The Portrait of Finn, the Druid

Finn was sixteen when he made the vow that would define the ruin and rapture of his life.

He had nothing to distinguish him from the sea of bland adolescent faces—sallow skin, a lumpy nose, oily hair that curled at the ends without charm. His eyes were a muddy grey bearing no particular cunning or light. He was plain average, had no useful talents, could not sing, dance, draw, or debate. He was invisible to girls and ignored by boys. He was an introvert, a loner and a mediocrity to boot; a loser on the spectrum and he knew it. However, he was acutely conscious of one special talent and one overriding urge, namely the uncanny ability to observe with finest discretion and an almost unreal rage to be free to achieve is dream.

And that was TRUTH. He sought, the unvarnished TRUTH of which all truths were but pleasing lies. Not the truths of everyday facts. Not the beliefs as the accepted delusions of society. He wanted to know what originated the illusion of real fact— TRUTH itself, the logic of the yet unidentified timeless, spaceless universal procedure that emerges the matrix of everyday cognizable reality.

And so one night, standing in front of his dusty bedroom mirror, chest heaving with adolescent hubris, Finn pressed a trembling palm to his chest and whispered the words that would damn him, save him, and consume him:

"TRUTH or death."

It was no poetic oath. It was a vow, a contract with the spirit of the void. He knew that realizing his vow would cost him his life. But that was OK. He would eventually die anyway because his genes intended it that way.

Soon after, in a moment equal parts joke and yearning, Finn asked his only pal —a reedy, chaos mongering nerd with paint-flecked fingers and eyes that never quite aligned because refracting a different frequency of the spectrum— “Paint me as I truly am.”

The boy laughed as though Finn were mad—which, in time, he would become—but agreed.

A week later, Finn gazed upon the canvas, expecting mockery or horror. Instead, what he saw was the portrait of an awesomely beautiful pure sixteen-year-old girl. She, it seemed, was his Truth as naïve adolescent wish personified, and would become the ever evolving mirror of his innermost Truth, of his true self.

Sophie, that’s the name Finn gave her, was unbearably beautiful. She seemed almost luminous, unreal, exquisite. Her wonderful blue eyes shimmered with stillness, ancient, eternal and untouched. Her posture was grace; her expression, pure and serene. It was not romantic beauty—it was sacred.

Finn, was smitten, hooked, speechless, emptied. He did not laugh. He did not blink. He took the portrait home in silence, climbed to the attic, and hung it beneath a cobwebbed beam.

“You are TRUTH, my lovely” he whispered, trembling. “And I will go to the ends of the world and beyond to find you.”

So Finn began his journey to TRUTH which, so the ancients claimed, was sharp as a razor’s edge and difficult to traverse. He started by reading books. Towers of them. Philosophy, physics, metaphysics, pataphysics, the varied religious fantasies with or with god, neurology, poetry, mythology, anthropology, the multiple theories of emergent self-organising systems. He read until the words swam in his eyes and his body slumped with exhaustion. He searched relentlessly for the key, the code, the magic mantra that would reveal TRUTH, naked, yet bare of human artifice.

But every system he examined revealed its seams. Every human theory contradicted itself. Certainty collapsed into paradox. And always the something he sought was missing.

Still, he pursued his goal relentlessly, single mindedly, year after year, failure after failure, from time to time achieving a minor success that served to keep him motivated and focussed.

He turned to the mystics, the self-professed finders of old. In India, he sat at the feet of white-robed gurus who enchanted themselves and their devotees with talk of self and no-self, of the delusion of ignorance and the illusion of awakening, of bondage and liberation. In deserts and mountains, he found spaced out ecstatic Sufi dancers, Tibetan monks entranced with chanting, jungle shamans who feigned transmutation. They offered visions, mantras, riddles, salvation scams. They smiled with teeth worn by time and spoke as if they stood on the edge of divine knowing.

But Finn saw through them.

Their truths were enchanting lies, self-serving human survival constructs. Their visions were not revelations, but distractions, even anaesthetics. Soothing masks crafted to comfort the frightened and orientate the bewildered. Their peace was not wisdom—it was surrender. They did not seek TRUTH. They fled, indeed liberated themselves from it into the beautiful lie that so delights.

And so Finn turned from them all. He understood that to find TRUTH he had to remove the lie, that thin distractive cosmetic layer that makes brief human existence bearable, sometimes even enjoyable. TRUTH, he realized, had to be distilled directly from nature whose seeming beauty and meaning were but superimposed human artifice.

He wandered the world, alone, mind blazing, body withering. He gave up comfort, gave up love, gave up all paths but the one that sucked him inward, downward into the darkness of knowledge of the self not yet conscious.

And each time Finn returned to his attic changed, he found the image in his portrait, his TRUTH, changed.

At first, subtle. Her eyes grew sharper, her mouth thinner. The softness began to harden. Then came the visible decay.

Her cheeks hollowed. Her skin, once luminous, turned pale, then waxen, then ashen. The light, the hope in her eyes faded. Her hair, once silken gold, coarsened and dimmed. Her posture stiffened. Her smile vanished.

