Room Where It Happens

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 swimmingor 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.

 

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent

True Romance

Mentioned last week the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a term used in film to refer to a female — not a woman, mark you, but a girl or perhaps female, depending on the level of [im]maturity — who exists in a story not for herself, more deeply not as a Self, but only for the

Read More »

On Real

Learned of late that several people — at least three husbands in young marriages, two with young children, everyone in his 20s — had not only never read The Velveteen Rabbit … but hadn’t heard of it. That sorta explains why it’s public domain and I can link to it here. Also explains why when

Read More »

Subjective, Objective

The other day I wrote on a wing and a whim … and misremembering. Or as Prufrock put it, quoting Woman — That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all. Nearly nothing I recalled happened in that way. Except of course the recalling. And a bit more. Wasn’t a

Read More »

People do the Craziest Things

Adam — did he do what he did for love? Did he say, ‘I will join her; I can’t bear to be without her.’ — is that how it went down? He at after Eve; was it because he’d rather skulk around the earth a sojourner and pilgrim at the mercy of the people in that

Read More »

Random

Inconvenient Truth

Near the start of The Shawshank Redemption Andy Dufresne is on the witness stand, losing a battle for his life he will ultimately win. The district attorney calls “inconvenient” the inability to find the gun used in the crime. Andy has used the gun to make a hole in the river, though not to make

Read More »

All Hat No Cattle

The men I respected most when I wrote about the golf business — and being the golf business they were mostly men — were course superintendents. I loved talking with them, because they more than nearly anyone else wanted to be there simply for the grass and the golfers, and in that order. And this

Read More »

Hey Babe, Wanna Increase My Downline?

This wouldn’t be the first time someone “posted” a “blog” on their “website” while having nothing to say. Well, not nothing exactly, but certainly not being sure exactly what he wants to say. But then that’s part of what a blog is, or was. Or maybe that’s just the bad kind; definitely it’s the old

Read More »

Related

Covidomatic Libs

  Dear _____ , (supporter, donor, customer, friend, co-afflicted) In these _____ (unprecedented, challenging, dangerous, difficult) times, we know you’re _____ (standing strong, bearing up well, getting ripe, fingering the edge of the cleaver and gazing at your partner’s neck) and miss our _____ (plums, belly dancers, unmatched selection of fine wines, engine repair tutorials)

Read More »

Like A Rolling Stone

A totally unscientific survey — texted my brother-in-law on the other coast — shows [my] fears of the death of the ice cream cone have been at least mildly exaggerated … tho looking, literally, a little topsy-turvy. A’course, I’d not heard anything specific; the reports were only in my head because about nothing from this

Read More »