If the line between good and evil cuts through the human heart there’s gotta be some overlap.
The lovely mesh seems so far to last oh … about forever and it occurred this morning it will never quite be clean this side of the fundy conception of the Jordan. Even Dr. Willard, averring as he does an earlier fording of the waters in the Red River of the Soul, acknowledged as much.
We have met the poor always near to hand and he is resilient. For, as the Solzhenitsyn quote commonly concludes, ‘who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?’
A look inside and there is more than overlap, there is integration. There is entanglement among the brambles, good and evil twined, and the bottom, shd we ever find it, a muck of what we never want to see laid out dry before us on the ground, so just add water and thank God we need it, water every few days lest we die to hide the trashy ground we thought solid enough when we stepped upon it.
The opposite of the cheesy-easy bromide of the mid-past — it was on fire when I lay down on it.
It wasn’t.
We lay down.
Then lit the fire.
And so there is as ever paradox, which is to say confusion, which is what paradox is when it still seems like contradiction. We need the well of living water to cover ourselves but water made the muck, then hid it. So we figure, perhaps, ok — drain the swamp. But from where we’re standing in it? And even then won’t we still be stuck?
And anyway aren’t we but dust and won’t water always do that to us.
How can it be a solution when it only seems a mixture. Ever with us.
The answers I imagine myself coming to then seem not to be because I’ve had such thoughts before and while this is manifestly not a whattya gonna do or who can say or well, there’s no real answer is there … none of those. No bromides in any directions, just miles and miles of miles of river and dust.
Alongside the odiousness of refuse-to-choose this sounds defeatist or worse and smart people have ended up there — existentialism without, ironically enough, existence … a focus on being that in practice excludes a reason for it and so depends on itself and so will and does collapse and implode.
Nothing finite can explain itself.
Hence the paucity of whys and wherefores, of giving reasons, and all the feels in the world won’t replace that bec we’ve tried and why the hell shd I care what you feel any more than what you think? And look where it has got us and who is suggesting now that we hold hands and sing kumbaya?
And so we … do nothing?
Counterintuitive.
Bit of buzz tho.
Bit of buzz so.
We know we must alter course, and so … keep swimming … or walking … [you thought maybe this one?] but, ya know … different.
Think different.
Feel different.
Or not.
There’s the frozen chosen, deer in the headlights, blow it all off and binge Netflix route, and sometimes even that seems like too much trouble. It’s such a big river, a big world, and we will never see all of it. We’d never make it no matter how much we move, which ways we go so why go anywheres.
They also swerve who only stand and wait?
This seems untenable too;
I’ve tried it — so have you.
Gotta be both.
Do + Nothing.
Cldn’t resist …
It’s an answer.
Stay t’the end.