The Last Day of Winter

On the last day of winter, the seekers went foraging in the blueberry field, looking for signs of melt or mud, for patches of brown earth or lone, stray, disheveled blades of grass to contrast with the vast veneer of snow and the lingering layers of endless white. The sun was out, but only meekly so, hiding behind clouds and peeping through the grey streaks for brief intervals, hesitatingly here and there. It was one of those weird, restless days when people who previously (all winter long) had been ready to snap, finally snap, or snap yet again, or otherwise relapse into eccentric behaviors. Two of the seekers were at first chatting discursively about their hunger pangs, their difficulty breathing, their unreliable footwear, the frigid discomfort of appendages,  having left sturdier coats, hats and gloves at home; they found themselves speculating about whether woods were more haunted in warm weather than during the cold season, whether ghosts hibernated, whether spirits traveled south for a time like everyone else in New England. The other two wayfarers were lost, transfixed, caught up in a rambling conversation about the heartier peoples of earlier times who dealt with winter without complaint, those hellions in Russia and Mongolia, who lived with the elements, who were forced to hunt and fish and built shelters or who hibernated underground for months at a time - without complaint. Those sturdier types, they asked for so little, expected little, begrudged no one, resented no one, were grateful for their portion, not like people these days, the pathetic whiners of modernia, those ultra-sensitive hyper-condriacs, who can't be outside in any kind of wind chill,  can't sleep exposed to the elements, can't go without their allergy pills, can't deal with any glitch in their schedule. Give me a little bit of that old spirit: to accept what life throws at you without expectation or lament...It's really quite tragic, when you consider that we can't go back to that mindset, it's not a matter of people not being able to face winter.......it's more the mindset that's we've lost touch with...because those tribes, those peoples lived within narrow horizons - their home was their world - they had nothing to compare it to really - nowhere that they'd rather be...

The Afterlife: A Dialogue

I maintain of course that glorious immortality is the ultimate goal - whether people realize it or not - the great telos, the goal of life...thus on some level we can grasp or intuit the bare outlines of what lies on the other side...

Oh. I don't know about that. What if some people out there are just - you know - indifferent to the whole matter.

What? Indifferent. It's just not front and center...

Fear of death, my man! C'mon. Do you discount that?

Yes. Yes. Of Course. Fear. Panic. Dread. The pangs of growing old.... That's normal.  But really that has to do less with immortality as it does fear of change in general. Death represents a huge adjustment - let's face it ...

And what follows after death...that is what people obsess over...and rightly so...

Yes, but, I'm just not sure you can say that everyone has the same vision of heaven, hell or limbo or...

Well...but everyone hopes to live forever....everyone craves the infinity of possibility that eternity represents- that sense of being able to go beyond what has been, to do or undo, to visit and re-visit ages and past lives and to make up the time....

Not for me, sorry. Can't fathom it. Wouldn't like it....

Can't fathom immortality you say....

Nope. That would be like perpetual insomnia...Ugh...

You'd rather just go asleep like a log - forever?

Wouldn't even know I was asleep. It would all go silent...

And that doesn't scare you...

Not that part....really...just getting over the cliff is what scares me....

But that's so sad....For everything to end with a "blip"....

Well...but painless...right? No regrets, no hand-wringing...no second guessing...No eternal punishments...

That's a cop-out. What about justice? The good and the base are punished with the same oblivion? That's untenable....completely unacceptable....

Well...can you imagine having to stay awake forever, having to remain conscious and aware of time past and time passing...

Oh - but it wouldn't be like that!

It would be more like the "blip" if you eliminate awareness of time...

Awkward or the Unbearable, Ineffable Complexity...

