Have You Noticed

Have you noticed, the harder people find it to face reality, to acknowledge the truth of things, the more they resort to censorship and propaganda to maintain the self-deluding servicability of an obfuscating narrative? Infantile, yes, and cowardly and shameful. But can you blame them? Things are not looking good. There used to be just enough civility, just enough warmth, just enough honesty to live in the world with a sense of decency and benign liberality. The raw truth has fangs. It’s terrifying. Horrifying to discover the world has no meaning, that you live in a society that is just barely a society, cities unwalkable due to maniacs on e-scooters and e-bikes whizzing past people crouched smoking fentanyl or walking determinedly indifferent to the surrounding dystopic squalor while dodging mounds of human poop and laboring hard to convince themselves we live in a moral universe. A media that glorifies empty suits seeking positions of power and wealth and demonizes people of principle who protest the manifest evils afflicting the world’s populations. That calls a genocide a conflict. That calls a heavily militarized totalitarian oligarchy a democracy. That calls journalists who reveal the truth terrorists. And arrests them. And muzzles them. And claps its hands with delight. 

Before syntax, we used jukebox buttons. We punctuated time with hit songs. Most everything was assumed to be genuine. But there are methods for finding out the undercurrents of the banquet hall. Analysis is held together by paper clip, if it is explicit in meaning. If not, then paint the light next to a light bulb. See if it doesn’t turn bovine. I’m serious. The fire lasts longer when we read. This is because of syntax. It holds everything together. Otherwise things go crazy. There’s meaning all over everything. Ideas crash into each other like protons. The book perceives it is being written even when someone is reading it. And this is a cause of wakefulness.

Meditate to apprehend all that is empty. Or so they say. I say thrash the current beneath the wave to catch a fish. Read things carefully. Read like a catheter. Penetrate. Sew acceptance in the heat. Use the thread behind the eyes. The needle of the mind. Thread it with thought. Plus bursting around awkwardly attracts laughter. And for intestinal peculiarities, we have the highway. Emerson’s cutlery touched on the slice between heaven and so-called necessities. It happens when our nature is galvanized towards the fiber to be folded. It’s easier than you think to climb the planets against the void after dreaming. It takes a minute of old rails to explain a train. But once this is realized, the path to satori trails us until it trips over itself, and gets lost in the rain.