A streetcorner Socrates calls out those who grow forests of words -- not because he doesn't love the trees, but because they impede his view, making for perpetual dimness in a mind that craves light. The trick is not to clearcut, but to leave only that which enhances the view.
Nature dresses up the detritus of our fallen civilizations. After all but the most resolute stonework has crumbled, cool faces of stone having sloughed off to leave rugged, pitted rock, all that stands testament to life is the tall grass that sways in the wind.
Some love attributing sacredness -- places beyond place, times beyond time, the infinite & the infinitesimal. But anything elevated to the sacred becomes a thing for which people will kill or die. Often, people don't make this reckoning until the dying 's done: -death for a sign -death for a symbol -death for a chunk of dead earth -death for a vaguely evaluated idea The agents of sanctification will kill us all.
Only too eager to have the machine installed in their brains, they did what they could, and, instead, installed their brains into the machine. Data sparkled in the mind void, bouncing about and careening into other bytes and clusters. But the crash cascades always came, a cannibalistic consumption of fact, transmogrifying it into a shabby soup of quasi-reality. Brain-pans paining, densely packed with alternate realities that could never be rectified. By the time they realized the virtue of going out to play, they were no longer sure what "outside" meant -- Outside of what? Where's the exit? Where is there something else? -something simple? How's one get off this speeding bus? It became the pain that ruled that last lost generation.
The boy pressed his hand to the cool interior wall, sitting on the floor of a dark, empty chapel. Outside the sun blazed, and humidity oppressed. The orphan created a narrative in his head, one based on some strange logic. If hell was an "eternal torment of flames," then the cool interior of the monk's chapel must be the anti-hell -- a place that devoured the heat of hell-fire... but what did that make that baking place that was outside those thick walls.
They shouted irate philosophies about the foul leviathan. The angry measure of angry men, and all those foul winds blew back on them.
On the shore of angry seas I hear the crash of foamy waves, but miss the crisp sudsy sizzle that one hears on a sunny summer day. That nuanced note is lost to the Churn
There you sit in a boxless box -- unmoving, but thinking about moving. Then, stretching one trembling hand out to its fullest extent, you feel fingers press into nothing, but a hard kind of nothing.
In death, I'm a recyclable, my gut biome will gnaw its way out of me like Ripley's Alien - if on a microscopic scale. Agents of the Destroyer will turn my tissues into food bits to feed some other animal. Yes, I am inescapably animal - inescapably in transformation from living to not... This may seem morose, but is it? He who can imagine a dog cracking open his bones to eat away all the marrow -- without an inner cringe, or wince -- is a person who knows freedom.
the image blurs my mind blurs attempts to focus bring a headache so i relax, seeking no clarity, finding no answers adrift in emptiness attached to nothing; the abyss peers back what does it see?
Tiger Riding for Beginners 