Saturday morning is overcast in Eagle River.  I anticipated writing from a coffee shop in town.  I arrived and read a sign that said open 7 till 2PM Monday through Friday.  Disappointed, I returned to the Best Western lobby. I settled into a chair at a corner table.  Yesterday the manager of Inn described the day to day staffing challenges that she works with.  I imagine Eagle River Roasters coffee shop is also affected by short staffing, and is closed for the weekends.

The pandemic roils our communities in indirect ways, which were unanticipated.  At the beginning of all of this many months ago, no one spoke of the stress to supply chains, and how deeply employment, work relationships would be disrupted.  Many lives are being redirected.  These events will take years to play out.  “Normal” is a memory, and we have no control over the future.

Another quotation from my notebook.

The most powerful instinct
of man
is to be in conflict
with truth
and with the real.

It is not true
that in order to live
one has to believe
in one’s existence.
There is no necessity to that.
No matter what, our consciousness
is never the echo of our own reality,
of an existence
set in real time.

But rather,
it is an echo
in “delayed time,”
the screen of the dispersion
of the subject and its identity
–only in our sleep, our unconscious,
and in our death
are we identical to ourselves.

Consciousness,
which is totally different from belief
is more spontaneously
the result of a challenge to reality,
the result of accepting
an objective illusion
rather than objective reality.

This challenge is more vital
to our survival
and to that of the human species
than the belief in reality and in existence
which always refers to spiritual consolations
pertaining to another world.

Our world
is such as it is,

but
that does not make it more real
in any respect.

–excerpt, Radical Thought by Jean Baudrillard

Do we not think our consciousness is our direct awareness of data, the information acquired by our five senses?  And does not the memory of my experience of that data — create my unique personality?  So I have concluded for many years and I’d wager so have you.  My awareness is a screen and the senses a five channel projector!  Consciousness is an echo of the real.  “What you see is what you get” – right?

These lines suggest another possibility.

The writer suggests my consciousness, and by extension my awareness of self, my unique personality comes from resistance, comes from a challenge to what is exterior, from confrontation to the world outside…  My mind projects to my consciousness, a difference to the background data gathered by the senses.  My identity is formed by resistance, by a push-back to the world-such-as-it-is…

The received wisdom of commonsense reverses what is in fact taking place.  What is ultimately real?  Not an after-life world…  I am certain “spiritual consolations” are the product of flawed common sense thinking.

Do the lines quoted give us any hint about what is ultimately real, the truth?  They do not.