In distant memory’s flash of neural circuits there is nothing solid to behold.
We know too much of what we know. The necessity of keeping one’s True intact, that is, not to lose oneself to spectacles of sun and moon as cult objects littering the days, months, years digested and disbursed so long ago.
“Serious” can’t be serious if it’s not eternal. The eternal we contemplate, from the comfort of green chairs, the we we believe is in us is not us, we know, because of what we know, or think we know, is known by the ones who write books about faces from Africa, Mexico, Egypt, timeless in our dreams, though our dreams, our selves are not timeless, are not even our selves, but minerals, chemicals, measurable currents.
The Ones Who Know catch up to us , always, and one can’t blame them, for how else would they sell their pills? With enough R&D they’ll find out and, cruel bastards, tell us exactly what we are.
Don’t misunderstand. I believe. I believe the pills create, or simulate, some form of happy. I’m merely suggesting that perhaps depression was not so bad if we were at least ourselves and not whatever it is they’ll ultimately find out we’ve become. When they’ve accumulated, studied, and interpreted all relevant data.
Surely it was better to believe that to be human was to be godlike. And after we killed god, well, that was fine too, for we became better than godlike. We became gods.
And don’t blame Darwin for this, he merely noticed patterns. Of adaptability, and change. And wasn’t it good that while once we were less than what we are, we later evolved to become more?
But now it doesn’t matter, really, whether we are less or more or even if we become better than the more we are at present, for it can all be broken down to formulas and code and what not, indexed.
For instance, “first loves,” those radiant memories we cherished, were, after all, mere chemicals, hormones amplifying illusions of sensation in our blah, blah,blah and bleh, bleh, bleh, in loco pubis orgasmus flagrant delicto, and so on and so forth.
Of course we drove a nice car to the restaurant, “in the day,” so hours later we could hop into the back-seat sweating and thrashing with passion and perfume, though now, decades later, our “great love” is no real experience we “owned” and remembered, but signals flashed electric through synapses and what-not to stimulate the thing-a-ma-jig and bring our personal “balcony scenes” to light, emblazoned by imagination, and passed to consciousness like table-salt or napkins, then diffidently explained, using whatever awkward language we are most adept in – usually the one we’re born of, the one whose adjectives embellished the whole myth-take in the first place.
Our yearn, yearn, yearn amounts to nothing.
Not even pain of aeon’s slaughter, quashed desire, minds snuffed on a billion killing fields and deathbeds can be – what? justified? excused? – if the lover beside us, our significant other, is not even an “other” (naked ape!), but an organic-machine-orgasmic; hence, hardly “significant.”
Yes, all of them, from fumbling first love to “one and only truly,” all of them, complex systems, compendiums of matter. Stuff.
We interact in the big system, the hierarchy, make it our “drama.” How we march through the day-to-day without choking or puking is a mystery, perhaps one of the few mysteries left for us common folk who live instructed by the cemetery’s narratives, animated by the spirit-spark that drives us to do what we do and cherish what we believe, are told and expected to believe, is good and sacred.
I see shadow-figures on the edge of all this, I see neurons, I see the end of trying to fathom wherefore or why, the end of both pleasure and pain.
Consider that even if we feel what we feel, we know we are not feeling it, for we are no longer ourselves, just energy coursing through the system in response to stimuli, signals of semiotic something or other …
We use symbols of … we term it all “I” or “we” or “us” for reference … language, abstraction, blah, blah, blah, bleh, bleh, bleh … easier to name things, whether they mean anything or not, whether they are important or not..
Grammars require verbs and nouns.
We seem sad and disappointed, but we are not really, because WE ARE NOT, really, and there are ones who can prove this, and ultimately will, after the proper research, and publish it as fact and make us curse their names for stranding us between two worlds: that of the spirited, eternal “who” and the sensual but senseless “what…”