is no longer alive—this same dog that we’ve been watching her carefully wheel up to her terrace, intermittently throughout the film, by way of a pulley system attached to a wicker handbasket, not unlike the basket on the back of Ms. Gulch’s bicycle, which the little dog Toto escapes from, in The Wizard of Oz (1939)—another good movie. And Ms. Gulch bears a strong resemblance to the Wicked Witch of the West, if I’m not mistaken. So the point is that I couldn’t tell the difference between long grass and beautiful begonias; thus I mowed down my neighbor’s garden by mistake, and this shows how good intentions can end up causing much evil and mayhem in the universe.

But, this year, I went from hating Halloween to liking it. It’s my favorite holiday now. I was so afraid that our local gangs would come out of the woodwork, using the annual festival as an excuse, and turn our whole community fascist overnight. But, instead, what Halloween did is forge new pathways of communication between us lowerclassmen. Now I know all of my neighbors’ names, their hobbies and interests, their favorite books and movies, their religious beliefs, and more!

We’re scheduled to break bread together, next Tuesday. The whole lot of us. And we’ll continue to do so, regularly, till kingdom come (which is to say: until the next GREAT CHANGE interrupts us – this implies either an afterlife, or eternal death). And when I say “break bread” I mean many fine foods will be served, for man does not live on bread alone, and anyone who lives in the vicinity is welcome to partake. All you have to do is convert to our local culture, which is an offshoot of philistinism. It’s a chance to get to know your neighbors better.

But I keep wondering: Now that I’m a true believer in Halloween and no longer an infidel, what shall I dress up as, when the empire strikes back? What shall my costume be? Or, here’s a question that is ten times as interesting: What would my costume have been, had I participated just two days ago instead of cowering in my bedroom? (For I hid from the trick-or-treaters while my sweetheart tended the door and handed out candy.) Well, after many sleepless nights and countless meetings with my board of executive shareholders; plus a couple of focus groups that we engaged in, just for good measure; I’ve decided that, for this past year 2018, supposing I had dared to become an accomplice on that eve when the holiday was committed, my Halloween costume would have been [drum roll]: Sabbatai Zevi. My reason for this is as follows:

Since each individual’s life consists of a plethora of details, any summary of a given person’s being is necessarily an approximation, sometimes even verging on a lie; so any soul’s take on Sabbatai Zevi may have nothing to do with the actual truth of his existence, but since we’re focusing on my own silly misunderstanding of his life for the purpose of striking an hypothetical pose at a masquerade, I’ll tell you what the man signifies to me: Sabbatai Zevi claimed (rightly) that he was the long-awaited Messiah; then, upon being imprisoned and threatened by aggressors, he simply converted to his captors’ religion. After which he continued to prophesy flamboyantly. That’s what I’d like to do, in our contentious times: Just keep strong for the Imagination, no matter who is pulling the levers of superpower.