Why are we the only ones? Of all life, We commit mass homicide, Kill ourselves, And befoul our only home. Only we. Why?
After painful meditiation I've come to believe That we are infected With a blessed, damned disease Called consciousness.
Caught between beasthood and divinity Between being of the world and not of it Between knowing none and knowing all Between perfect self-ignorance and supreme self-understanding We are the creatures of individual possibility. In the natural world there is neither good not evil; With awareness comes the capacity for both. That same infection which permits art, altruism, Fidelity and loving care, allows violence, indifference, Dishonesty and psychosis, For it spawns personality and its child Personal choice. I have come to believe in both the divinity and the diaboly of human nature And that they are inseparable. Our disease is terminal And all we can do is make the best of it By striving to treat its more virulent symptoms While reaping its blessings.
The Curse
Since time immemorial we as a species have been individually lonely. Communication has been a poor substitute for communion, and the walls which stand between individual awarenesses can never be fully breached. Empathy is imagination rather than experience. In the most fundamental sense, we ultimately live - and die - alone. Even the search for deity may in the final analysis be a desperate attempt to achieve a oneness with the divine which we are irretrieveably denied with other human beings. Existential isolation has been considered by many as the cruellest curse of consciousness. But - what if the walls between us fell down, all of them, to the last brick? What if we could indeed feel the experiences of each other as keenly as our own? There are more than six billion of us now. At any moment there are thousands of births and deaths, and millions of orgasms and moments of intractable pain. Love and hate and courage and fear wash over multitudes like the waves of the sea. If that sum total could be felt by all and each, I cannot see how our egos could withstand it. The sheer force and intensity of it would of necessity sweep selfhood away. Our isolation is insulation, permitting us space in which to exist as ourselves, and our curse is a misunderstood blessing.
Paradoxes
The paradox of the writer, the painter, the sculptor, the composer...
To: create the understood. To: forge originals acceptable to the masses. To: communicate a newness accessible to old archetypes, an archetype itself - which, though created, must seem discovered, dug from the depths of our common human mine - to care.
The paradox of the reader, the spectator, the audience...
To: recognize, from a perspective bound to the past, the genius of new directions. To: apprehend the pathways which point to a future not known To: take the universal personally, probe it, appreciate it, know it well enough to celebrate the rare occasions upon which it is expanded - to care.
Mach's Principle
Sometimes I think about the stark fact that at every moment, people whom I've never met die and people whom I'll never meet are born. No one of them affects me, but the knowledge of that vast unperceived collectivity moves me immensely. On a different scale, thi resembles Mach's Principle: the gravity one hydrogen atom manifests for another at the other end of the universe is miniscule indeed, but from the frame of reference established by the existence of all matter springs the gravity which grounds us on this earth and links it, sun and moon together.
Monsters
Long ago, the night held monsters. The darkness was filled with power and mystery, and our ancestors huddled around the comforting campfire, directing only furtive, frightened glances into the threatening dark beyond. Around the campfire there was sight and safety, and the glowing embers seemed to embody a universal truth. Our ancestors gazed not at each other, but into that common light, that warm shared center. Now, of course, the monsters are gone. They've been killed off with guns and flashlights and dictionary entries. But still we circle the lights in our dens, receiving truth, and gazing not at each other. We have forgotten what darkness is; forgotten the awe and the wonder which knitted us together as a tribe. We must relearn this splendor for our own salvation. It is time to turn our backs upon our electronic campfires and, hand in hand, stare into the void, and reclaim mystery, remembering that we all live upon a coal, still warm and glowing in its center, only recently spun from a fire which yet floats in the magic darkness.