The Core

The glass fogs from my own breath.

I wipe it away, but the veil remains. Perhaps it is on the other side of this pane. Is the window flawed, or is someone there on the other side breathing and wiping and trying to see me too?

Do you see the mental image of my creation, or adopt the image provided? Or do you only the microdots of pixels formulating characters put together in strands, the culmination of ancient works that created a written form of this language that still fails to convey meanings that try to claw their way out of my brain?  

Still, I feel on the cusp of something larger, like almost to the place where the glass will become crystalline. Its the damned language in the way. Allegory, parable, images, comparisons, examples and yet, and yet, I can never get to the philosophical place I need to be to solve this. Philosophy defies mere verbage, it scoffs the very attempt.

How can we fix this thing if we can’t actually get to the place where we discuss it?

We have been dancing on the cusp of this for what seems years now, and this last aria has spun us ever closer to the apex.

Now I feel I must undo it all, unravel it all, flush every word and start anew. The core isn’t where I’ve been looking. There are only tendrils leading into an ever more complex maze swirling around it. I get lost in that.

The fog itself may be reality, so maybe its time to just embrace the fog itself, the lack of clarity, rather than claw fervently in a futile attempt to eradicate that which cannot be taken.

This isn’t even a problem of nations, wars, poverty, disease, its a human problem. Its my problem. Its your problem too. Humans are simply fucked beings.

Nothing works with us. Clans have shunned those who followed their baser natures. We have education available by the droves to enlighten the lost. The threat of punishment, even the ultimate collective punishment of war does not hamper our taste for evil. Kill one, and another ten rises in their place. We have created holy writs of religion and governments all to the so-called ideals of humanity to no avail.

Nothing works.

Deep down, we know it. We know why too. I certainly do anyway. In my heart of hearts, do I not desire to “crush, kill, destroy” those I see as oppressors? Do I not want to wrest power from them and create an equitable world of my making? My will be done. I want to be surrounded by people like you. And you. You too.

But not “those” people. They cannot be fixed. All my talk about collective consciousness aside, I wouldn’t want those people in MY brain. Roll around in Glenn Beck’s brain, know his innermost fears and desires? Be one with fiends and pedophiles and militant Zionists and Anne fucking Coulter?

No way. No way in hell, man.

What I really want is them off my World.

And they feel the same way about me. About you, too. And you.

So we are back to the fog. You see there is an immovable thing between the us and the them, and so it was written, so it was done, so it shall ever be, amen. The truth I see evident as a motherfucker is that all humans are not created equal, and so far no set of rules has ever been able to stop that. Everything else is fantasy.

Not that a perfectly good and workable fantasy is inherently bad. I know the difference between the two. Fantasy. Check. Reality. Checkmate. Most people do, you know. Its not the fear of reality not living up to the fantasy that stops us, you know, its the cold hard reality of chancing utter failure that does it. Whether leaning in for that first kiss, and being gently rebuffed, forever killing the fantasy that your kiss is returned in equal measure of desire, or standing in the street demanding free health care for all… we all know deep down it will never work. So we harbor our own illusions, cling to them, write about them, but always stop short of taking that step. We would rather preserve the dream than chance destroying it.

In reality-land, as many people would hate health for everyone as would love it.  There would be no “if they tried it they’d love it,” as we see in our imagination. Because, you know, people are basically fucked.

In their reality, they dream of good little Christians bearing and loving every random pregnancy, and people who don’t object to letting hard working Americans make a decent profit. They dream of a world where everyone isn’t trying to take their legacy away from their children, where no one is trying to drag their upstanding little ones in to the sewer with the dirty people.

Never the twain shall meet.

Free will and the pursuit of happiness are illusions we choose to buy into. You can’t pursue happiness, its what happens along the way while doing the mundane things of existence. The minute you chase it, you step on someone else’s. Same with free will.

Everything is tribalism. Everything is greed. Every tenet we have been taught to worship, every ideal is basic greed. What is greed but love of self and hatred of others? My house, my wife, my husband, my kids, my friends, my neighbors, my community, my state, my country… and every vow, oath, loyalty, creed and constitution is set up to protect that greed. Even our Gods are Jealous. “Put no other God above me!!!”

