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August
2007
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Copyright © 2006 "Giving well is the best revenge."
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The Next Year-Zero
Some are content with minor, fairly unobtrusive illusions. Others, gripped by genes of ambition, greed, and envy harbor larger, often quite destructive, illusions. These latter strivers, by the roll of the dice, sometimes achieve mightily, managing deeds which many come to see as "great".
"Great" or not, it’s all a house of cards. Happy fools, we, inhabitants of a universe of utter impermanence, strive for and—when available—don masks of seeming permanence.
Mired in durance, we are voyeurs of impermanence who desire mightily for our access to it to go on for nothing less than forever.
Laughing all the way to the brink, we try to learn from our mistakes. But even the humblest among us are done in finally by the perfect uncertainty of this our home.
Mistakes accumulate, breeding other mistakes eventually in a wholly unmanageable geometric progression. One day the chickens we thought we had counted before they hatched and which we thought belonged to us disappear. They don’t come home to roost. They just vanish.
Deprived, then, of our illusions, we are given to flailing about in various unseemly manners.
War, pestilence, famine, disaster natural and manmade only goad us to wilder, more elaborate flailing.
A clear-eyed view of the world reveals now a time of considerable flailing.
No point in recounting the evidence. Those with eyes already see. The blind can’t. Why bother repeating the familiar catalog of failures and mistakes.
It is not the end that is at hand, but a beginning.
One day soon, we will awaken to calamity on a scale well-known to this rambunctious universe and even to dear old earth herself but quite new to myopic homo sapiens. Not rapture, alas, but rupture.
Those who survive will themselves of course continue to flail for a while (flailing being the only thing we’re really expert at).
Another day will dawn and with it, hope. So great will the hope be, and so devastating the view backward, that those survivors, you may be sure, will think about and judge us pre-calamitites as extreme and extremely undesirable primitives.
So primitive will we and our now-vanished world seem to them, that all they can do is start over, counting (again) from zero.
They will reset all the clocks and calendars to this new zero, saying, what came before was perhaps of some interest and even worth studying for the lessons to be learned but was finally as any fool can now see calamitous.
We, and all our revered dates. rituals, and time-bound pomposities reduced to a series of negative numbers. No more B.C./A.D., but some new nomenclature, some new counting (and accounting) as foreign to us as Hammurabi’s world.
Unthinkable? That’s the point. We got into this mess because we failed to see that precisely nothing in this universe is unthinkable. Including the inevitable and imminent negation of our vaunted days and ways.
Happy new years.
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"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." --Oscar Wilde.
Magellan's Log Copyright ©
2006 Texas Chapbook Press
www.texaschapbookpress.com