Call this a journal entry.
Splendour is lost in the splendiferous, is it not?
What is the word’s worth, Wordsworth?
And how much is your Woolworth,
happy Shepherd-boy?
I write lines that only mimic poetry, jokes that aren’t funny, or platitudes that are.
Monday morning I suffered from the specific melancholy that comes with the internet being out. Nearly my entire social life cut off, my news habit tormenting me.
What is happening now? Has anything blown up?
Spectrum technicians are working on it. Neighborhood outage.
67 years ago I fell out of the sky and now reside in Brooklyn and it astonishes me because the trip from then to now seems so natural, like the drift of continents, geological time compressed into the lifespan of some tiny organism.
You are not alone, tiny organism, I shout to a passing paramecium, you are interconnected with the infinite space full of beings. But does it listen?
Cosmic changes as well as local cultural changes and macro and microeconomic disturbances are manifested in my mood this afternoon. The specific anxiety in trying to track the growth of the fascist movement in the USA while witnessing the utter dereliction of duty and abandonment of common decency in the Republican Party and among people who look like me. In November 2016 walking in Bed Stuy and seeing my reflection in a window and seeing someone who looks like a stereotypical Trump voter and a couple years before that, watching the uprising in Ferguson and re-examining my childhood in segregated Florida and my mis-education into a White identity. I was going to tell stories about being a five year old bigot tonight, but I am still ashamed, and maybe I was seven. Now I see White people claiming victimhood and cultivating resentment and mass psychosis, what used to be called demonic deception, a cloud of false witnesses, pathetic little liars who have attached themselves to the Big Liar like hungry little puppies to a dead bitch.
I’m plugged back into the information matrix and overdosing on the impeachment of Donald J Trump, choosing to watch the CSPAN stream on Facebook and sometimes reading the comments that pass by, mostly trolls just trying to provoke but also true believers. Reading these comments is like eating grains of rat poison.
True believers of a big lie are damned by their faith, at least in my mind. I want to see them suffer the humiliation of realizing how wrong they were and to see their noses rubbed in their own ideological mess, but I know I will never see that, and they will go to their graves with their beliefs, damned but never knowing they were damned, as they drop through the sketchier bardos, pulled by karmic gravity through the vacuum of their ignorance, tormented by hungry ghosts, or so I like to imagine. But if they are remembered at all, it will be as ancestors their descendants would rather forget, and they will be forgotten. They will not become statues on Monument Avenue.
So you see I’m not in a charitable mood all the time.
What is of good report?
I learn about the work of an activist who worked for the homeless. He died last week, but a short film was made about his work and now it is a testament not only to his character, but to good work itself, and to the very idea of walking a path of righteousness.
What is my right path? Isn’t it the one that brought me here?
“Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,”
as Wordsworth said.
Here I am. What’s next?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home