Monday, December 27, 2004

Tidal Waves and Dreaming Oceans.

Thousands of people died in Asia due to an Earthquake and tidal waves. Was that as many people as died in Asia anyway on that day; in the world? Was it less than the general average? I expect we would find great killers move among us whom we do not notice as such. They are the Great Whites that cruise the ocean of life every day.

Many tourists were sunning themselves on the beach when the ocean just came out of nowhere and grabbed them. It makes you think. The news organizations were overjoyed. Rupert Murdoch, Lord Rhees Mogg (now there’s a name from the real time Lord of the Rings) and Conrad Black, among others, sent their minions in search of coverage. Britt Hume practices his gravitas. Faces disappear in the rear view mirror. Take the total deaths in Rwanda and divide by the days of slaughter and you’ve got another tidal wave that rolled for months. The Congo has the greatest sustained tidal wave and it’s nowhere near the ocean.

Iraq; I’m not sure if that’s a tidal wave or an undertow... a riptide? I close my eyes and see blood red full moons pulling at the waters of the world. Pale horses are bearing the dead in long processions into the moon’s wide mouth. The seamstress of the shadow-land is weaving the new envelopes in which to stuff another dreaming puppet. The helix half disappears. All we see are the goings in and the comings out.

Underground fires smolder in the wings. Daily they are increased by the collective contributions of thoughts fed under the pressure of life into the tight compartments of potential. Here and there a pustulence breaks upon the surface. One hotspot follows another. These are the days of our lives. This is the industry in which we are engaged.

Let’s think of our thoughts as a stock portfolio. Every day and every night we add to our holdings. We are diversified. So much goes into the racial memory; so much goes into personal grievance, so much into fear, so much into hunger futures, so much in the general confusion fund, so much is contributed to false ideals and structures based upon nothing but a collective belief in the unreal. We’re a growth industry. Is it any wonder that cancer is one of our most impressive products? We’re talking blue chip.

Everything we say drops into the well of the vital soul. There it outlines the parameters of event, fencing in the environment for recurrent Karma. The blueprint is on the table. The draftsman bends over the table. The machine shop awaits the plans.

Everything we do is more of an engraving; an actual cut upon the formless. Some sculptors work on a private creation. Elsewhere thousands move over a large bank of clay; carving out an entire city destined for their inhabitation. They’ll have music and movies. They’ll have a history as the scroll unfolds. There will be wars and trials and parades aplenty. Men will swear oaths and women will weep over incomprehensible losses. They’ll live out this history as it was written according to the collective agreement of whatever it was they agreed to. Poof! There they are. And poof, there they go. Of course it’s not a time lapse scenario. But it will rise up and it will fall back and the dead leaves will twist and gutter down the streets and sidewalks. Ten thousand years of dust will cover them until the men with maps and pick hammers and brushes come to read what they can from what evidence they find. But they won’t learn anything. They’re building cities of their own.

They will build these cities and towns. They will draft documents and pass laws. They will compromise the documents and they will break the laws.

Occasional madmen will come upon the scene and point out the inconsistencies and they will be driven into the hills or raised up upon a cross. In a hundred years they will become the heroes of a renaissance and their words will be gospel as their words are reinterpreted to fit the needs of the architects of the following wind.

There will be great speeches in dark hours. The soul of the people will rise to face each shadow that grows on the borders or in the midst. Dramatists will repeat these speeches on temporary stages and hearts will swell at remembered heroics and bloody deeds. Flags will wave in the thundering sky and men will rouse themselves to final acts of glory against pitiless time.

Love will flower in every age and at the breaking of each new day. Love will struggle and endure though every bitter trial. Love will be made all the greater by comparison but only recognized long after the fact. Lovers will drift on separate boats across immeasurable seas while the memory reshapes the circumstance into a dream. Love will be broken into a million pieces and every piece will be the whole of Love. In the end, the only thing that will remains will be the Love. It will shine upon the face of its containment or it will glow like the most distant star, far, far away in the incalculable depths of the hearts that have abandoned it. But it will never go out. There is no life without this Love, though the life has no thought of its existence. It continues all the same.

The arrogant mind and its wide ambitions will forever fall short of this Love. This Love will stay perfect and apart as madness does from the mind of reason, like a seashell beyond the seas reach. It will remain unchanged regardless of the brutish nature shaping demons from its rutting need. And everything will be shaped according to it in the time that it takes to accomplish it. Every dark creation, every misshapen form will be worn into beauty like the honeycombed cliffs by the unseen hand of the wind.

No one who has ever lived can accomplish more than to allow this Love to work. The greatest artistry is in the witnessing accommodation of Loves effort to reveal the poetry of the human soul that seeks to sing upon the sympathetic string; the resonant response vibrating to its greater likeness.

So, we go about our business here. We shape the world to our ends, almost. But we are shaped without understanding it every step of the way. Whether we have massed armies against presumed enemies; whether we are swept away on a sunny holiday beach, whether we work in the quiet of our being for the greater good, or proclaim our magnanimous acts in the crowded thoroughfares, we cannot fail to come to the same moment of revelation. It is true that some paths are more painful than others. Some paths work at a greater resistance to the inevitable. They run wide of the mark. They press apart. They press against. They push. And they harvest. On the road to Damascus or Samara, they press on and they kick against the pricks. It is the most amazing thing. It has been said so many times, in so many tongues, in so many lands and yet, it remains unheard.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you get any better than this I think you will disappear, right up into a column of light. I don't know what else to say. This is the very best yet.

z a

Anonymous said...

Extraordinary. I will need to read this again and again. This is a work of genius.

Bill

Anonymous said...

Recall the Vonnegut novel (can't recall the title) in which he surmises that the failure of humans was the fact that their brains became too large and they were unable to go with the flow, as it were? He then imagined shrinking brains as part of their survival mechanism and likened them to sea lions, basking on the shore in complete happiness until an impulse moved them to enter the water to frolic only to be swallowed by killer whales and slide down the dark tunnel to the after life. For better or worse, I think I prefer the big brains. They, at least, allow for imaginative chord progressions.

Anonymous said...

Amazing Grace how sweet the sound. I am in on the ground floor of something special with you. This is meat and drink.

thank you,
Bruce

Anonymous said...

Sorry, the one above Bruce was me.

JackD

Anonymous said...

Beautiful. My continued thanks to you for doing this..
I read the two before this one also, and the stained glass analogy in "Hot-housing..." was just incredible. Something I will never forget.

ben

Visible said...

I want to thank all of you for making this possible. I doubt it would continue happening in this respect, or be anywhere as good as you claim it is, were it not for the understanding that other minds would be interacting with it.

I don't respond here in the threads very often. It gets redundant unless I'm getting an actual question. I do always respond to emails however.

If anyone out there is in contact with JustOffal I would appreciate someone letting him know to email me. I've written him several times and I suspect that he's not getting them or not checking that account.

Believe me I am grateful for the support and the knowledge that this gets read. It was an awful labor for me to place this sort of thing as often as I did among the Philistines and Pharesees of The Fray. Hindsight is showing me what an awful place that really was; at least for the likes of me. Fern bars tend to discourage hippie clientele.

I thank you all with great gratitude. Sometimes the work will be better than at other times but I will always strive to get out of the way of the message.





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