Hypothesis of a ghost dancer
I'm an amethyst diamond, a zen proverb in the now, a doctor in the disturbance field...I like rusty metal, rustic and blue,
blue as the ocean...
I’ve lost the belief in what I’m doing and it is too hot to think as I wait for the rains to come to cool me down, any disturbance is welcome in the hours that stretch out.
All my bags are packed as I wait for the bus to come and I take a cigarette in the shadows where it seems I have lived for so long while words drift around me and mean nothing. I know they can read my thoughts so I have to be careful.
I see a girl on the steps going up. She says not a word to her chocolate milk as she drinks it and I think: ‘now there’s a good conversation,” but the dress on her body says other things, but women are women and that’s how they are.
I hear there’s a heat-wave all over the world and so if the sky catches fire we must be prepared. When it comes to it I will dive into my ice bath and lay back and smoke and read a novel; but I have also heard that a great fear is about the Earth and attention spans are at an all time low.
I think it is the toothpaste everyone uses, it must have some juju ingredient in it that destroys the pathways in the brain so there is no longer any straight thinking where one thought is hardly held to another; and who will guide us if we have become such unintelligent sheep and chewing the cud we are led to?
If memory is classed as intelligence then god help us all and maybe we had better switch from IQ to EQ, but even that is flawed and sparking dementedly as they pump us full of hormones and such.
Fire up the rockets boys we’re moving to mars.
Where is the guiding light out of all this? There seems to be an assault on humanity worldwide, and it’s not because people are bad. I’ve travelled the world over and I find we are all the same, that we are all connected and we all want to live in peace and thrive.
And then my masterpiece was finished and I was ready to show it to the world, but I couldn’t find where the world was to give it to; what a strange thing.
My life is made up of a little room with a door and the world is on the other side of that, but when I walk through it I see only walls.
So I clutched my manuscript to me and went in search. I walked far and wide looking into many windows, staring into people’s eyes to see just one to approach, for just one clue, some iota of direction to head towards where I could show my manuscript to someone who would be interested.
Eventually I became exhausted and went home, the manuscript ten times as heavy as when I had started. I put it in a drawer and forgot about it, and I think it’s still there now gathering dust.
Now and again I would take a stroll through the machine and moon around for fun. Some bright spark did a thesis on what he saw and even had it published but he was laughed out of his academic community and so with his head hanging low he was accepted into the fields of the other side, the conspiracy theorists who welcomed him with open arms and read his book through and through until it wore right out with only a faded picture left of me mooning.
I’ve been meaning to ask him where he got his book published but the poor fellow doesn’t speak anymore, just stays in his room staring at the walls; but he will be alright in time after his pain has reduced him to the size of a saint and he can walk without absorbing other’s beliefs. It does one good to stir a little in the cauldron that burns away the ego.
Just lately there have been a lot of petitions to the machine to bring back Elvis and after a long wait the official reply was: request denied.
I have a young secretary called Miss Julia and she is very busy for some reason, always rushing around, but we stop now and again to have coffee together and shoot the breeze so to speak.
One day we went on holiday together and we spent our time on the beach where she would paddle in the warm sea and watch the sundown and be mesmerised.
On the last night the full moon came up over the mountains and she lay on the sand and watched it go across the sky and told me she would be leaving and going back to school to learn about the stars.
When the morning came she was still on the sand sitting cross-legged and joined as one to all.
After breakfast I asked her if she wanted to stay or come with me. She took my hand and said: thank you. I looked into her eyes and saw only the stars of creation. And then the taxi came and off I went leaving Miss Julia on the beach to go her own way.
The ghost was on my trail so I had to keep moving if I wanted to stay ahead of it. I’d decided not to go back but to make a run for it and so I made my way to the border.
Every day I grew more tired and as I came closer to the border I began to wonder if I’d make it.
The machine watches over us all from the skies, nothing goes unnoticed, but there are ways to throw it off such as changing my profile so my outline is different and I become one more entity in the moving crowd; or staying under cover in cars or buses; and joining in with others to become part of a group.
Eventually the algorithms of the machine would figure it out and they’d send someone for me but I had a good head start and I had a plan of sorts. But the ghost worried me; that, I hadn’t planned for, and once the ghost gets on your trail there’s no escaping it.
The border was set by a wide slow moving river and like all borders was a place of constant change which suited me just fine.
I wasn’t planning to cross it because if they tracked me to it they’d figure I’d try to get across, so my plan was to find somewhere to hole up and wait it out, and for a while that worked, until the ghost came.
The ghost isn’t real, but it’s real enough to cause a problem. It’s a construct, a bio-metric matching to your fears that happens to every employee that joins the company of the machine, and is held in stasis until something or someone goes wrong and then it’s released and comes for you.
