Pivoting
Wednesday is the pivot point of this week.
Waking this morning I felt disoriented. Before waking, the body just ‘knows’ time in a way that a clock cannot. I surfaced to wakefulness through a sticky, surreal, dreamy vision. Did I see it or did I feel it? Both… Almost 9AM now and I continue to recover.
I dreamed a misshapen world, a place distorted by technology, a society on the cusp of a stress failure. You know, those always surprising failures when materials can no longer absorb the quotient of energy which humans insist they bear. As in high tensile steel, a tiny impurity becomes the junction of a crack that cascades, accelerating, and the part suddenly fails under the unrelenting stress, and then an entire system dies… (I once witnessed a 20k racing engine die when a tiny valve stem failed)
I traversed the nightmare, near the borderland of consciousness when I awakened this morning.
Could this human world, the zeitgeist of the USA, this ‘city set on a hill’ be nothing except a simulacrum,* like a Dali-esque painting? The “city set on a hill” is a phrase originating with Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount… John Winthrop in a 1630 sermon, and Ronald Reagan, the 1970s politician, liked that phrase. Both men believed he was designated (ordained) to impose order, to routinize the world.
Perception of a tsunami of ‘temptation’ from which only the magical mo-jo of the cross will rescue us is one root cause of the misshapen ‘reality’… Of that I am certain. Thoughts? What are your thoughts?
What is our condition now? What words are left, their meaning fixed to common agreement?
A snap-change of scene. Pivoting.
Outside of the Starbucks at 3rd and State the sun still shines, the overnight rain has re-animated the drought-stressed grass, and trees. I look forward to beginning the fall harvest of maple leaves today.
All is well and all shall be well, to quote from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding poem.
* imitation, doppelganger
One thought on “Pivoting”
As I often do here, I would like to add an old poem written a number of years ago. I hope this resonates with your thoughts.
Limitations
These words are not the noble words.
They will not alter our course
or guide us through the bottleneck
of human ignorance,
nor remove the blinders
from my neighbor’s eyes
or change the views of
madmen who drive us
towards extinction.
If I knew those words
I’d splash them across walls
and shout them at strangers.
But these are not those words.
These words are for me,
helping to calm
what some would call a soul,
reminding me I am not dead.
They ease me through the days
that race across my life.
At one time, I hoped
they’d give me courage,
but they did not.
Instead, the words I write
allow me bits of comfort
when I have ceased to care.
These words I write
are old and used,
and though I want to claim
them as my own, I cannot.
They are not mine.
I’ve borrowed them
from those who wrote before.
Just as now, these words
will pass to others,
giving comfort when
writing sheds our demons
and brings us safely home.