We are unexceptional and our problems play out like leaves falling from trees in the fall, piling up and swept aside by careless wind. We are not singular, we are plural at least, more at most, grouped by cliche and neurosis and disease, by the scripts our parents followed for generations before us. We're just a mass, churning.
When I was a child I was raised without care. This has had repercussions that have rung like a bell's sine wave from one end of my life to another; my thinking is muddled by my formation like any feature on any face. We're creatures of our past and possible futures, but not slaves to those impulses. You can't fight what you can't see, but once described even the devil is nothing but an old suit and bad cologne trying to trade quantity for quality. Burroughs:
There are no honorable bargains
Involving exchange
Of qualitative merchandise
Like souls
For quantitative merchandise
Like time and money.
So piss off Satan
And don't take me for dumber than I look.
So in the end, my friend, my guardo camino, my brother by choice? His father died two nights ago with a failed heart. It had started failing long before, and he'd never spent much effort on caring for it. Then it failed, and he left a wife with two dead sons and one dead husband and no living parents in the middle of a dust bowl of west mesa slum, left her to stare at the pictures on the cheap wood paneled walls, left her to wonder, to wail, to ask: why?
Why? And we can't know. Because we aren't exceptional. We aren't the product of our works alone. We aren't the masters of our fate, not just us. No, we're a collective, all the weight of all the stars in all the universes, hot and bright in us, we're not just our stories or our conscious lives. What I know is, we're not alone.
Even when we are very much alone, we're the sum of all the universe and all that implies. All the good, all of the bad, all of the influences we don't care to realize.
What I know is we have to name our devils, and give them no more significance than anything else, give them our fragility. Give them our love. Make them just like the rest of us: unexceptional, fallible, impermanent. Then do with them as we wish. Make their needs our choice.
| < bleh | survival > |
