I use this room to reflect.
It’s a place that’s light, but pitched black.
I sat here in the fruit of my youth and I sit here now I’m old.
I come here mainly to think.
Maybe I’ll lose you here, but my problem is I’ve seen it all.
I mean who hasn’t, by 15 I’d watched enough TV to know everything I could ever desire, create, be, had already been done.
There’s nothing new under the Sun.
Yet still I’m asking questions.
It’s like this, here I am, with more than royalty. The pleasure at my finger tips would have had Cleopatra, Solomon or Henry VIII in orgasmic spasms. The level of health and cleanliness, the choice of food, the variety of everything, the availability of people, travel, the shrinking of the world, a phone, the net, free sex in 3D, reality or latex, light, sound, noise, love, loss, experience, speed…
It’s mind-numbing, all this available and I’m not, we’re not, happy yet.
Empirical research is the way, that’s what they teach you in school today, mother.
Someone’s got to try it all, just to see why we aren’t happier, of course.
There’s a mental picture I have, of red rocks in the burning sun, one of those places, Australia probably, where there’s desert lands and everything’s difficult and unspoilt. I‘ve never been anywhere like that. Never touched it, but I know it, it was even in a bad film. It says to me that there’s somewhere real, clean, separate, but it’s polluted by its availability. No need for a life and death cruise to the other side of the world and a trek through uncharted territory, just push a squashy button, with a squashy digit and sit back. If it gets to you climb on a plane, take out your camera and tattoo “I woz ‘ere.”
We know there’s a pleasure to be found away from the world as we know it, there’s poems and bearded men and women that tell us about it, there’s an awareness of a higher power that comes purely from the world around, I mean, I know evolution, I went to school, but the glory of the lakes, of a cave somewhere of the vastness of deserts, of the power of a waterfall somehow touches the soul. Says that there’s more.
So instead of the discovery channel, I chose to travel…
Sometimes the mundane and the spectacular combine, there’s a bridge in Stockton, on it written; ‘all the rivers run into the sea and yet it is not full.’ I know the water cycle, it’s GCSE geography, evaporation, condensation, over-retention. The point is that the same water is going constantly round. I saw a pointless probability study once. The probability that you’ve drunk a water particle that has previously passed through Julius Caesar is something like 98%. What am I on about…
It’s all circles, winds going round and round, water going round and round, matter, cells going round and round, you die, you rot and that become the matter under our feet that is a living organism, it produces plants and then is eaten by something that is eaten, it’s a cycle, it should the food cycle, not the food chain. We just try to make ourselves feel better with the names we give things.
It’s all futile, it’s all dust and air, we take our little lives so seriously, we record history, every birth every death is the source of so much soul jerking emotion but it’s meaningless.
Human beings come and go, millions upon billions, numbers we can’t get our heads around each one matters to someone because we have to pretend it’s important and not think about the big scale. No one talks about death. No one mentions that nothing really changes, a few new gadgets, but no real change, people are born, get happy, get sad, do stuff, die and are forgotten, even the famous fade.
I have set myself to find out the point, the point, wisdom, not knowledge, deeper than philosophy, but the practical point of this existence, is it a cosmic joke, an accident, a creators joke? Is it worth the aggravation to find yourself a job? What can you do that lasts, that doesn’t fade, that isn’t part of a cycle, that won’t be destroyed or lost? Every work that is done every structure that is built is constantly dependant on the next generation, the earth always overcomes. We can busy ourselves or we can be honest with ourselves.
Most work is vanity, self seeking, self aggrandising, done that our contemporaries value us, all about how we are perceived. Where’s the meaning in that?
I’ve seen a happy street cleaner and unhappy heiress, messed up dole takers and together premier sportsmen. What you do makes you do something. You may as well spend 80 years chasing the wind.
I’m well read, well studied. No that’s an understatement. It’s what I’ve set myself on. I have acquired knowledge and ideas, the written word like a desert traveller stocks up on water. But no one can carry enough to cross the desert. As I searched into the limits of human understanding I came face to face with the reality that is the darkness of insanity, the colour of craziness. Some people find satisfaction only in madness. Some of the great philosophers, artists, the famous, have dabbled with edges of sanity and we marvel at their ear-cutting feats. But again this is a self-aggrandising reverse psychology of pride. It’s is meaningless, lost, chasing more wind. A pointless effort done for the audience and to scream at the Sun, cursing its longevity and influence. The increase of knowledge, of wisdom, of understanding of the realities of the earth leaves me sad, broken, in sorrow.
