I've been reading Eliot. strangely enough, I feel the world today contains many parallels to how it was almost a hundred years ago. I must have been an idiot to think that The Waste Land was just a poem of its time. Tom's old voice seems to hold renewed significance, or maybe that significance never left. Maybe we left to find ourselves. Are we lost again?
Amid forests of bright abundance, light cannot reach far — spray paint and laptop screens are opaque, after all, settling into this wasteland of LEDs, marble, and stainless steel (for some, remembrance too). Oh god i write an old man's poetry do i not? Strutting through the lights, feeling heavy and hollow at once. Yet there must be meaning. Every act of ours is inconsequential. We are finite; existence is infinite because infinity is the only conceivable total truth (but that's for another day). Putting us by infinity is the same as putting zero by one, fundamentally an absurd comparison. No act of ours, nor their memories and reverberations, will have ever existed; it's like that sixth-grade math class which remains so oddly sharp in the back of my head, where this elderly blonde skeletal-faced woman noted a number approaching zero and multiplied it by a bunch of values, landing at something functionally no different from zero. Lucy and my galactic great-great-grandchildren (which I am determined not to have) will be contemporaries, all shadows of Sisyphus pushing boulders up mountains in daylight times. A sort of living calendar of microscopic scale.
But one must imagine Sisyphus a happy man. Between zero and one, between today and tomorrow and all the moments that are to be ours and only ours, there still flows an infinite assortment of colors — we are futile in our march at the stars, as much as zero is futile in its march at one, but that is irrelevant in itself. Everything is irrelevant to infinity. Of course. But that's not our problem. Let infinity be a nihilist. We have chocolates.
One must imagine Sisyphus a happy man. Purpose is needed where there is no purpose or otherwise no reason remains for survival. That purpose, then, must lie beyond the barriers of survival, beyond the barriers of reality. Push that boulder on. It is in the pursuit of significance, in walking down that alley with no end, in chasing a light we are unworthy of, that souls are immortalized and immortality confirmed. In pursuing purpose, purpose is brought to be. Know that there lies a place beyond ours that we may never glimpse — to know is enough.
Skywards, for only there are we lost forever with direction.
We are minuscule. Yet we contain so much. So much that we dare reach for what we could never reach. It is this which makes Sisyphus a happy man and us greater than the sum of every second in our existence.
(Right, waking up never meant letting go. Anyway.)
dec. 02 / 2020
i hear the heart's sentiments.
i hear the mind's ambitions.
i answer to silence.
it's so funny, i almost forgot to cry.
dec. 12 / 2020
List everything I hate about the world today:
go go go go go
List everything I love about the world today:
go go go go go
dec. 26 / 2020
