When a Moth Devours Everything You Love

Photo by Jerry Zechariah on Unsplash

A moth devoured everything I loved. Sometimes this happens and when it does if you are not already in Suffering School you get there straight away.

Before the moth devoured everything, I thought I knew about life and its ups and downs.

I thought (I laugh to think about it now), that I knew what it was to carry pain. And I firmly believed that in every life there were good days and bad days. I didn’t know that a far more common pattern, at least for me now, is a few good days surrounded by a lot of bad years.

But this is not to complain.

The moth did me a favor. It hurts to say that but it’s true. Of course, this does not mean that I would not give everything to regain what was lost. I would, but I can’t because that is not how it works. The moth devours and then you learn to live without whatever it was that was devoured. I won’t tell you what I lost, but I will tell you that they were worldly things, the material along with the non-material, like status and confidence in my own convictions. Now they are gone.

I won’t go into detail because if I start talking about what I can’t have while I still want it, I run the very real risk of glamorizing and then glamorizing turns to craving and then the craving turns into torture so bad you would do almost anything to get for yourself whatever it is you are attached to. It’s a losing proposition.

I had to train myself to do this years earlier when I gave up smoking cigarettes— to remind myself over and over again how much I hated cigarettes and how much they hated me. Once the addiction was broken I could hardly look at the things, remembering how I let them degrade me. They determined how I felt, what kind of day I was having, what my mood would be. How sad to realize all the many small and big decisions I based on what was best for cigarettes and not me.

When I quit I did it on my own, the moth wasn’t involved because that is not how the moth works.

The moth takes away the good things.

To be fair, the moth does not judge things on their merits only on the effect those things have on you. If the effect is negative, the moth devours them.

Still, as hard as it is, it is better that I not have the things I lost. At least not until I get over my inability to separate self-image from public-image and self-worth with net-worth.

I had unwittingly allowed ephemeral things to define me and they did—they told me that because I had them I was (of course) a winner. This made me smug, and turned me into somewhat of an absurd character—like Podsnap in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend:

Mr Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr Podsnap's opinion….He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all other things, with himself.

Same! I also stood high in my own opinion. And I could never make out why everybody else was not satisfied. Couldn’t they just follow my example and do exactly what I did?

That’ll fix their problems. So obvious!

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence….'I don't want to know about it; I don't choose to discuss it; I don't admit it!' Mr Podsnap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him.

Guilty! I also swept difficult problems behind me because, I, like Podsnap, set a brilliant social example which meant that, well, I could do that:

Mr Podsnap's world was not a very large world, morally; no, nor even geographically…. he considered other countries…a mistake, and of their manners and customs would conclusively observe, 'Not English!' when, PRESTO! with a flourish of the arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept away…..

My world was small too. Really small. And whatever didn’t fit into the customs and ways of my little world, were concluded ‘Not Normal!’ and PRESTO! swept away.

As a so eminently respectable man, Mr Podsnap was sensible of its being required of him to take Providence under his protection. Consequently he always knew exactly what Providence meant.

Exactly! Providence answered to ME.

And it was very remarkable (and must have been very comfortable) that what Providence meant, was invariably what Mr Podsnap meant.

We had answers because we shared the same faith. Faith in ourselves (a nice religion to have).

His religion was called Podsnappery , while I referred to mine at the time as Reality, often starting sentences with, “The Reality is….”

These may be said to have been the articles of a faith…which… takes the liberty of calling, after its representative man, Podsnappery. They were confined within close bounds, as Mr Podsnap's own head was confined by his shirt-collar; and they were enunciated with a sounding pomp that smacked of the creaking of Mr Podsnap's own boots.

My articles of faith also were confined to my head which did not stop the moth from getting in there somehow and devouring all the doctrine and dogma that had built up over the years. Turns out that what I used to refer to as Reality folded once all the outward signs that propped it up were gone.

You may wonder what it is like to lose your religion, especially if your religion is based on yourself. It is very hard.

But then stripped of it, with my convictions gone wobbly, I had to reluctantly admit that I didn’t really want to be in a religion that had only me as a member. That may be okay for Podsnapp but I was starting to believe that I needed to ground my faith in something other than my little world.

My circus animals were all on show.

I remembered that Yeats also went through a winnowing when his circus animals deserted him. He knew, way before I did, how they were part of the show.

I did not know about the show.

And that I was worshipping it.

Players and painted stage took all my love

And not those things that they were emblems of.

And that the thing I gave my love to, the show itself, was illusory.

…..it was the dream itself enchanted me.

But I was not, as Thomas Merton reminded me, “called to an illusion…[but] to the nakedness and hunger of a more primitive and honest condition.”

The moth knew that my more naked, honest condition required an amputation.

Maybe at last being but a broken man

I must be satisfied with my heart

(maybe I should be too)

“Incidently, “ Merton goes on to say, “it is only when the apparent absurdity of life is faced in all truth that faith really becomes possible.”

My faith now reveals things rather than sweeping them away. And hard as it is, I hope to come to the point where I can thank the moth for relieving me of all the things that led me to live the life of a player, confined to a script and dependent on an audience for approval.

She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away

But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.

There is one thing I’m totally sure of though, if I had the choice of hanging out with the pre-moth me and the post-moth version, I’d always, always, always choose the latter.

Which reminds me of ladders and what Yeats says about them:

Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of my heart.

I should like to do that, to lie down here, next to Yeats on this spot of ground marked out for me.

Photo by Cyrus Crossan on Unsplash