Gasping for breath, sensitive Simon trudges forward, looking around, yearning to tell someone about what he has just seen, what has gone down, what scandals are brewing, what horrors are lurking down the street, through the woods, in town, out of town, on the outskirts, on the edges. He has this crazy notion that life is somehow unbearable, that a person who is fully awake and aware of his surroundings is flirting with disaster, that intelligence and real concern breed insanity in the one who tries to absorb and balance the intricacies of a simple square inch of anything. Brooding thus like a mathematician calculating Pi to the last digit, mumbling silently to himself, tripping over sidewalk cracks, shivering without his coat, he laments: I am the witness, the sole witness, the prophet of the absolute terror, for the nighttime of the world, for the burden of mortal existence, for the human animal who was never meant to be a mere animal, who was not designed to function as a savage beast or an overgrown hyena...(That's when the trouble starts... when people immobilize themselves as slovenly brutes or else pretend to be as high as the angels...) It's bad enough having to digest a single day's worth's of headlines - the horse meat scandals in Europe, North Korea threatening preemptive nuclear attacks, drug cartels attacking students on spring break in Mexico, cruise liner passengers succumbing to dangerous, unstoppable bacterial infections, cheating athletes making their public mea culpas, celebrity chefs feuding over media exposure, another drive-by shooting in Chicago or D.C. where the victims go unreported, young women mauled, attacked by roving bands of males in India, smog levels in Beijing setting new records for numbers of people living under untenable conditions, prelates and clerics resigning, some from exhaustion some out of shame and guilt...a new Pope, perchance, to oversee a vast imploding bureaucracy of hierarchical intransigence....or those other headlines too disturbing to even mention like that house of horrors in Cleveland where the three women were held, beaten, ravished for more than a decade... Every waking moment on this god-forsaken planet, it seems, exacts a price from the psyche - a frittering away of stamina in the form of needless anxiety, stress and toil. One must become like Atlas, preserving it all in memory, in consciousness, like a desperate man teetering under a giant globe that he is taxed with holding up. And, along with these headlines, to be confronted by local horrors here at home, a thousand seemingly minor happenings, to be surrounded by local provincial folk who bear it all in awkward silence, who go on with their lives with quiet resignation or in some cases loud, disorderly meltdowns, desperation all the same. No public forum by which to unravel this nightmare, no one to converse with, no one else willing to acknowledge the sheer volume of unspeakable evil, the litany of public crimes, the private domestic abuses, the ugly, hidden, petty scandals, ... and this most recent "incident" (witnessed up close, directly)... a vision of sorts...just the latest of a series... so many heinous acts and miniature atrocities piled on top of one another... the insanity, the obsession, the compulsion leading to the lies, deception, betrayal - not simply the surface phenomena of events but what lies underneath - the snake pit of desire, the cauldron of the irrational, the seven-headed hydra dragging us all down into the dark iron cage below. It all goes back to the pre-determined outcome, he thought...the pre-conditions, tendencies, inclinations, instincts, appetites, pathologies leading to up the ugly outburst, the physical expression of the underlying spiritual ailment, which (consciously) we ignore, deny, flee from en masse, refusing to look at, refusing to probe, because nobody gets it...no one is involved...all of us radically cut off, disjointed, detached, unaware, negligent, complaisant, complicit, looking the other way, downplaying, explaining away, dwelling upon the facade of peaceful civility... Even Terrence - usually so easy to bounce controversies off of, so typically receptive to such philosophical banter, if simultaneously,  playfully contrarian, resists the full implications of Simon's thesis...When Simon tries to tell him about it,  he remarks that: yes oh, well, so I guess every young man and woman are playing with fire every time they go out for the weekend - since - theoretically - disaster could strike: ha, ha, ha....I mean...they could procreate....ha,ha,ha... you know, continue the species...This only makes Simon wince with frustration to hear such nonsense. No, no, Terrence continues: I'm completely serious...you were talking about the dangers...and well, isn't that a constant danger of youth? But you're forgetting something my friend.... in this wild claim of yours that life is one big long nightmare....one locked house of horror....Oh what is that??? Simon bellowed. Some people love the danger. Ha, ha, ha, ha...No really. That's capnip for some. You don't see that? People want....not to get hurt exactly....well sometimes, yes I suppose they do...but mostly we're talking moth and flame pyrotechnics.... Simon paused for several seconds before replying: That in itself is also terrifying...because they have no sense of the enormity of the danger, the bottomlessness of the abyss. And yet, to be fully human means we aspire to the highest stage of civility, refinement and cultivation,  to reach the stage where these terrors torment the mind, to reach the stage of logic-induced insanity. - So those thinkers at the top, as you describe them, the in-tell-o-gent-sia - the artists, writers, scientists, journalists, photographers, anyone worth their salt must all go insane? By the simple logic... of keeping their eyes open? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha....Terrence could not contain himself. Well....But at this point Simon became so tongue-tied, he could not speak. Terrence was beside himself, obsessed by the topic-at-hand, unwilling to let go of the argument: Why do you use words like terrifying, horrific, agonizing, god-forsaken, unbearable? Why not say, like, uhm - uhm - uhm - weird or, or, or.... wacky, you know, intriguing, uncanny? Because it's - it's not all darkness out there. People are still smiling and cavorting, some are actually enjoying themselves, others blissfully ignorant, obtuse, distracted... No need to put such a negative spin on things.  Right, mumbled Simon, with the growing cases of mentally ill and depressed/anxious people out there.  I don't see it...I mean yes I see it...but not to the degree that you're describing. The house of horrors. The what? The house in Cleveland. What house? Where the evil troll.


