Schizoid
I'm a nomad
A wanderer
A seeker
A rootless cosmopolitan
(Well, not exactly rootless
And not exactly cosmopolitan)
But my roots have been damaged
They've been cut and twisted sick
Yet the memories remain
Reluctantly
Invading my consciousness
With military regularity
The confusing legacy
The ambiguous heritage
Sometimes I wish I could see it
Just as they see it
Those with moral certainty
With dogmatic absolutism
With Manichaean simplicity
Which is ultimately nothing
But impoverished reductionism
Those without all the traumas
Of dysfunction
Of totalitarianism
Of immigration
Of suicide
Of psychoaffective disorder
Psycho
Affective
Disorder
This nebulous PADding
Around my brain
This implicate order
Electromagnetic field
Quantum vacuum vibrations
Out of tune
Out of period
Not resonating
But causing dissonance
On all levels
Including the cognitive
Cacophony
Just caca
Or Dada
Doesn't make sense all the same.
Fragmentation
Our schizoid world
Embrace it, ride it, use it
To realize - we are not us
Our self is never whole
Just an illusion of permanence
Fossilized by dogmatic beliefs
By ideology, religion, propaganda
We all surf this life
Whether we realize it or not
Better to be awake
Better but not easier
Oh no, not easier
I'm a stranger
A foreigner
Camus' Sysiphus
Gide's Immoralist
Judge-penitent
L'etranger
(Well, not exactly that kind
of a stranger -
I'm not French enough)
My nausea is different from Sartre's
I will never see a tree quite like that
But it has this Holden's quality
Though I never caught anything in the rye
Raise high the beam, carpenters
Is there a Jesus amongst you?
High. Beam. Rye. The Buddha.
No phoniness here,
Only the awakening
From a deep slumber
Inside the matrix.
There are many matrices
Several epistemes
They coexist in time
It is they who clash
Not civilizations
Sometimes within one person
Wreaking havoc in the mind
Our schizoid times
There once was the World
Inhabited by gods and men
And the latter could read it
Easily enough
Through symbols and signs
That referred to something real
Then the game changed
Men invented God
In their image -
Sublime and awesome fear;
Deep, abiding love -
And called Him the Creator,
Reversing the relation.
But the myths remained.
The words endowed with God
The things infused with meaning,
And men among them.
Inevitably, the meanings slipped
The words escaped
And God slowly died
Under His own weight
Under the weight of missing words
And from the face of God
Came none other than Man
God is dead! Long live the New Gods!
Anthropocentric carousel
Went round and round and round and round
Until it crashed
In the apocalyptic nightmare
And from its remains
Arose a new order of things
Or so it seemed
In truth, it was disorder
Not even chaos with its rules
Disorder
The signs became unhinged
The reality became submerged
In the flood of simulacra
The spectacle ensued
The carnival, buffoonery, burlesque
The whirlwind of words and meanings
Without anything to attach
And to signify
The face of Man
Drawn in the sand
Washing away into the sea
What will come next?
Whose face will we see?
How beautiful or ugly will it be?
That is the question
Of our schizoid life.
Find your own answer
Don't buy into what they say
Don't become a decidophobe
Don't seek refuge
From the storm
Of our schizoid life
The easy way out
Is also the path of darkness
Of simulated illusion
Of sentimental hope
Of false certainty
Of militant security
In short, of death.
There were never
Any "good ol' times"
The only good time
Is now, this moment
Don't lose it
Don't waste it
Carpe diem
Go forth and multiply
Good thoughts, love, friendship
Not misery and suffering
Go forth
Don't look back
Except to learn
From history
Which has much to teach
If we just listened
Just don't repeat it
Don't fucking repeat it
As a farce
Simply create, build, make
Heeding beauty and function
But beauty most of all
The wrecking crew
Will always lurk around
Don't mind the gap
In their minds
Just do what you can
To make some sense
Out of this schizoid life.
August 9-10, 2017