It’s what they use to keep you under control, no one wants to be driven mad by their own fears and so it’s effective, for the most part. I’d had one encounter with it when I’d tried to escape before and had only just kept my sanity; and so was brought back to carry on working.
Nobody gets away for long, all are brought back, but I just couldn’t lose the naive hope I’d be the first, but it was not to be.
The ghost comes in many forms but usually begins by insinuating itself into your thoughts.
“Daddio, where are you?” I could hear on the edge of my consciousness; and this is how it begins.
“We are the many, friends all, surely. Take up no sword against us. Come back now and forget that ache in your spirit that sets you apart. No, don’t go that way, it leads to nothing. Listen to us; have we not served you well? Listen to us...come back...
And when you get back all becomes normal and there is no ghost or machine...it’s all imagination, just something that was dreamed up and time now to be normal again and to go back to work and join all the others and forget about running away, and after all, there’s nowhere to run, everywhere is the same, so be good now and settle down and work hard and be obedient and you will be provided with all you need to exist. We will take care of you, haven’t we always done so?
But I just wanted out and knew if they got me back again I’d just forget and maybe never wake up again.
Image from Pixabay
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I very much enjoyed reading this. Perhaps my favourite line was:
But in its entirety, it was fantastic and cathartic. Strange, yet familiar... and many other paradoxes.
Loved it.
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I'm strangely happy about your experience in my writing and I hope you come back for more...
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I know this ghost well. I know the toothpaste. That juju, you know what it is. Its in the water too. Who is there to guide us after all of that?
Those that make it so.
The best we can do is acknowledge it. Know it. But don't be part of it. Hear it but don't listen.
For the machines, mechanisms made in ways so that the only way we can part from it is to live alone in the wilderness but we al search for connection. So ignore the machines. Social connections to each other, to people will prevail after all.
Righto; thanks foxy...
Hello!
This post has been manually curated, resteemed
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Much love to you from all of us at @helpie!
Keep up the great work!
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Thank you...
@wales,
You are an excellent writer! I should have checked out your blog before now.
Respecting the insights of this piece, I'm not sure what to think, let alone what to say. There's a lot going on.
There is a danger of overthinking things. I know this because I do it all the time. Indeed, this tends to be a character trait of writers and poets. While it is the wellspring of our creativity, it is also the wellspring of our madness which, alas, occurs amongst us far more frequently than the population-at-large.
One of the oldest conundrums of Man is how to live as "part of the world," as we must unless we are to become recluses trapped within prisons of our own making, without being subsumed by it ... maintaining enough independence from the collective so that we don't become mindless cogs.
I don't have an answer per se, but I'll tell you what I do (and it works pretty well).
I actively engage the world ... but in a manner consistent with the expectations and constraints of an Honor Code ... irrespective of the consequences.
I am an ex-soldier and, by choice, I internalized the Military Code of Honor. It is, admittedly, archaic by today's social norms. And, it is, in reality, reminiscent of a time that never existed, but one which everyone wishes had. It is a hyperbolized version of humanity, much like Camelot and the Legend of The Knights of the Round Table. But there is magic in Legend and when life gets tough, a little bit goes a long way.
It is not a religion, nor a philosophy exactly. It is, rather, a manner of comportment to which I hold myself ... and others. When I comport myself in such a manner, I like who I am. When I don't, I don't. Same thing with other people.
Despite the high-mindedness of the sentiment, I long ago stopped trying to save the world (for therein lies madness), but I do go to considerable lengths to try to save my little corner of it.
And, perhaps most importantly, I believe things "mean something." All this baloney about never passing judgement on anyone or anything because eveything's subjective ... arrgh.
Liars are called liars because they lie. Cheaters are cheats for the same reason. There is a connection between the actor and the act, the noun and the verb, for a reason. I prefer the company of honest and honorable Men. And so, I make an effort to distinguish the former from the latter and treat them accordingly.
For thinkers, the danger in not doing so is nihilism ... and there's nothing for the nihilistic but misery.
"Ah, but we're miserable because we wallow in Truth."
Blah, blah.
There's lots of Truths I don't understand, but there's lots that I do. Spending all one's time obsessing about the former, and none of it appreciating the latter, is a decision.
Quill
There are circles with circles that I comport myself, but sometimes I find myself with my feet at the top of the circle and then gravity pulls me down. As an artist I tend to take things as far as they will go which is where the madness is, but also the genius; I've not got there yet, but I feel I am close sometimes. In a way it's a bit like martial arts where you go through all the dans to finally become a master, but where do go from there? It's that that I'm whirling in and to tell the truth I'm not sure there's anything more...
@wales,
There's infinitely more, mate. More than you and I could possibly write about in a million years. The universe is a fascinating, but incredibly complicated, place. But sometimes we get so close that we cannot see the forest for the trees.
Scale things back a bit. What is ... genius?
