![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Hello,
The year is 2022.
There is a hole in everything. You bail with netted buckets, held in swiss cheese hands, behold a patchwork moment! Dream memories. But pressed, oh-no, p-pressed and you puff up to assure! These are real hands, Herr Doktor, these are real fears! I am justified! I am true!
You, there, on the gallows. Admiring the knotwork? Amusing the Honorable Mr. Ketch with your banter?
Look closer.
The Honorable Mr. Ketch is not amused, in fact Mr. Ketch is Quite Bored With This Whole Thing, You Know, and would just as soon disabuse you of any fraternal notions except that it's less effort to nod and wink and pull the lever. The Honorable Mr. Ketch has his own existential crises, surely, not one of them mitigated by years spent literally killing people, people like you, and people not like you, too. Dignified folk, even, wealthy and respected, people with manners, people with class, people who don't come up full of asking What Was This All About, Anyway, or Dear Lord Why Me, or, worse, far worse, the winkers and nudgers, the in-crowd, the unrepentant ironists! The Honorable Mr. Ketch, weighed down by his own infinite sin, toils in quiet grace, doing his work as well as he can, all things considered and thank you very much, no really, it's a horrifying occupation, yes, and great work if you can get it! But ones like you, please, he'd rather have a sobber, a screamer, a rabid anarchist, anything but Someone Who Gets Him And Really Appreciates His Role Here.
I was raised on a trajectory toward contradiction, and if that seems normal to you, then, yes, exactly. If it doesn't, then maybe you're a future historian and you don't speak the language well enough, yet, or you've solved me, already. In either case, congratulations. On the off chance that you're still somewhere in between (you liminal few), I apologize. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway and also fuck you, you're doing it too, probably, and if not you wish you were, which is just as bad, worse, even!
The problem isn't new in the sense that it's only just now been recognized- no, it's an old one. You've known it since Dandelion Wine. Since that fruit started fermenting in your belly. After you learned to be afraid of the dark. When you learned why you should be. Luckily, some Very Smart People have been Thinking about this problem for A Long Time, which is nice™, but unluckily they all seem as stumped as you, though, to their credit, poetic confusion still gets you laid, and various strands or flavours of confusion can band together and, be wrong about things, together. Being wrong about things together can get you all kinds of things that being wrong alone won't, like staying alive, and refrigerators, and buildings. But if you're wrong enough, with the right people, with some great stuff, you forget. You all forget that you're wrong. I mean, you're right, of course. One plus one equals two, and this wall bars passage, despite any protests. It's that you'll remember, eventually. That this is unsustainable, that nothing lasts, that the inevitable is inevitable, and that, it's not so much just just that you'll die-
it's that there will be an experience which is unfollowed. It's that there is something, there is an experience, that is, it is like something, to be the last thing, which is to say, there will be an experience that is your last experience. And when you really remember you remember it could be the most banal, or even taken liberally, your entire life whole. And the Wise, those knuckleheads, those absolute tea pots, spent the last few hundred years poisoning the exits! Religion? Hah! Psychiatry? Hah! Hedonism? You're not brave enough, you never were, and being reminded of that is surely just another weapon in your arsenal of shame.
Critical failure is the normative equilibrium, here, everything is broken and it works fine that way. The unresolved crisis remains unresolved. Forever. This is my hot take on some-thousands of years of so called western thought, such as it is, as it were, so to speak, in a sense, to be clear, in closing, et cetera, and so on.
THAT SAID
Maybe there are some better questions to ask?
The year is 2022.
There is a hole in everything. You bail with netted buckets, held in swiss cheese hands, behold a patchwork moment! Dream memories. But pressed, oh-no, p-pressed and you puff up to assure! These are real hands, Herr Doktor, these are real fears! I am justified! I am true!
You, there, on the gallows. Admiring the knotwork? Amusing the Honorable Mr. Ketch with your banter?
Look closer.
The Honorable Mr. Ketch is not amused, in fact Mr. Ketch is Quite Bored With This Whole Thing, You Know, and would just as soon disabuse you of any fraternal notions except that it's less effort to nod and wink and pull the lever. The Honorable Mr. Ketch has his own existential crises, surely, not one of them mitigated by years spent literally killing people, people like you, and people not like you, too. Dignified folk, even, wealthy and respected, people with manners, people with class, people who don't come up full of asking What Was This All About, Anyway, or Dear Lord Why Me, or, worse, far worse, the winkers and nudgers, the in-crowd, the unrepentant ironists! The Honorable Mr. Ketch, weighed down by his own infinite sin, toils in quiet grace, doing his work as well as he can, all things considered and thank you very much, no really, it's a horrifying occupation, yes, and great work if you can get it! But ones like you, please, he'd rather have a sobber, a screamer, a rabid anarchist, anything but Someone Who Gets Him And Really Appreciates His Role Here.
I was raised on a trajectory toward contradiction, and if that seems normal to you, then, yes, exactly. If it doesn't, then maybe you're a future historian and you don't speak the language well enough, yet, or you've solved me, already. In either case, congratulations. On the off chance that you're still somewhere in between (you liminal few), I apologize. I knew it was wrong and I did it anyway and also fuck you, you're doing it too, probably, and if not you wish you were, which is just as bad, worse, even!
The problem isn't new in the sense that it's only just now been recognized- no, it's an old one. You've known it since Dandelion Wine. Since that fruit started fermenting in your belly. After you learned to be afraid of the dark. When you learned why you should be. Luckily, some Very Smart People have been Thinking about this problem for A Long Time, which is nice™, but unluckily they all seem as stumped as you, though, to their credit, poetic confusion still gets you laid, and various strands or flavours of confusion can band together and, be wrong about things, together. Being wrong about things together can get you all kinds of things that being wrong alone won't, like staying alive, and refrigerators, and buildings. But if you're wrong enough, with the right people, with some great stuff, you forget. You all forget that you're wrong. I mean, you're right, of course. One plus one equals two, and this wall bars passage, despite any protests. It's that you'll remember, eventually. That this is unsustainable, that nothing lasts, that the inevitable is inevitable, and that, it's not so much just just that you'll die-
it's that there will be an experience which is unfollowed. It's that there is something, there is an experience, that is, it is like something, to be the last thing, which is to say, there will be an experience that is your last experience. And when you really remember you remember it could be the most banal, or even taken liberally, your entire life whole. And the Wise, those knuckleheads, those absolute tea pots, spent the last few hundred years poisoning the exits! Religion? Hah! Psychiatry? Hah! Hedonism? You're not brave enough, you never were, and being reminded of that is surely just another weapon in your arsenal of shame.
Critical failure is the normative equilibrium, here, everything is broken and it works fine that way. The unresolved crisis remains unresolved. Forever. This is my hot take on some-thousands of years of so called western thought, such as it is, as it were, so to speak, in a sense, to be clear, in closing, et cetera, and so on.
THAT SAID
Maybe there are some better questions to ask?
no subject
Date: 2022-01-14 06:58 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2022-01-14 08:53 pm (UTC)From: