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February 7, 2009
I dare say that, yes, this world was once mine, My roots burrowed through this soil and bore life through like blue veins. I once sat in a green field as if it were my bedding, and watched the stars as if the sky were a mirror. I was connected to it viscerally. It was me and I it. It shone with prismatic clarity. I spoke in unison with all the chirping of the crickets. I had no idea that I was yet the primordial fool. I was ripped from it with anything but surgical precision. No anesthesia. It still hurts. Now, like Freud’s men-babes, I want to be granted re-entry to its cosmic, loving, outraged comfort. But it does not yield.
i missed the colours of that world, that unity and identity. But, like tinted flowers in fresh water, the coulour has drained out and I see what others had told me I ought to see for so long. The world has become a painting with its colour sucked out. Pigment resting on grey and off-white, and nearly-carbon-black. I thought it would never happen. I’m like the Little Prince who has lost his first sketch, and now cannot test if the adults around me understand where I’m coming from.
However, I can assure you that it’s not novelty I crave – getting swamped by critiques of modernity has made sure of that. Perhaps I crave simplicity and virtue. I crave Socratic discussions on right and wrong modes of being, and return to a time when they actually meant something. I want to whole-heartedly denounce the stoics, the sophists and the cynics. But somehow, I can’t coherently summon the words, the argument, the care, the belief that they’re not altogether correct.
I wish i could still rely on partial information, and tout or denounce this or that from a glimpse of it. I wish I got angry at the news like I used to. And that injustice was still outrageous and not a just another matter of course. I wish I could stop having discussions about ideas in terms of the authors that first wrote them down. At least I’d have real avenues for discussion, instead of bobbing lackadaisically on this oceanic body of partial certainties, and monochromatic opinion. I’m tired of simulacrum. I want the real thing back.
Who’s with me?
*crickets chirping in the distance*
oh leloup, it’s relativity that seems to be darkening the strings of your banjo. a world bereft of moral clarity is our yoke, but there’re lots of corners in that world in which to build forts and paradise. besides, good can always be better, and it needs to be bad (or at least at the next table over from bad) in order for that to happen, right?
you not angry at the news? need i be worried here? like for i to send you some stuff to get angry about? got a whole quiver here… just say the word.. this is the finest quality anger-inducing strain of news.. it can’t fail.
[i'm a cricket]
You sound a lot like Socrates, my dear friend. And you remind me of something he says in the dialogue about courage. If we could trace out the ancestry of all good and evil, their birth and how they are, we’d be that perfect unity. But we’ve never been whole, and so we strive. We demand justice. And we see the good shining through a broken world, a world whose life is so wrong it seems it can’t be lived rightly. I daresay you’re speaking out of that voice whose absence you feel so close, that voice that is irrevocably, ambiguously, somehow yours.
I’m so frightened of becoming voice co-opted in a vocation carved out of the voices “that first wrote the ideas down”, as you say. Hmmm:
The One is silent as we flitter and pass,
Caught in the world’s light, as shadows fly;
Time a memory-coloured dream,
And life many voices, inside the one.
To be (one voice) hear one cry,
Shattering white brilliance of eternity.
Just dropping by.Btw, you website have great content!
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