Panta Rhei

I feel lucid and sad, like a cold day. It’s good to forget oneself. It’s better to remember that one doesn’t exist. Not in any true sense. That is to say, if non-existence is our ultimate destiny, life is sweeter and much more tolerable when this awareness penetrates consciousness and becomes a reality.

Diversions are visceral and ultramarine. They have my full endorsement.

Every day I feed crows. And wonder. What’s it like to be a crow? Is it to be constantly hungry? To enjoy moments of total transcendence when spiraling in the air? Who’s the man that brings us peanuts?

I always imagine thoughts in other animals that are similar to the thoughts that float through my head periodically. This is, no doubt, a mistake. Most of my thoughts are a brew of words. Ruminations assembled out of words. Narratives assembled out of words. Dramas assembled out of words.

Are there dramas without words? Yes. Of course. Many. Sunrise. Sunset. An owl swooping down on a mouse. The process of inquiry, the intent attention of intention. A man and a woman sitting in a car on a cold winter day, both searching for the right words, the sentence that will make everything right again.

Is calculus a garden? Is it a garden of convergences and infinite sequences? Yes. And much more. There are derivatives and infinitesimals. These are flowers of infinite abstraction. Flashes of insight and elegies and hammers.

There’s not a single atom or molecule of my body that wasn’t formed on this planet. Generated by this planet. Created by this planet. I am the planet. I’m a piece of the planet. An epiphenomenon of this planet. This whirl of feelings and thoughts I experience every minute of every day are the responses to phenomena to an entire universe of which I’m a part. Feelings and thoughts are waves, essentially, disturbances with no associated mass. Oscillations, vibrations, pulsations that transfer energy from one place to another. Or shape it into stems, bubbles, faces.

Or words. Words are waves. Vibrations. Sounds. Meanings. Images. Signals.

Everything.

Paint, oceans, nipples.

Nipples are signals. Railroads are different. Railroads differ from nipples in interesting ways. One is soft, the other is hard. One is totemic, the other is shovels. Just shovels. Ties and rocks. Steel and language. The shouts of men. Caustic tones of sweat and salt. The lowing of cows. Steers. Boxcars. The smell of shit. Clumsy actions. Frequencies of penumbral butter.

I prefer the spirit of the bohemian to that of the businessman. There are realities with no commercial value. To stick a commercial value on something is to effectively devalue it, to make it a part of exploitation, abuse, and structural violence. A number stapled to a cow’s ear.

I have spent my entire life trying to live life to its fullest. Everyone does. Everyone who has adequate housing and access to water and food. This is a luxury in life, to worry whether one is living it as fully as possible, so that when one dies, there are fewer regrets. Because there’s always that undercurrent. That anxiety. That life is fleeting, ungraspable, and deeply enigmatic. That life goes by fast and you need to hop on that train and experience it as fully as possible. That you may be one of the lucky ones to plummet its meaning and surface with epiphanies and insights and books to enlighten one’s brothers and sisters. Unless, of course, you find yourself in a culture that no longer gives a shit. In which case your efforts will be for you and you alone and (if you’re really lucky) one or two close friends, who are like-minded and react similarly to cemeteries and who chafe against the adjustments necessary to hold down a job and like to think outside the box. The proverbial box. The box that keeps us trapped in ignorance and comfort. A dubious comfort. The kind of comfort that rewards you for your subservience and good attitude. A good attitude is the attitude that you adopt to get along with the boss. That allows you to float gently through a life of comforting routine while beneath the planks and thwarts of your boat an ocean of nothingness festoons the horizon with an ellipsis of stars.

This is the condition into which we are born. The other animals don’t appear to have this problem. This need to avoid feeling cheated. This need to explore one’s interior complexities, one’s moods and inner geography. Some people like to call it a journey. I like to call it a sneeze. There’s a subtle but building irritation that culminates in an eruptive exhalation of air and saliva. That’s life. A sudden involuntary expulsion of slobber and air.

And then wipe one’s face with a Kleenex and stare at the rag draped over the kitchen faucet.

Is that satori? Is that living life to the fullest? Are there degrees of life? Gradations of life? How much of life is measurable and statistical and how much of life is changing bulbs and sweeping the floor and wondering who built the pyramids of Egypt?

Knowing and accepting death is a big one. The Egyptians had a definite idea bout the afterlife. Osiris opened the door to the afterlife for everyone, which was called The Land of Two Fields. According to “Ancient Egypt for Kids,” “You had to earn your way into your afterlife by doing good deeds while you were alive. The more good deeds you did, the lighter your heart became. If your heart was not light, you could not board Ra's board and sail away into your Afterlife. To avoid any chance of trickery, the goddess Maat weighed your heart after you died. If your heart was not light enough, you were stuck in your tomb forever. But once you were in, you were in. You only had to sail away in Ra's boat once. After that, you had a free pass, and your soul could come and go.”

I like the come and go part. Well, think I’ll take a spin around Milwaukee today. See what’s up in Wisconsin. I’ll be back later, in time for the all-you-can-eat-prawns night. Binge on a few episodes of Breaking Bad.

If anything like a soul persists after our body gives up the ghost (the ghost being us), what is it? A ball of energy? What would existence be like as a ball of energy? An amorphous, ectoplasmic blob bouncing off the walls. No arms, no hands, no fingers, no toes. No dick. No vagina. No ribs or snot or hair or skin. None of that stuff. Just energy. Energy is eternal delight, said Blake. I hope he’s right.

We are currently facing the most historic event in the history of homo sapiens: extinction. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish. Dead fish.

Let’s focus on the now. The Now, capital ‘t’ capitol ‘n.’ That fictional entity of continuous present tense. Which doesn’t exist. How can it? As soon as it’s now, it’s gone, it’s in the past. It’s history. It’s a word in this sentence. It’s an insight that just got written down. And we’re just in time. Here comes another one. Here comes another now. Oops. It was just here. Where’d it go?

Heraclitus got it right: life is flux. Everything flows. Panta Rhei (πάντα ῥεῖ ) in ancient Greek. Meaning change is the ultimate reality. The current in the stream is the most real thing about the stream. Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily for life is but a dream.