TALE OF THE TEMPLE:

You benefited at my expense. I do not regard a being that would benefit willfully at the expense of a human being as being human. All this time you had the opportunity to reconcile, to atone, and to apologize. Instead you acted defensively, as though it were YOU that was disadvantaged by this undue conflict. When I demanded justice you contradicted me, and thereby contradicted Justice. You did not treat me as a friend or ally; you treated me as an adversary. This was never your right; I never consented to it. We are not borne into competition; we are borne into cooperation. Games and sports are merely a perversion of Our Nature. You maintained the veneer of companionship up until that extent when it most mattered. At that moment I saw you to have never been a companion at all, though you still expected – somehow! – the amenities that are due only to friends. You defiled this sacred Temple of Companionship that I constructed on the stones of Broken Love, and you used that same love to try to justify it, all most as though you wanted to tear it down just to salvage some part of my old misery that you had never made any attempt to prevent or to heal. You left me alone then as I leave you alone now; the difference between us is that in Solitude all you can do is destroy; I am the One Who Creates. I created both the opportunities of the past and the opportunities of the Present; the only difference was that this time I trusted you enough to allow you near to them. To your mind this temple was only ever a House to Steal from and an Arena to do Battle in. But you never had Honor in Thievery nor Sportsmanship in Competition. You simply broke the rules carved into these walls as you broke these walls. And this is the tragedy of the barbarian: that he answers to no authority higher than his own will. No one can follow his example, because the very nature of his brutality can never be pardoned by the conscience of his victims. They are AWARE of that end of his behaviour of which he remains childishly ignorant. The barbarian breaks every rule of competition, for to him all is fair in both love and war, and no crime can be committed in a fit of passion. So he never takes responsibility for his crimes of passion, and only becomes an agent of the Gods: a puppet of the winds. There is no haven of Nirvana waiting for him, and his seat in Valhalla is right beside Lucifer. He tries to justify to his victims his misdeeds, adding insult to injury and to injustice, and all the while the very nature of his competitive and ruthless arrogance precludes the possibility of objectivity upon any part but the part of the victim he addresses. Hence it is all ways the powerless that grovels before sheer fact. But it is not the “fact” as it is represented by the man of undue, stolen power. The barbarian breaks the rules of both friendship and of competition by his act of parasitic betrayal, and like the parasite he blames the Host. The Host never consented to competition, so how can he have broken the rules of Competition? He had simply made the possibility available through Friendship. Why should we listen to the barbarian’s feeble plaints of self-entitlement, as though he had the RIGHT to rape and pillage? Are we not his victims? He will break the rules but never hold himself accountable to them. He does not seem to feel he owes them to us. This is his tragedy: that he breaks the rules before we even knew the nature of the game. And then he claims to find shelter in the integrity of the Game Itself. But the Game Itself is ashamed of his behaviour. He has defiled the Arena as much as he has defiled the Temple, for he turned on his own allies; he betrayed his own team. He was never a True Fighter, but only a Poor Lover. And it was only Love – of the most narcissistic sort – that drove him to War in such a frenzy that he imagined All to be Fair in both realms.

Dm.A.A.