A lot of people think it's creating something no one has ever seen before. And, sometimes that's the case. Can you imagine the reaction from the audience of the first guy who figured out that you could make fire by rubbing two sticks together? If that's not a shit-it-your-sheepskin moment, then I can't imagine what would be.
And there's a clue in that analogy: Genius, in all its manifestations, is about ... an insight.
Insight is a subject which I have studied for more than 20 years. And guess what, the overwhelming majority of times, it comes not from discovering something completely new, but rather from thinking differently about something you thought you already knew.
And one of the most effective ways of achieving the effect is with words.
Words are the nuclear weapons of nuance. Oh I know, I know: "A picture's worth a thousand words." But if pictures are so great at telling a story ... then why are they so frequently dependent upon captions? (I have a theory, but that's a rabbit hole for another time.)
Let me give you an example.
As I recounted earlier, 2o years ago I started studying insight (and a whole bunch of other neurological stuff) to understand why poetry effects/affects us the way it does. That is, why, neurologically, do some poems (or lyrics of a song) reduce us to tears? It seemed like a huge over-reaction and I wanted to understand it.
A few months in, I visited my folks in Nova Scotia and I was chatting with my Dad about writing poetry. Now, he couldn't really care less about poetry but, to hold up his end of the conversation, he mentioned that there was one poem he quite liked.
It was written by a famous Canadian poet named Robert Service who wrote a bunch of stuff about Mounties (RCMP) ... and my Dad was a retired Mountie. The poem was actually one that all Canadian kids read in school and so I'd read in many years earlier.
Anyway, he pulled it out and I gave it a re-read.
It was all going very nice ... but then I hit a particular line. It wasn't some cosmic revelation but it stopped me in my tracks. Here's the poem (the line that struck me is in bold):
"Now a promise made is a debt unpaid."
An "unpaid debt" ... that's exactly what a "promise" is. But most people, myself included, wouldn't have thought to think about it in that way. And, strangely, when you do, your mind starts re-interpreting the way you think about the promises you've made to others ... and the promises others have made to you.
Our ancestors lived in a world where a promise was a VERY BIG deal and they would go to great lengths, sometimes forfeiting their lives, to fulfill it. The mutual faith they had in one another's oaths created extraordinary cultural bonds and a social cohesion capable of weathering a great many hardships.
In modern times, promises have become jokes and the commitment to their fulfillment often belittled as "archaic."
Consider divorce. 50% of marriages, including my own, end in divorce. And, despite the government's determined efforts to not possess statistics on the matter, almost all of those involve adultery. The government doesn't want such statistics to exist because the brainiacs in our universities have determined that "morality should never be attached to sex." ALL sexual activity has to be deemed "amoral," irrespective of the social costs.
Well, it sounds all very "progressive" and all that, but here's the thing: Sexual behavior is a standard upon which all human beings judge one another irrespective of the ideological desire to turn off the impulse.
Such "social progress" has created some rather unusual legal contradictions. For example, while one is liable for commercial "breach of contract" (with total strangers) that results in financial damages, the bankrupting of your spouse and children, because you were screwing your boss, carries no liability whatsoever. And the statistics are unassailable ... the chances of the kids falling prey to every manner of social ill you could articulate, skyrockets. Drug use; teen pregnancy; criminal delinquency; school drop out ... and an inability to themselves, 'pair-bond.'
But there can be no social sanction?
No one forced you to take those vows and yet you did. And, as a result, a million decisions, large and small, were made by others on the presumption that they'd be kept. And yet, your violation of them, and the cascade of consequences that they trigger means absolutely nothing in divorce court.
"Show of hands, lads. The Ayes have it." And just like that, 'No Fault Divorce' was the Law of the Land ... and what had been a 'moral abomination' throughout recorded history was suddenly less morally objectionable than jay-walking.
Is there not something about this development that stirs a bit of ... skepticism? Name one other instance where the law is written to protect a contract violator or perpetrator of a conflict. And what are the consequences for a culture that accepts lying, cheating and betrayal as morally equivalent to telling the truth, playing by the rules and ... loyalty?
And here's the thing: No one actually believes any of this baloney ... but we act as if we did. The Emperor's New Clothes. And, if one were to believe the ideologues' assertions, then why are we still making those ridiculous vows ... and still getting married? If 'sexual exclusivity' is an artifact of our troglodyte past, why do we keep flogging a dead horse?
All that from an insightful phrasing of a few words in a poem.
"Genius' is the ability to cause another to think. Look at the top of my blog page:
Quill
That's a long piece. I think it was all the lead in the car exhaust that caused my memory to be so bad that I could never remember even a line of poetry, or even remember what I have just read as I'm reading it. Makes it interesting sometimes, but mostly it just makes for a lot of re-reading all the time. This is why I write word by word with no preconceived story to write, and why I write the way I do. It's all in there somewhere and sometimes I feel it just has to come out, as to how, well, I just put it down as it comes...