eerie4

Descartes, in a crisis of faith conjured up a demon. A hellacious fiend: omnipotent, malevolent, skilled in all arts of the diplomacy that is deception. Descartes then set the demon above him and proceeded to rip his world apart. In the end, perhaps, after he got done self-flagellating, he wept in great relief, and thanked a God whose creation he could now admit.

This is your Father of Rationality. Fucking mystic.

He might have done better to listen to the peasant with regards to that rationality. After all, peasants are only religious to the point of distraction. One prays for the crops, and kills a few virgins aside. But I guarantee as surely as they incant their magics, they till and weed; they sow and reap. Metaphysical lessons and considerations of what is rational are forgotten in the automation. It is a popular hallucinogen these days to think that machines will gather some malevolent intelligence and use a human love of sloth to subjugate the flesh. I think the machines shall simply keep running, creating the ever-elusive faster, stronger, and easier for their masters while the human beast grows too large for its confines and slowly suffocates.

The machines, unable to be fed, shall soon perish afterward.

Some think carefully controlled extinction of cross-sections of the population is necessary. Others await aliens, or Christ. Anarchists and the Power Elite cower in their respective churches, putting on their witch doctor masks, forging second-by-second alliances with each other that are followed immediately by second-by-second betrayals. One hundred new shiny plastic different gods, a chemical solution for every ailment, and No Man Ever Knowing What's Best For Any Other. Whole men are vulnerable things, they can be taken apart from three hundred and sixty angles of attack. It is better to be fragments blowing with the wind then solid; snapped in half and left in an alley for the junk collector.

I think we just need new disciplines. A couple of brand spanking new mythologies. Without all the recycling of wit.

So I go about this business on the fringe walking behind the backdrop. I hear it in every voice, every time I take a seat across a booth and sip the beverage; as I settle in for the next tale, I listen for it: Let us find another way to speak the truth again. Let us find another way to gesture, meet in the middle, our worlds subsumed within us, to blow each other apart. Let us find new incantations; let us split ears with the dissonance; find new resurrections and in that harmony, re-invent this rhythm of us.

I've spent a long time making the steep grades of my life flat. On flat ground grows good crops; on flat ground one can build a house to stand against a storm. Nonetheless, even in the days of national parks at eight dollars a spot and Google Earth, peaks and valleys still hold mystique for me. If I disappeared for a hundred years and then returned, how many here there be monsters would reappear on my maps? Do we forget peaks and valleys; abandon our own mysteries too easily? Today's life has become a wide road to travel, easy on the tires. These are the roads that hypnotize. These are the roads whose solitude will send a man into the middle of its blackness to kill himself, trying to answer after all the senselessness he's had to run through with some cooked-up rationality. If you won't give credibility to the lazy evils and strange devils in your head, you will meet them out on that dead pavement eventually. Take an unintentional lesson from Descartes: There is too large of a world, and too many ways to tell someone to go fuck themselves for the word wrong to last forever. Had I a stone tablet and a handy lightning bolt, I'd carve that out as the first commandment for the man sick enough to desire to be free.