It’s a Wednesday morning on the downhill slope of September, near the end of 2013, a season and year marking the declension of all those alive enough to read this. It’s why we mark time. It’s why we have myths of the immortal; vampires, angels and demons. I’m not trying to be morbid, but your watch is not for making meetings on time, assignations, synchronizing a mission so the bridge blows after your agents have crossed. It’s for smaller increments of death, and though it feels are though the meeting, assignations and blowing of bridges are the plot of your life; the plot will end in a plot, and urn, or a mass grave that CNN will report on and goad the people of one nation or another into stopping the madness, into thinking of the children, into the moral imperative of the right and just to slaughter the wrong and unjust. There’s an old Chinese proverb I’m about to butcher; If revenge is what you seek you should dig two graves.
Michigan has a sky that is bluer than sky’s elsewhere; or a color of blue that’s distinctive. I look at the sky often. It doesn’t seem noteworthy and yet I’m not convinced everyone does. Only a small part of me looks to the sky expecting to see something unusual; mostly I look to the sky because it’s the sky. I know it’s not really blue, I know that it stops somewhere beyond my field of vision. I know that clouds that look like bunnies not only aren’t trying to, but from other vantage points they don’t look like bunnies. A cloud is not a Rorschach test, it’s not that one guy sees a bunny and another two victims stewing in their own mortal juices. The Rorschach is fixed in time and space like a photograph or a novel. I look to the skies because I do; I could come up with reasons, but I’d just be making shit up.
When I was a kid I used to go to the MSU observatory. I could name the constellations; I knew how to use the stars to navigate. The guys who worked there and my parents thought I had a keen interest in astronomy. More curiosity than keenness. I am privileged, I have a sense of entitlement, if I’m curious about something I expect doors to open and when they don’t I will go through a window. I know, the subtext is that I am spoiled; the subtext is that I’m bourgeois; I use my powers for good. I use my powers to learn, not to berate, to further my greed, I rarely think I’m superior to anyone and when I do I think of it as their failure not my success.
I don’t walk into a room like I own the joint; I do walk into a room as though I belong there. I don’t think of a waitress as my serving wench, but I expect to served and treated like a citizen. Most importantly though, I look to the sky. I think in terms of air, of depth, of bunnies and the color blue. I look to the sky because looking to the dirt is defeatist. It’s not that I never look to the dirt or that I don’t appreciate it, I look to the dirt less often because I am looking to the sky. I think in terms of the dirt being there at the pleasure of the sky. Like everyone else I give human like qualities to things; the sky isn’t pleased or angry, it isn’t distraught or bored or horny, it doesn’t even exist in a practical sense, if you fill up a jar with blue sky all you get is a jar full of air. It was full of air when you started.
For our purposes the sky is immortal. It’s not immortal, but if it had a wrist there wouldn’t be a watch on it. If it had a wall there would not be a calendar hanging from it. The sky doesn’t have myths of where it goes when the world ends; we do, we have myths for ourselves and myths for the sky.
I watched a few minutes of a documentary because a few minutes was all I could stand, and this guru guy in the same sound bite said both that there was no god and that each person (to the tune, I’m sure of five digits of currency) was unique and had a soul. That’s the worst type of conceit, that though the universe was created by an explosion and life evolved by adaption necessary to survive this environment, that somehow or another man, above all mammals, inherited an immortal personality if not an immortal body. I can see where that’d be one hell of fine adaptation it doesn’t make any sense. To say that the earth is mostly a closed system and the things we made up of are likely to remain in a closed system would be the no god part of an immortal soul. I’m not arguing one side or the other; I’m just saying a soul is the same side of the same coin as a god. I also think a guy who is charging privileged suckers for his sage wisdom that is supposed to provide some sort of enlightenment or insight in the course of the suckers life, should probably stay in character.
Maybe it’s just me, but I have a lot of respect for the integrity of an individual’s ideology, values, and core beliefs, no matter how much I disagree. I lose respect when they waffle on those things, especially if I agreed with them. That one sound bite had me filing the guru under con-man, grifter, one who exploits the weak points in rich sucker’s fear of death. The narrator was the worst kind of sucker, but at least he exploited his own exploitation, though it didn’t seem like his intent. Maybe I’ll finished watching it one day. The smart money’s riding against it.
Most of the people who believe they have a unique and immortal soul also have watches and calendars and think that their intention to be a good caretaker of that soul wins them some sort of brownie points. How does one know if they are a good caretaker? Theology. I can’t think of a religion that isn’t butt heavy on all the ways to fuck up your soul and light on how to nourish it. Even Buddhism with a pretty strong non-interference policy, has a bunch of ways you can fuck up. A person can function really well without a god; the soul is another matter entirely. Imagine how few people would watch daytime TV if they believed this was all end-game, this mere hour to fret and strut on the stage was the only hour you got? Again, not arguing one side or the other, just saying the watch and clock are ticking away, assuming your senses (which you rely on to keep you from getting hit by a train among other things) are all working, everything you know from your experience suggests that watching Oprah has taken an hour you’ll never get back and has given you nothing you can use to make the next hour more valuable.
The sun is streaming through the shades. This downward Wednesday looks like it will be a nice one. A bunny cloud is floating in a sky the color of a Michigan mint.
Loading comments...