Still, he kept her because she, his very own TRUTH, fascinated him. She was his all, his obsession, his only guide to TRUTH, the very Self of his self.

“She is revealing the true,” he whispered, breathless. “She is peeling back the lie. And I am she!”

Years passed. Finn grew gaunt. Friends stopped calling. His parents, long dead, left behind an empty house that grew colder with each season. He scrawled notes in mad journals, rejected sleep, subsisted on rice, tobacco and silence. The attic became his contemplatory. The portrait his deity.

As Finn stripped away the flimsy veil of human made ethics, cast off the moral illusions of self-righteous elders, rejected even the comforting frames of logic and science, the decaying adolescent truth in the portrait descended, indeed sucked him down into the black void of his innermost being from which the bright white lies that identified him emerged.

Now she, TRUTH, had become stern, menacing, unforgiving. Her eyes reflected contemptuous, mocking, sceptical intelligence—loveless, merciless and cold, like nature itself. Her beauty had long vanished, replaced by a ghastly gravity that drew the eye with dread.

Her skin, the lie’s illusion, cracked like old clay. Her teeth yellowed, crooked, protruding like a predator’s fangs. One eye sagged. Her hair became a nest of grey tangles. Her hands—now gnarled and claw-like—clutched a twisted staff that had not been painted before.

Finn stared at her, dolefully.

“You are revealing what you truly are, and what I truly am!” he said, gratefully.

“She, my TRUTH, is the lie undone,” he wrote in a torn notebook. “She is the beauty raped, the comfort murdered. She is the bitter truth of TRUTH. Terrible. Naked. Unbearable, but true.”

And still—he loved her, as he loved himself. For she was he. Her dreadful, fearsome image reflected the stage of his journey to TRUTH.

When Finn, the druid turned eighty, he looked in the mirror and saw someone else entirely.

His face had grown smooth. His eyes, deeply blue, were clear. His white hair, long and brushed, framed a face projected absolute stillness, serenity. He had become a quite beautiful old man.

But inside, the fire yet burnt fiercely. The calm was an afterimage of chaos. He was not healed. He was consumed. He yet craved to merge as one with his goal.

Finn knelt before his portrait, a slave. He touched his forehead to the ground in acknowledgement of absolute subservience.

“It is you,” he whispered. “You hold the way. The key to TRUTH because you are TRUTH.”

The ageing woman in the portrait was now a vision of nightmare, terrifying to behold. She, TRUTH, no longer looked human. That grotesque image, and which reminded him of a statue of Kali he had once seen in a temple in Varanasi—cloaked in skulls, blood dripping from her tongue, trampling men, venal and mendacious, beneath her feet, now slowly morphed into a vacuous outline of a turbulence in an unimaginable vast ocean of fluctuating momenta that hinted at the possibility of endless combinations that self-observed as identifiable realities.

TRUTH, Finn realised, was a ubiquitous procedure of constraints, a blind automaton whose output happens as the cosmos of transient lies.

He had seen through it all. The sweet stories. The noble causes. The beguiling religions and beautiful sciences. He had raped the lie, killed the illusion. For they were but transient human make believe, unworthy of worship.

And now he saw her, in full.

She was TRUTH. Not a pearl, but a razor. Not a mother, but a maw.

She had taken everything, indeed thingness itself, from him.

And shown him HER, the matrix of everyday reality as human illusion.

Then Finn decided to end the journey. One night he climbed the stairs for the final time, listening to the wind howling outside. The moon hung low and red.

The portrait waited in the dark.

She was unspeakable now. Not merely old, but ancient, but degraded to cosmic dust. Her body no longer followed human symmetry. It was just a sea of constrained excitations. Where the eyes had once shone so brightly there gaped 2 black holes that invited into endless vacuous eternity.

Still, Finn imagined he discerned a sarcastic grin and smiled back.

“You win, my love” he said softly. “But so do I.”

He pulled a lighter from his pocket. The tiny flame it created flared—yellow, hot, righteous, greedy.

He held the flame to the canvas.

For a moment, nothing.

Then smoke curled, the oil caught, and the fire licked that hideous face. Her seeming grin flickered. The flames spread, devouring the portrait like dry leaves in autumn.

Finn sat beneath her as she burned. He felt no fear. No pain. Only awe mixed with emptiness. He had achieved his goal. He was free, liberated and that smelt sweetly.

He had seen her.

And she had been him.

TRUTH, at last.

Not beauty. Not light.

But revelation of emergence and de-mergence as terrible, glorious, hideous never-ending procedure.

The fire reached the rafters. The air filled with choking smoke. The floor creaked beneath him.

Finn, now still and smiling, closed his eyes.

And in that final breath, he whispered what he had vowed so many years ago:

“Truth or death.”

No regret.

गतेगतेनपारनिर्वाणस्वाहा

Gate gate na pāra nirvāṇa svāhā

Gone, gone, no beyond, extinguished, so be it

Inferential Perception, truth, and the Relativization of Reality