Fat in the fire

Dispatch from the Walnut Room, Denver CO:

The impending doom we perceive bearing down upon us like a freight train seems considerably less tragic tonight. It's because we can console ourselves with the knowledge that although we will be thrown in the fire, all these other people will burn too.

Two for Augustine

The stillness of holy reality confounds one's thoughts because God is imagined as somehow living, and yet he is also considered to be frozen in permanent changelessness and eternity. It remains impossible for us to conceive of something living or alive without the processes of life as perceived in time, without motion or decision or change.

***

In a dream last night: I have returned to my home town with some people. We are at a shitty half-destroyed restaurant that offers a choice of fried catfish or chinese food. People I knew from high school enter. I am happy to see them, but they snub me. The close friend I am traveling with points to the railroad tracks nearby and says, "Is there a place where we can get across those tracks?" I turn around and look. Just barely hidden from view, a very picturesque dirt road leads across them. "Yeah, right over there," I say. Then I look again. Deepening back on the other side of the tracks is a misty pastel morning to rival the most beautiful I have ever seen. It's as though not just childhood, but the era previous to even being born is seen in the hazy distance of hills and trees. I think to myself with wonder, Arkansas.

Total War

The only satisfying life is one spent in a state of total war for some overriding ideal.

Thirty

We carry on, I guess until we can’t carry on any longer. The spark of youth has vanished and we’ve grown tired. The only thing to do now is to get into as lock step and march until we drop dead in whatever frozen Siberia we’re to find in the minds most advanced reaches. We’ll carry on, either west until the end, or east until we rediscover the beginning. And really is there any difference? The question remains if there will be any sort of sun rising or setting there.

0

God does not accord to perfection. On the contrary, whatever god is, is by definition perfect. God is the original standard, the first frame of reference.

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Faces Comprising a crowd: Ugly, Horrible, mean-spirited, crude, dumb, repulsive. Half-conscious pigs at the trough. One’s got to wonder where God is in all of this.

But the Grotesque does not exist objectively. Only my perception of the world exists. That is where the Shit and rabble finds itself. The world is just what it is, no more and no less –without value judgments. The grotesque belongs to me, to my own mind.

You were wrong

The crusade has been in motion for years. Blown out speakers and loud tires on the highway. No map, no compass. Every minute is stressed to the breaking point with super-conscious anxiety. You have been trying to find the ultimate reality. You threw a hateful ultimatum at the gods and demanded an answer.

In search of the ultimate reality you wore yourself out on weird trips, misguided efforts. slept in graveyards, chased sunsets over distant hills, etc. You dragged the muck up out of the unconscious depth and then you gasped with horror and vomited when you looked at it. You did strange things even you can’t explain. You did morally questionable things. You told me you would take this as far as possible, as far as the human mind can grasp. But there was one danger you refused to consider: that your entire quest was completely and totally misguided.

So you suffered appropriately and for a long time.

But tonight something is going change. Tonight you will walk into a bedroom and find her there, having fallen asleep with her clothes on. You will pause for a moment and appreciate the scene. Standing there in the middle of the room in total silence, it will become very clear that she is the meaning. The meaning was not to be found in sacred or philosophical texts, not in temples or in an ambitious future, or in a dramatic confrontation with the void. It will be there with you in her room tonight. And it will seem impossibly simple.

In the morning you will begin to suspect that the meaning of existence is not a thing to be intellectually discovered, or sought out at all. It is not to be forced out from behind the curtain at gunpoint. Instead, you find that it was with you all along, inherent to the experience of being alive. It was sitting quietly with you while you were racking you brains for the answers to these riddles.

The meaning of existence cannot be forced out of hiding. But in time it will gently reveal itself to you.