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Kr Vs the spinsters and eggheads of today are not the dickinsons and wittgensteins of yesterday. they will take your lunch money to go see star wars.
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Ev Mh the universe is expanding, coming apart at the seams. Until it learns to stop that, it’s always getting crasser. There was an Ev back then who similarly dismissed those now venerables. Were this not a relative world, I personally would go back much further to find the minimally respectable. But they’re dead, and we’re alive, so they aren’t worthy to kneel down and buckle our bootstraps. On the night of the living dead, don't let them try to. We’re wrestling with a far more evolved beast and deserve a hand, like alcoholics who dare to share, for every winning move. It's not about the result. Sisyphus is us. To reserve all your respect for the dead, authorized, embalmed, cleansed of smells and sweat, where’s the risk in that? No risk of being a misguided idiot, nothing really ventured, nothing really gained.
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Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. There are still important eggheads who keep their poems and thoughts in their drawers or share them with honest and critical compatriots. I attended Bryn Mawr whose founder said “only our failures marry” and many still carry the flag. (Okay that was back in the day to be sure, but not so far as Emily Dickinson.) And I suspect that those who compromised enough to make enough noise in the past have all been forgotten. And there are those in the middle who like Wittgenstein compromise minimally to be institutionally authorized aren't so easy to judge. Yes he compromised, you didn't notice?
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One day I got sick of hearing and being academic and social authoritysplained to that culture was dead, language was dead, words were dead, I was essentially dead, just chemicals and numbers in frozen frames for filing as the exclusive evidence, there was no essential me, or essential anything. However, you can't credibly deny the connecting splices because you can't penetrate them with your instruments and instrumental gaze, which useful vocabulary I owe to some tumbleweeds that blew in attracted to all that dry dust. They say it's capitalism that's blocking access to the splices using the same instrumental logic that capitalism idolizes. What if the splices hold the key to overthrowing or sufficiently tempering capitalism to reveal what's in the splices. It's a Catch 22, who will cut the Gordian knot? At your service. C'mon, it's a wasteland on the verge of being blown up and poisoned to death, yes, but not dead yet. In fact one grows more alive in the face of these dangers.
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I’d long reflected on all this, and then came the test of my hypothesis. My father died. When I watched and felt him cross the great divide I fully awoke to the abject blasphemy of denying the difference. Next to his death, my life grew so alive it filled everything, even time and language with life, the rocks stars jars cars bird-like words came alive, even he whose dying drove death in made the microphone top pop and punch a guy in the nose who was eulogizing about him at the funeral, Harry hates that — the wounds still visible and festering in excruciating pain but There. all there. And not dead. Everything connected to everything else, all the different channels communicating, Wittgenstein Emily Dickinson the whole crew of long lost venerables in all the pink cheeked cheeky vitality of their youth spilling out of the screen into the pre-post-erous present and crawling into bed with me — still creating no small mayhem wherever the programs on the channels haven't adapted to the intercommunicative reflexivity. Analysis and theory all a Xeno’s theoretical arrow that can theoretically never arrive at its target, so it verifies its verity in theory and never actually does, in an all living, poetic world in which arrows do hit the target, and I'd pierced it dead on and was and still am lodged there, whether at the bull's eye or an outer circle, I cannot see.
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The important thing is I made it! I told my mind to make a bow, and I pried it open and lodged myself there. I got my mind to focus on the target and meditate and wait for years and years (strictly adhering to the instructions in Zen in the Art of Archery) until I was sure my mind could let me go, and then I flew! And I hit the target. Come to think of it, the method, as I now remember, assures a bull’s eye. So I’m emboldened to turn up the sound so high it brings down the house, as thé termites enjoying their interminable Thanksgiving dinner scramble for cover. Don’t cover your ears it won’t help. Steel yourself for a blow. This good news is soaring swiftly to the bull’s eye in your brain, and not by one of Xeno’s merely theoretical arrows. Here it comes: however luminous and just by the seemingly meticulous calculations carefully spun out for centuries by humble scholars with their hearts burning only to serve truth and humanity, however grand and for a pretty long short term liberating in body and spirit, for the king of error is the highest angel of truth, who one day slipped and fell off the tightrope*, God dead culture dead language a total scam! What's called the devil”s (he's not dead either) deal.
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Alas the curtain had not yet fallen on the last paragraph to the resonating thunder of one hand clapping before the termites were back to their dinner, so what if their dear friends and relatives at the next table, table and all, got beamed over to Siberia? Oh but wait until tomorrow. Weather report says that a hard rains a gonna fall.
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I didn’t immediately cogitate it of course. I was too busy feeling it. And when I went back to cogitations I wasn’t aware how much that personal experience was egging me on. One day suddenly while gazing at a very particular fresco by Giotto — this one fresco is the one and only map of aliveness containing all the states and capitals (ask your solar plexus it knows even before the evidence (in another book) rolls in) — it hit me like a ton of lead impregnated bricks, the grave really was empty.
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I'm still not sure whether its friends, to save the life of life, drugged it to appear dead, and then life went back to India to live out its life and re-enliven and live on in and as Buddhism, or life did plain old die and come back to life right there on the spot. Does it matter all that much to the living? The main thing is, after not just experiencing it first hand, but all that logical verification the doubter in me demanded with the results cross checked over and over, until it could not be denied, life as creature and category, world and word, was there in me and right before my eyes.
