plea from the loom

[over one year gone now, this particular episode precipitated the series of events known as "the rest of my life." funny how that happens.]

It’s a dark and stormy night. The picture ouside the window is awash, a tapestry without detail or distinction or even a subject. As I stare outward, I begin to weave of these lost threads a course of action. Something has to change.

It is a very old battle. It has been waged since the beginning, and with its resolution may come the end. This is neither hyperbole nor vague, metaphysical truth. The battle is real, and its final settlement, whether in the General Assembly of the United Nations or amongst its radioactive ruins, will forever change the course of history.

My half-brother and I are two of many warring parties. He’s a brute and an idiot, though people hardly seem to notice these days. He is the god of savage war, who was born in Thrace, far away from Olympus. Things have been going downhill for a long time, a very long time, since you all started calling me Minerva and him Mars. I prefer to go by Athena. (And why the alliteration, always the alliteration? It’s as if, without it, you won’t remember the truth of the matter: he and I, Ares and Athena, are two sides of the same coin.)

I’m tired. The terra cotta glow of the city reminds me of Helios rising, but dawn is hours off.

He’s obsessed, my half-brother. He delights in warfare for its own sake, and his dogs and vultures must be fed. If it were my decision, you all would have long since recognized the inevitable: War is obsolete. It was obsolete five thousand years ago; by now, it’s toxic, invasive, and threatens to destroy more than a few thousand lives, more than a nation or three. It will destroy civilization. It will destroy everything.

Since the dawn of man’s consciousness, I’ve been protecting you - or, at least, something like me has been protecting you. Sumer’s Enki, ruler of Eridu, was one of the first; he held the directions, the codes and laws and truths, and he called them me. (I wonder what he, lord of the freshwater ocean, would think of the rain, coalescing into muddy, oil-stained puddles in the street.) My domain is basically the same, and so is its name - metis, the Greek word for craft. Wit. Strategy. Technology. Manufacture. Everything that makes your society what it is; that is what I protect.

A whisper has driven the nations of the world to fortify; the strongest is, after all, the least likely to be challenged. You build nigh-invisible jets and stockpile nuclear weapons at the suggestion of - who? Certainly, the ends are mine; you mean to avoid war, to defend your world against havoc as I have. You do mean to avoid war by building more and more hideously destructive devices, do you not?

No, don’t look so helpless, don’t sigh - you know full well who has been whispering into your open ears. Forget what you heard and listen now. I cannot offer you the spoils of war. You must cultivate your pride from water and earth; sweet fruit cannot grow from blood and steel.

Listen to me: I offer you a tapestry of peace. Will you accept it?