(no subject)
The climate of control, atmospheric restriction: smog that bears down over cities and precludes the gestures of angels reaching us; unable to see their faces, their fumbling attempts to save us (from who?), desperately feigning hopefulness for us (what for?)… All this-forces that straddle the man-made silver needles and nature’s stretching green hands, both forms lunging, reaching towards the smog but unable to pierce it, ladders with nothing to grab onto; the sky impenetrable and we caged in this bubble, contained within this heated claustrophobia…
My friends from the prison they ask unto me / ‘How good how good does it feel to be free?’ / And I answer them most mysteriously / ‘Are birds free from the chains of the sky way?’…
What can happen inside this bubble? Is there anything which can roam, soar, flow, even live? Do we want it to? What could possibly rend this apart, and in so doing rend us apart, tear our skin off, refuse this smog, this global warming, this globe encased within a sphere; feeble fingers unable to touch the universe, eyes unable to see through the haze… Because we are part of something bigger, but unwittingly or not we’ve shut ourselves off: isolated, self-ostracism: and now we can’t reach the very thing that might save us, the hugeness, the infinity of darkness, the eyes ‘out there’ that redeem our hollow ones in here.
Infinity has never interested me before, has never drawn me; I am grounded, I am all about the phenomenality, I am about life inside this bubble as awful as it is. But there’s this sense of mythology, something unnameable and looming, and in the face of this apocalyptic present that we’re living the possibility of being in the world that is the world outside ourselves, the world that is the universe not our cloister, not our little cubbie hole, the world that is grand (again), glorious (again), alive (again), and massive (again). Maybe I’ve been thinking too much about Homer, maybe apocalypse is making me romantic. Probably. The thing is: there’s only so much digging and rummaging you can do; at some point your eyes want to look up and there’s only fucking smog up there. And there must be something outside that haze, that cocoon: not the Absolute they talk about and pray to with all its precious constancies and redemptive handouts, but the vastness of a big blue sky: an endless space that allows endless possibilities, endless distances to be journeyed across, a soundscape that accommodates ten billion voices and more, throws their noise into openness, into brimming existence, horizons which are only illusions like all horizons really are (you can never reach one), everything multidimensional and promising if only because of its size. What we’ve got here is the absolutisation of a horizon, the fixing of a horizon so that it can be reached, making it not a horizon at all, making it a wall. What I’m dying for is the possibility of multiple, endless forms of disclosure; this world, ourselves, just particles, and millions of other frenzied particles around us, unknown shapes and entities, unknown everything, endless unknowns and unnameables, endless emergings, pregnancies and births. That’s the mythology: of the unrepresentable and the intense plurality of cosmological growth, of flowering from non-being.
I’ll try to stop thinking about damn Socrates and the devastation he brought with his reason, but that doesn’t make the bubble any more penetrable; in fact it only fastens its structure. But bad faith can be handy in our apocalyptic days, letting ourselves believe the bubble is our protector rather than the hands clasped tight around our throat.