Sturm der stimmung

Two days in one. Rain in the morning, drab impregnable sky like a soviet condo. Late afternoon the sun breaks out. Sparkling blue vault and green ground and mild heat. On a different planet. Part of a cosmic wheeling.  

Yet it’s nothing to me, a record I don’t want that I don’t know what to do with. People prop up their pillow heads to stare through a glass darkly at an eclipse and then they trudge through rain and sun like an army of sightless droids. History lurches ahead with emergencies and reclines into routine. 

(The other day I saw an ambulance blocked by a train. That was a new one. Normally I see exaggerated deference to emergency vehicles. People drive their cars into ditches to make room for ambulances going in the opposite direction down four lanes divided by medians, a minor display of piety on profane roads. But a train chugs along, inexorably, an archaic steel snake from the advent of industry, delaying the hospital trips of the dying, heart attacks waiting at the tracks with all the cardiac arrests to come.) 

I watch the passage of the day, its crushing arc, without feeling the immensity of the threads spun about me. Without fearful recognition of how the sun could go out, anytime, on its own whim, and I could do nothing but shiver and die.  

The consistent fluctuations of the weather, the enfeebled wonder of marching through days double sided or cubed or diced. When the hours could add up to no more 12 or 6. When there could be a fifth season. The rain could fall forever, with the earth acting as a pump to suck up a cataclysmic flood. We could walk two feet underwater all the time. Things happen to work the way they do for no reason, and instead of begging for salvation on the brink of madness I quip and skip through senseless events.  

The eclipse I keep forgetting; the pale sheet of myself spreading over everything, my unreflective moon face blocking rivers of light. Thinking masks what I don’t want to see. Thinking as a stiff posture, a premature and prolonged rigor mortis, lockjaw with loose lips.  

David Hume was right, and his problem was never solved, never could be solved. We don’t see causes; we base our reasoning on habit, expectation and custom; succession and repetition built up into supposedly stable laws. The sun never sleeps, but why not; it obeys and observes nothing and could just as well extend a flaming racket and smack our tennis ball planet into a different galaxy.   

-- 

Speaking of misconceptions, of lusterless insights; the overrating of the image, the false power attributed to the screen. Not entrancement by the spectacle but envelopment by the atmosphere. The image has no grip on souls. Rather there’s domination by mood, wafting gas clouds of panic and rancor and low-grade euphoria. No one stops before an image, holds up ego ideals and bows before gleaming icons. Instead it’s squatting and brooding in the middle of swirling sentiments. Immersion in undulating depths. Staring down a hall of mirrors replaced with cataracted wandering in a universe of deepening murk, aqueous breathing in a tuberculotic climate. Instead of dazzled eyes, flooded lungs. The status anxiety of narcissistic one-upmanship? More like status saturation among aspiring infants. Underneath the obsession with wealth and power and beauty and striking images is the desire for temperature-controlled amniotic dreams, a fetal sleep before the dawn of nightmares.