I have been having a rough shit of a time these past several weeks. When depression is at an eleven, I go silent. Y’all have heard all my crying before, so why repeat the tune?
Some days hours minutes it feels like I don’t even have the power nor the ability to breathe. All I can do is sit dumbly and stare without sight at the thing in front of me. Photons dance and neurons fire, but I can’t grok a damn thing.
Creeping up from the floor under me, the voices of the Dead and the shades of the dead speak. In those moments when I am more dead than alive, they animate me until I recover and can breathe again. I have always heard them say four words, but I have only understood the first two.
“Stay clean.”
Take the shower. Wash the face. Brush the teeth. Change clothes. Eat. Drink. Waste goes in the proper receptacles. Prepare myself with lotions and adornments. Go through the motions that the living does until I live again.
Sometimes I don’t want to. Sometimes moving feels like thumbtacks in my joints. Sometimes water feels like acid eating my skin. Sometimes I don’t feel like I’m capable of going through the day and I wonder why haven’t I stopped breathing yet. But the Dead accept no excuses. I’m going to stay clean, if not by my power, then by theirs.
I stay clean.
As the fog lifts and I start becoming less of an automaton and more of a person, I sometimes catch the third word. “Be…” Be… what? Become? I’m here, what else does the Dead want from me? That it takes a Death God to keep me alive continues to fill me with bittersweet mirth.
With the establishment of the Sanctuary of the Nine, and the resetting of most of my spiritual matters, I hear a little more clearer than before. In this most recent suffocation by depression, I finally heard all four words.
“Stay clean. Be holy.”
Da fuq?
I’m Apostate. An oathbreaker. A mongrel of mixed blood with a defiled body. I am nearly the complete opposite of “holy”. Be more clear, motherfuckers. Remaining clean, I understand. But it is impossible for a godless rebel to be holy. Right?
A surge of darkness overwhelms me and I fall into a stupor. Thinking I have fallen out of my chair, I look up to find myself within the Sanctuary of the Nine, facing [a certain thing]. From [that thing] comes four words that I do not hear with any physical organ, but the force emanating them vibrate my bones to the undoing of my joints.
“Stay clean. Be holy.”
I cover my head in response to the overwhelming presence. I open my eyes to find myself back in my room. “Clean”, I get. It has been demonstrated to me each time they animate me to take care of myself when I’m disconnected. Clean is more than just being free of dirt. (Free of miasma?) Clean is keeping the body in as good a condition as possible. So, perhaps, “holy” means something different as well.
I grew up with the connotation that “holy” is a state that the worthless sinner I am will never be able to achieve. If I did attain any shade of holiness, it is because the Christian God had pity on me before remembering my mixed bloodline meant I was irredeemable. Like “prayer” and “worship”, “holy” was something real better people did and I could only pretend to know.
I’ve been wrong before…
holy (adj.) Old English halig “holy, consecrated, sacred; godly; ecclesiastical,” from Proto-Germanic *hailaga- (source also of Old Norse heilagr, Danish hellig, Old Frisian helich “holy,” Old Saxon helag, Middle Dutch helich, Old High German heilag, German heilig, Gothic hailags “holy”), from PIE *kailo- “whole, uninjured” (see health). Adopted at conversion for Latin sanctus.
Primary (pre-Christian) meaning is not possible to determine, but probably it was “that must be preserved whole or intact, that cannot be transgressed or violated,” and connected with Old English hal (see health) and Old High German heil “health, happiness, good luck” (source of the German salutation Heil). Holy water was in Old English.
Health, is it…
health (n.) Old English hælþ “wholeness, a being whole, sound or well,” from Proto-Germanic *hailitho, from PIE *kailo- “whole, uninjured, of good omen” (source also of Old English hal “hale, whole;” Old Norse heill “healthy;” Old English halig, Old Norse helge “holy, sacred;” Old English hælan “to heal”). With Proto-Germanic abstract noun suffix *-itho (see -th (2)). Of physical health in Middle English, but also “prosperity, happiness, welfare; preservation, safety.” An abstract noun to whole, not to heal. Meaning “a salutation” (in a toast, etc.) wishing one welfare or prosperity is from 1590s.
But how can something broken be whole…
whole (adj.) Old English hal “entire, whole; unhurt, uninjured, safe; healthy, sound; genuine, straightforward,” from Proto-Germanic*haila- “undamaged” (source also of Old Saxon hel, Old Norse heill, Old Frisian hal, Middle Dutch hiel, Dutch heel, Old High German, German heil “salvation, welfare”), from PIE *kailo- “whole, uninjured, of good omen” (source also of Old Church Slavonic celu “whole, complete;” see health).
Stay clean. Be holy. I know what the words mean, but I still do not understand them. I do not understand if this is a directive, a reminder, a working upon me, or all of the above. I have caught myself repeating the words when I need help to make myself do the thing I need to do but don’t have the energy or the motivation to do it. I tell myself I have to do the thing, because I have to “stay clean, be holy”.
They have faith I can comply with those four simple words. Right now, they are four sets of sounds. Perhaps I will learn the deeper meanings as I go through the motions. We’ll see.