The Left Angle Cross of Obscuration (Version 1)

Full breakdown

Obscuration is a genuinely funny cross. Have you read Alice Bailey, one of the founders of the New Age movement? She reads like she had this cross — everything blurred, a constant fog of detail without ever quite saying anything, commenting on nineteenth-century Tibetan texts thick with vagueness. Follow a sentence to its end and you get: 'only advanced students who have reached the seventh level of something can appreciate the significance of the aforementioned detail.' Go back through it and ask yourself: what was actually said? Nothing — pure obscuration.

Because logic is starved of energy, these people find clever ways to get it, blurring the picture with statistics and detail, hiding pieces so they keep some kind of access — quietly adjusting the record, shifting a number, fogging the situation, always, they'll insist, for everyone's own good.

They also chase details that seem completely pointless, astonishing everyone with the sheer extravagance of it — someone who absolutely needs to know exactly how many 'Smiths' are in the phone book. Does it matter? And yet these people can chase the tiniest detail down to the ground, and occasionally that obsessive digging leads to a genuine discovery. We should be grateful to the people quietly working out obscure details somewhere off to the side that may one day matter enormously to everyone else — even if, at your dinner table every night, it can feel like too much.

When you start living as yourself, none of this needs to hurt — because you understand the allegory. At bottom, all these crosses are archetypal: gods, forces, demons, spirits, faerie folk, all of it, and we all live out their mythology. Every cross carries its own mythic story, its own gods and goddesses playing the game. See how helpless we all are, pulled like puppets — and see the beauty in it too: the contribution each of us makes, precisely while being helpless.