The philosophy of groups cannot be deconstructed without the reality of our individual human drives.

We cling to what pleases us, and reject that which does not. We wish for that which pleases us to please no other. We cannot wish an egalitarian society into existence, for we are basically not egalitarian beings.

Think not? Picture, and I mean truly picture your spouse moaning in pleasure at someone else’s touch. Does it bring pain, rage, jealousy, feelings of inadequacy?  Mine! That’s what it comes down to. Our version of love does not include wanting our “object of passion” to have pleasure or happiness in any remotely selfless way. We have somehow twisted ourselves into believing denial makes our own pleasure greater with eachother, that our selfishness and greed is somehow holy. Not that I am endorsing a World in which such bonding is dissolved, it is the way we are wired. I’m wired to find such bonds sacred.

Too gruesome? Picture being perfectly ok with your child choosing to live with a different set of parents they liked better. Parents that were awesome, loved your kid and were loved in return by your child. Same visceral reaction: “Mine!” “OWWW!” Again, not suggesting giving your children away, just pointing out that even in order to give them a better life, we do not give up on things or people with which we have bonded; bonded meaning “own” in some sense.

I’m just expanding on the idea that we are not creatures of enlightenment by any stretch of the imagination. We do not share. We do not submit to “others.” Our only true loyalty is to ourselves; thus by proxy our clan.

Would any of us take a cancer-stricken, bed-ridden Lou Dobbs into our home, and lovingly spoon feed him and gently change his soiled diapers? I rest my case.

It would take a wiping and rewriting of history to rewire our human psyche.

We cannot wipe away the fog, we are the fog.

So, before I go on in this lengthy missive, I want to throw in a comment I belatedly left on G’s recent Guide Stone essay. It went unnoticed, I think, and then I decided to pull it and use it for an essay another day. Today, I guess. My thinking has altered in even these few short weeks, and my tone today is not nearly as fluffy and semi-snark, but it leads into a greater thing I want to address nicely.

I have to conclude now, that the Guide Stones only have one message. We are fucked beings, and there are far too many of us. Period.

Our brand of human tribalism only works in tribes. Obvious. Small tribes is our only hope.

We cannot erase our differences, our very natures. We are tribal, selfish and greedy beings. We are animals that require enough territory between us that we do not by competition alone create havoc on ourselves and our environment.

Any set of rules, no matter how much thought we put into them will not work once we multiply to excess.

If one starts with the premise we are NOT created equal, in matters of natural intelligence, physical fitness, or moral standards, the only structural law that makes sense is one of protectionism to those that less has been given. That only will work for our species in small groups.

We need ownership of one another to act in unselfish ways, but even those ways are selfish because it is protecting what we perceive to be our own. We could not let someone we know and care for starve in front of us while we fed.

I can fantasize all I want about People of the World caring for one another, with no divisions, no othering, no hate.

Its a beautiful fantasy. So it shall remain. For in reality, I divide, I other, I hate.

I find my own psychosis, my own reality break, my own fantasy to be the good, the worthy, the righteous. I’m sure “they” love theirs equally.

The myth is not just an American Myth, though we take it to an art form. It is the inherent failure of the human animal itself. Nothing has ever, from prose to sword, been able to change that.

The core is that we all know how broken we are. The core is that our fantasies sustain us in the light of that truth. The core is that humanity is a failed experiment. The core is that we are greedy little bastards, and there are few, if any, truly altruistic acts.

The core is also that by speaking to our little fantasies we, at the very least, hold back the total chaos of allowing the greediest of our instincts to be totally unleashed. Its as much a human instinct war as a class war.

Even if the collapse comes, even should we create our little paradises for a while?

You cannot rearrange a zebra’s stripes and we cannot change our core natures.

Humans are fucked up. And we breed.

We have not learned to let go of our sense of self.

There is no safe place, nowhere to run that we won’t find ourselves exactly as what we are. Animals.

I’ve been writing for several hours now, and still have no greater grasp on the saving grace philosophical answers that I so yearn to hold.

C’est le vie.