Hey........said Terrence said....employing one of his typically long pauses....what happened to you? You look strange...Oh man,,,where have you been what have you seen?

It was too disturbing, said Simon, I couldn't explain it....I was walking along the quad at noon...

Hey I was there too...Nothing was happening...

Oh yes something happened...

Attempts at conversation, explaining the unexplainable only leave him tongue-tied, bereft, misunderstood. The awkward pause. The conversations starting up and freezing in mid-sentence. This is how it is to live - to  never fully communicate. Are you listening? What...I'm trying to? Yes? Tell you... About... If I could only tell you how it is... It is so hard to explain the big picture...to cover all the parameters... Don't you see? Don't you?  That it's all too much really. I'm drowning in the details. I'll spare you all. You said. You were saying....We want to hear. No doubt you do. But I refuse to simplify... You're exaggerating... surely...You're mistaken... Are you joking? I'm quite serious...I must tell someone... We get it Simon. Slow Down..Take a breath.  No you don't. Yes we do. But how can I tell you when it's not so clear...when it's too vast and complex to serve as a simple story, a linear narrative...I am not spinning yarns here! Just tell us. Tell us all about it. About them. About whatever... Alright then....How to begin....To take but one example of the Taucher family and their recent implosion - the bitterness of some ancient progenitor now shackling the dysfunction of the second and third generations - with ripple effects of mutual antipathy and settling of scores. If anyone had the time to map out the entire gamut of chaos emanating from this prodigious clan with extended branches of cousins and nephews, siblings and grandchildren inhabiting the entire southern portion of the state...And how Becca's mother can barely put food on the table for her two girls, because her second, soon-to-be ex-husband, recently fired or rather forced to resign, has taken up with someone else (a second cousin no doubt) and that person's step-daughter has a vendetta against Philippa, although she actually likes Becca - though Fiona has sworn a curse against them all...and should I mention the other toxic males in the mix, who carp and cuss and live to disrupt, wreaking havoc with their respective houses: Wayne's brother Gus- who broke into Chad's best friend's house to steal back the money that Chad said Phil owed to his girlfriend, Susan, whose job on the night shift is not what people think and besides the fact that her day job is really non-existent, that is to say untenable...and the welfare cheats (Wayne and his friends) play the system with no sense of guilt and crash the food pantries when they want a free meal. But it's more than that really. Are you people listening? Are you listening? Listening? What I want to know is the source...of these confusions... that just linger and fester, that continue onward and outward, being forwarded in time like an unending, relentless spam email...