This is a work of fiction.
image by ‘as above astro’ via Jae Mather
It’s like…
I’m watching a castle made of sand, slowly eroding from below
as the unforgiving ocean tide laps around its base —
The people at the bottom of the castle are dying and desperate,
while those above carry on with their lives, oblivious.
For now.
These thoughts arise; I think they’re mine.
The feelings never quite align:
Reactions over which I have no say.
It’s like…
We’re still animals at heart, driven by the same primeval instincts and reactions
that our ancient ancestors bequeathed to us.
Fight, flee, or freeze, these instincts tell us —
But how can we fight when we don’t know what we’re fighting?
How can we freeze when we don’t know what we’re hiding from?
How can we flee when we don’t know what we’re fleeing from,
and have nowhere to go anyway?
This body does what it will do:
I watch its moves, and misconstrue
its reasons
which, it’s clear, I cannot know.
It’s like…
I’m emotionally paralyzed, unable to decide what to do,
bewildered, stunned by fear and rage,
Afraid to look, afraid to feel, afraid even to imagine
what could happen next —
This is, pathetically, how I am facing chaos, its utter incoherence;
The loud tolling, the relentless drumbeat of accelerating collapse.
Just along… for the ride
Pushed along… with the tide
With no choice what to do, or think, or feel.
It’s like…
Lori McKenna sings: “I’m scared too, that we don’t know why we’re here, or where we came from and if we get to go back to it. I’m scared too, that the world seems so unfair and the TV keeps reminding us we blew it. I’m scared of getting old, of dying young, of staying still, of moving on, of reaching out too far and losing my footing… I’m sorry that life can be so hard, and that I can’t fix most things you need fixing… But don’t forget that we’re the lucky ones who feel the feelings in our bones and hold our breath inside our lungs so we don’t cry in public. ‘Cause the breaking only means it’s love, so don’t ever let it make you tough — Don’t ever try to ever rise above it.”
I read the news and get distressed —
A world of hurt and pained unrest;
Too hard to watch; too sad to turn away.
It’s like…
Everything is falling apart, but it’s happening so slowly that we hardly notice,
and nothing seems to really change, or even be capable of being changed.
And even if it is, we somehow know we’re way too late to try to change it now.
To know it’s not our fault offers no solace, no consolation.
I worry ‘bout the things to come
As hopes and plans come all undone,
Ashamed, afraid of what I can’t control.
It’s like…
Melissa Pierson writes: “A rat who is working for food suddenly hears a warning signal followed by a shock he can do nothing to avoid. After it stops, he goes back to working for food. But soon, even the sound of the signal is enough to stop him from seeking reward. Even though he could continue painlessly during this interval to obtain food, he seems crushed by the anticipation and now crouches tensely, trembling, defecating, urinating, hair standing on end. The animal is, in scientific terms, scared shitless. He can do nothing to control his fate, and that is untenable.”
We cannot choose what we believe,
What we prefer, what we conceive
or even what we pay attention to.
Our selves are just observers; still
we think our choices prove free will —
But the stories that we tell are all untrue.
It’s like…
No surprise that our attention spans have shattered. It’s too scary to really look and see and try to understand what’s happening. We can hear the giant boot coming closer, but have no idea if it’s coming for us, or not. How can we know? There is no making sense of chaos and collapse, no meaning to it in some larger arc of continuity. When I was young and scared I tried to make myself so small that I could not be seen, or I imagined myself invisible, safe for just a moment, a chance to catch my breath and prepare for the next shock, the next imagined threat.
We think that we might have a voice,
Some agency, a little choice,
But life is just “what is”; there’s no parole.
It’s like…
When the giant boot comes closer — an illness, say, or a financial setback, the loss of a job, or a threat from someone with more power than us — then, like any other creature, we “don’t know which way to turn”. This idiom exists in so many languages across all human cultures. It’s the universal metaphor for sudden loss of direction, uncertainty, and the panic and abject terror that that brings up.
At the sound of the giant boot, the ants and mice and silverfish just flee in all directions. Anywhere is better than here, we think, but that’s just the rationalization; the decision to flee was made long before we gave it thought. It doesn’t matter where, physically, psychologically, philosophically. Just escape. Into our fantasies, or our ‘faith’, or any of the amusements that we use to distract ourselves from really being alive, here, now. Anywhere but here. Anywhere but now. A recent poll revealed that more people now wish they lived in some imagined past, than in the present, and almost none still dream of living in the future. Can’t really blame them. Lots of us, it seems, are no longer living in the present anyways.
All I can do is shrug and smile
I’m never going to reconcile
what’s happening with what I think should be.
Each one of us, we do our best
We have no clue about the rest —
Poor humankind — we never can be free.
It’s like…
People tell me I should just relax, let it go, let it wash over me. Just smile because we can never know what the future might hold. And that we have no choice or control over it anyway. But that’s not how the human animal, with its model of how the world must and should be — logical and fair and advancing ever forward — can ever choose to behave. We just act out our conditioning.
And it’s easier for us, with our huge, unruly brains, to stop feeling than it is to stop thinking. And I can’t help but believe that a world of humans so disconnected from life and reality that they are incessantly thinking but no longer feeling or caring for anything but themselves, is a terrible, dangerous world that no one in their right mind would want to be a part of.
