Mirrors 2

We are all free. Most people simply prefer not to be, without realizing it. Obligations, responsibilities, possessions, and cages are all much easier than freedom. That is always the most difficult part of creation, the blank page, the empty canvas, the silence, all that crushing freedom. It’s madness. We constantly gripe that greater freedom is what we need to achieve happiness. Life’s hooks have snared us and are restraining us from achieving the grandeur for which we were certainly destined. Once cut loose, most people crumple like balled-up paper. If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that we prefer the security and predictability of the restraints. There is safety in cages. They create the point of reference from which one can see the landscape of everything that they are not. Much like the giant children that we all really are, everything that we are not is everything that we want. We want to be precisely and only what our cage will not accommodate. So we push, struggle, and cavort against it to gain freedom and access to what we are not. Most of us can’t escape. Some do, and some are removed from their cages against their will. Once out, cocks fall limp, pulse rates climb, and fear and panic set in. Man is an animal no longer fit to be free. We’re like an inmate who’s been inside too long to know how to function on the outside. It’s neither good nor bad. It simply is. Outstanding individuals adapt to and excel within this new freedom, and ultimately live happily ever after, amen. It makes the rest of us writhe with jealousy, contempt, and pseudo-moral outrage. Pseudo-moral posturing abounds as we criticize and condemn those fit for what we want but cannot achieve. We trip over our pride and our own feet as we stumble, crying, screaming, and looking foolish. Ultimately failing, disappointing, and underachieving. By definition, not everybody can be exceptional. Eventually, mediocrity, complacency, and stability find you again, sobbing like a child, a little more shaken up than last time. Sometimes it leaves you better or worse than the time before. Either way, you’ll do it again. None of us are really that bright. We’ll dance like this until we drop. We’ll continue painting, writing, lifting weights, breaking mirrors, singing off-key, chasing pussy, making wars, and intellectualizing over dumb shit. It’s predictable and safe. Like a cage. It’s what we do.

Mirrors 1

People love dancing in front of mirrors in self-satisfied vanity, as if their own beauty is the highest beauty. Everything else in the world that is beautiful is only beautiful insofar as it is pleasing or subordinate to them. This is subjectivity, not simply on a personal level, but on a larger, more contextual level. Pain is pain. Joy is joy. It is what it is, and it is no lesser or greater when it is yours.

Retrograde Motion

Is it the fear of being alone? Is it the illusion of concern? Perhaps it is the cataclysmic bizarreness of one thinking mind interacting with another. How do we account for shame? Why does the presence of another person hamper our honesty? Why do we hold back? The fears of judgment and subjugation are the blinders that eliminate your peripheral vision. We are like a predatory horse, a beast of burden turned aggressive ruthless fugitive. We have escaped from the bonds of meaningless isolation, been imprisoned by stolen freedom and pursued by inescapable detriments of every persuasion. Everybody is horrible and frightening. Everybody is capable of atrocity in all degrees. We all are, because in some layer of our terrified consciousness, we harbor the belief that other people aren’t real, at least not as real as ourselves. Goodwill and charity are easy when no danger is involved. I have done nothing to deserve my comforts. Nor have you. There is no such thing as “deserve.” There is no such thing as debt or justice. There is only malice, revenge, and vested interest in the well-being of another. Everybody hurts the same way. We all want to get back home. It all feels so unnatural. It is an itch that cannot be scratched. Words like “me,” “I,” and “mine” are self-referential utterances that point at nothing but themselves. They are signs without meaning, signifiers with no signified. These absurdities allow us to fumble our way through the dark, just like when the lights go out and you are somewhere unfamiliar and must navigate by senses you aren’t used to using. Those tender, familiar crutches start to become more important when we begin to see the perfect darkness take shape into monsters. Perspiration and tightened bowels become the limits of our knowledge, and create our prejudicial attitudes towards nonexistent things. It is all sincere. It is completely natural. With what alternative are we left? We cannot move in a vacuum. Locomotion requires objects with greater mass than ourselves for reaction. Action can only be reaction. There is no groundless movement. Even more upsetting, there is no apparent causa sui at the root. There is no root. Anchors are futile, but create the necessary rigidity that allows you to find a point of reference and navigate the soup. They are the objects with greater mass than you. Nausea is what happens when you learn that you aren’t moving, but are instead simply rearranging the objects around you.

Behind the Wall

Behind the wall there is nothing. Behind the wall there’s a vacuous lack. You’re standing precipitously close, and you’re only separated by this wall. You’re somewhere on the edge of nowhere. Nowhere is on the other side of the wall, but it’s not connected to it. Nowhere cannot be connected to anywhere, or nowhere becomes somewhere via its proximity to it. Nowhere must be completely detached and entirely separate. That’s why the wall exists. It’s an epistemological condom. Once you’re nowhere, you can never again be somewhere. Travel is impossible once you’re nowhere, because you’re already nowhere, and there’s nowhere else to go. Movement within nowhere is absurd and unintelligible. Location is a purely relational concept that is only meaningful if you’re somewhere.

Trains

Sometimes I can still hear the trains at night. We live further up the hill now than we did then. We can’t hear them as clearly as before, or as constantly as we used to, but on a quiet night they’re still there to carry me to sleep. They’re groaning along the Ohio River, laying on the horn.