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Though distance dampens it substantially, when shoulder to shoulder, side by side, life looked so utterly different from the critically theorized dead facsimile dreamt while hanging on the crucifying rationalizations that realized its resilient "reality" — as in the film director Martin Scorcese’s church condemned (amazingly this doesn’t shake Joan of Arc’s faith in all of it) account of the dream of Jesus on the Cross that he took the other path, married, and had a happy life.
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Then and there, all at once, like the wicked witch subjected to a bucket of water, that seductive, deathly dream of life just dying a little early to get it over with before the great ordeal moaned and groaned and melted away. i had no idea how deeply and in how many entry points it had its claws in me until they began to withdraw— and it hurt so much I truly lost my mind. I went literally psychotic for a few months as this seismic paradigm shift caused to buckle, then crumble, the ground under my feet, until (after the ascension) the wounds finally healed, the bulldozers brought in fresh soil in which all the seeds I'd been saving jumped in to sprout quite sumptuously in my wisely protected enclosed garden. .
Of course I’m crazy, but as the Mad Hatter says, all the best people are. Among the zombies, or so they profess to be, so who am I to doubt it, I am alive in unknowingknowing, not woke, just awakening, floating between night and dawn as in the opening pages if A la Recherche du Temps Perdu — however more seemingly lifelike they may be in their long fleshed out, carefully detailed, finely mastered dreams compared to this acutely vulnerable, newborn idea and rough sketch of being alive.
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Alas, what can’t they do better than I can? Nothing. I’m glued to the spinning of this cocoon that people are as likely to crawl into as they would be into the laughable tragedy of naked life stripped of even the thinnest film of the theory goo that goes back to some guru to protect it from itself. Meanwhile these somnambulists “woke” with all due respect to whatever they’re”woke” to, good or evil, up and at ‘em!, have mastered every virtue and vice and the most delicious, intoxicating cocktails of each. Next they justify their virtue and vice cocktails with theories (reflections) or anti-theories (just do it. Go for it) and mixed cocktails of those. Next these root systems break up to the surface and morph into invasive vines groping and grabbing and winding their strangling tentacles around anything they can find, but they can’t find me. They’re dead, or so they said, and I’m alive. I crossed to the other side. I’m reborn born, begotten of all life, not made of empty ideas. I’ve got everything life has to offer. As science admits, it only picks up 5% of what’s out there. I pick up all of it, an equal grain of everything that was is or will be, a motley crew of ingredients if there ever was one, but all combined — presto! the most beautiful beautiful soup.
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Dragging me kicking and screaming behind it, my life sought and found the word “alive” — it’s a match! It works! It plays! It's music! cries my life, as i watch with sufficient distrust. And suddenly all the words come alive and rush to the sides of their worldy mates ready to serve sentient, knowingunknowing aliveness and each other and be served. Finally I get the gist of the interactive 3-D movie, as violent as I like it, i’m the victim, perpetrator, as I like it, it’s all just words words words — the world’s most refined opiate, don’t think you or anybody can resist some brand, even by taking a vow of silence, those are the most beset by all the temptations of Saint Anthony —and this all inclusive Aristotelian catharsis, the alpha and omega of them all, ritually reflected in a mirror of the mirror whose minimal deviation from the original creates an endless gently curving chorus line of similar figures, cleanses my soul, refreshes my spirit, and that’s the solid, nutrient rich ground of my pretty relatively harmlessly (not that that’s saying much but I resolve to do better) mildly wildly, wildly mildly alive life.
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If the root and vine are logically, emotionally, and spiritually backrupt, how soon before the dream cracks to let in light from outside? To those not yet somewhat unwoke from what it is you’re woke to, such as the brokeness of Their wokeness, if you’re not a zombie stop pretending you’re one. If you’re not even part zombie, stop pretending you’re part zombie. That gangrene cannot but spread, so cut off that zombie part. Now! Please! It will never be clearer or easier to be alive. It seems like you couldn’t survive out there if you were to cut off that part, and I can't claim it won't always ache horribly when the limb seems to be there, but you press on it, and it's just a ghost, which doesn't appear in a mirror. But truth protects its own and only allows the hardships they’re ready for. Truth will lead you where you need to go to stay up and keep climbing. You know that. You know everything. You’re alive.
*though it seemed it could never happen, as this highest master of the art, thé lucid one long most favored by truth, gained mastery by simply knowing he wouldn’t fall, a trick taught also to me by Philippe Petit, for whom simply knowing that til death do him part from his beloved tightrope, he simply could not fall, obviated that option; but knowing him, I pretty much know that he naturally gave up the high wire when he joined the winged ones he took it up to soar with, also having reflected that, when something goes on forever, anything absolutely anything can happen, and it probably, if not definitely, eventually will, whether you know it won’t or not. That’s why, while still bound to a mortal body, I’m always exercising my knowing to extend its reach, even into the domain of the dearly departed. After a few billion years, as the vista widens, all they can see for miles and miles and miles is fate flipping a coin to determine what’s eventually going to happen, that universe is soon spent, another one born as the coin flips and lands as if it had never tried that before. Without our prayers for intercession, they would all fall to hell eventually, at least by these latest calculations hot off the press, and I have no reason to doubt them, as I haven’t slipped yet in this high wire performance and am perfectly comfortable without a net. I just know they won’t all go to hell though, and I’ll surely know better tomorrow. Please you too know I won’t fall when I’m gone to where knowing won’t help, and teach your children to know always better that their dearly departed dads are all right, lest their ghosts return to punch them in the nose. (Footnote added after the first five likes, but I pretty much know they wouldn’t withdraw them for a minor travesty — not that I fell but I leaned a little that way so I’m leaning this way now— given the glorious grandeur of it all.)
