Still, we wonder why we are here. Perhaps it is to receive invisible worlds. Not just the freight of our histories, our stories -- invisible and essential. Also love, repulsion, and desperate belief, -- everything that signals the army to the field of death, and propels the mother to the dark surf after her child. Perhaps to manufacture dreams.
We say time traps us. We believe in a place where it does not exist, pray for this, and fear it. There are other worlds, and emotion is renewed in them.
The visible world is a false god of unlimited power. Alternative realities have always propelled us.
We awaken into a dream we must describe. We fear the next dream. In our desperation we ignore the infinite dreams around us.
The world is haunted and incomprehensible….so we start again.
Today we have built cities that look like the sets of model railroads, children’s clothing for adults, art with a job to shock and leave. Archeologists will exhume all this, too, someday, and wonder what terrified us.
The Traveler: “We lived – all over the world, as best we could, waking at 3 and 4 AM to be on the time zone of our destination, traveling with currencies for countries unstable enough that they carried images of no politicians, or even that nation’s historical figures. Too dangerous.
“We hoped we were stitching the world together – we hoped we had captured some of its magnificent explosion better than anyone before. That is, when we were not desperate.
There was a kind of immortality in knowing someone with the latest slang in St. Petersburg, dealing in dams and cotton in Cairo, hearing about the coup from the safety of the Shanghai disco, the pane crash, the true rate of infection. We were desperate for speed, in a world that spun faster, desperate for knowledge of power. Its scope promised a life greater than any that had come before, because the world had never been so baffling, and this was a promise of immortality, whatever we could claim of the eternal. There had been false promises before, but we believed. It was so good to believe, and hang on as the taxi sped past neon.”
“People need to learn that the marketing is sometimes infused with the result.” –Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google
There is a War on Terror. We will know it is over when we are no longer afraid. Which leader has a stake in that?
1 comment:
Beautiful blog. I read backwards, so to speak.
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