They are the empty ones: So filled with hatred, fear, and bitterness that their bile overflows, viscous and greasy, coating everything they touch and trailing behind them as they lurch and slump, slug-like, across the earth.
They are the empty ones: Unable to satiate the gnawing hunger of the vast empty place in their soul, with jealous rage they try to fill it with hearts ripped from the breasts of the innocent with their vast engines of hatred and death.
They are the empty ones: Not content in their own misery they spread the word of hatred and fear so that, godlike in their own minds, the whole world will be reborn in their image as they crawl their cancerous emptiness into its every corner.
In some sense the empty ones are right even in the greatest declaration of their fatal hubris. We do create reality - though it is not the reality we all share, but rather it is only the perceived reality in which each of us lives. For some of us this reality becomes a dark place where we lock away the warmth of our hearts in order to protect us from our own fears. Where can you go when the world has become your cage?
I pity the empty ones. I cry for both the wretched creatures that they have become and for the awe-inspiring beauty that they could have been. Who knows? Perhaps some day they could still become it. I will hold out hope.
There are times when I must remember to fill myself with truth and beauty and joy so that I, too, do not start to become empty. I fill myself with the beauty of the life I have lived: The arched backs and first breaths of my children being born, the night when I first saw the woman who would become my wife, and the unique forms in which love manifests itself for each person that I care about in my life, the simple pleasures of childhood. I fill myself with the belief that all people are truly beautiful, even in their tragedy.
Music has always been a part of me as well. I am filled with the transcendent awe of hearing the swirling breath of the Church performing Under the Milky Way in the dark with the night sky arching above me. I am filled with the crushing frailty of Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel revealing secrets for an hour and a half in front of people who understand. I am filled with listening to Stars' Nightsongs as I drive around the lake at night through the rainy Seattle streets, lights refracting into blurred circles on the windshield and beating down on the roof in a soft purr. I am filled with the haunting and tragic beauty of Alone Again Or by Love, the utterly unearthly refrain of Panis et Circenses by Os Mutantes, and the distant ache of Nico's Frozen Warning. I will reach out to people with my own music as well, always seeking to find those rare intimate connections with strangers willing to share their vulnerablity and feel what I feel, and if I am very fortunate perhaps I will bring just a little bit of beauty into the world myself.
So long as I can hold on to these things I will always be free, while the empty ones lurch on unable able to find happiness no matter how much they devour in their insatiable search for something they, in all likelihood, will never understand. If there is a struggle between us, then I have already won.