cartoon by the late Charles Barsotti
There’s a growing sense, here,
that I’m running out of things to say.
That it doesn’t get any better than this,
that from now on it’s just the gruelling hard work,
and occasional excitement
of dealing with the unwinding,
the long and messy cleaning up and moving on
as everything falls apart,
the end of thirty thousand years of shoring up
a trillion flimsy sandcastles at the water’s edge —
and now the tide is rolling in.
And there’s a sense
that all the proclaimed collective crises
in the endless scroll of doom
are inextricably connected,
in ways that we can never know —
all just milestones
on the winding path to endgame.
It’s magic, amazing, wondrous, this life
but we spend most of our lives, it seems,
sleepwalking through it, not noticing,
distracted by the endless symptoms and diversions
of Civilization Disease.
We are all one, all just part of everything,
and have always been,
but, deranged by this affliction
of self and separation, we cannot see it.
We only see ourselves, disconnected,
apart, besieged, hard done by, and alone,
furiously maneuvering the joystick
to delay our final death
oblivious to the realization the controls do nothing;
The game is playing itself.
If this now-flickering self were to go out,
unnoticed, what would this writer,
this character, have left to speak about?
If there is no me, and nothing really happening,
what is the point of chronicling
the illusion that there is?
That’s all I have to say,
today.
We’re in haiku world
The sun rises in the morning
The moon glows at night
“The game is playing itself.”
Thank you for that one, Dave. It has been ricocheting around in my head and I quite like the ripple effects it is causing in various other thought processes and outlooks. Perhaps a tattoo is in order.
We are the universe looking at itself, observing itself. Chronicling. That is the point.
What has been enjoyed here is a seeming unique perspective on both collapse and radical non-duality, where others seem to address one of the two. So if this page went silent, it would probably be missed, maybe even seen as some sort of ‘sign’.
Sad but true. The emergent phenomenon will emerge or not. Negation is synonymous with the null hypothesis, nothingness and entropy. Fighting is survival, survival is fighting. That’s [just] life!
H. Arendt’s preface of her book Between Past and Future opens with an aphorism by the French poet René Char: “Notre héritage n’est précédé d’aucun testament,” which she translates, “our inheritance was left to us by no testament.” To quote Richard Saltoun : « For Arendt, this sentence illustrates the situation in which European people were left after the end of the Second World War, in a gap between past and future, a period of lost freedoms and deep existential questioning, where the threads of tradition were inextricably broken. »
To quote Arendt again : « However that may be, it is the namelessness of the lost treasure to which the poet alludes when he says that our inheritance was left us by no testament. The testament, telling the heir what will rightfully be his, wills past possessions for a future. Without testament or, to resolve the metaphor, without tradition which selects and names, which hands down and preserves, which indicates where the treasures are and what their worth is, there seems to be no willed continuity in time and hence, humanly speaking, neither past nor future, only sempiternal change of the world and the biological cycle of living creatures in it. Thus the treasure was lost not because of historical circumstances and the adversity of reality but because no tradition had foreseen its appearance or its reality, because no testament had willed it for the future. The loss, at any rate, perhaps inevitable in terms of political reality, was consummated by oblivion, by a failure of memory, which befell not only the heirs but, as it were, the actors, the witnesses, those who for a fleeting moment had held the treasure in the palms of their hands, in short, the living themselves. »
Long quotes indeed, but to me Char and Arendt address the listlessness, the acedia that struck the European resistance fighters of WWII once the war was over.
Thanks for the comments and quotes. It’s so awesome to hang out in a ‘place’ where “emergent phenomena”, “sempiternal change”, and “acedia” are discussed, unpretentiously and coherently. We are all, constantly, left to pick up the pieces. It doesn’t get any better than this. ;-)