12/31/2017 (3)

what is the secret?  How is it possible to maintain flow in a world of fundamental discontinuity?  Someone is doing an airdrop.  It is Willow, sending this year's resolutions (or revolutions, as she quipped).  In any case, we are dealing with this issue right now.  How do live.  How do live, honoring a truth, and the flow of all things?

***

Memory is strange.  It departs frequently.  It is difficult to see it with any clarity.  And if it is not seen, what is the proof that it even existed, that it even happened?  How plastic (as an old classmate liked to say) it is.  How malleable.  I want the past, in order to feel the reality of it, to allow its reality to invest a reality within me.  So that I can be real too.

I remember the pond in which Oyasama (Miki Nakayama) was said to have attempted to drown herself.  Turtles.  And the water black.  Wondering what it was that motivated her to walk into the waters, and wondering what it was that motivated her to stop.

I am wishing, and regretting many things.  Perhaps that is the danger and consequence of memory, how it can cause an irrevocable regret, an acute awareness of all one's errors.  Maybe that is why it is simpler not to remember.  It is simpler to just proceed onward, forgetting everything from before.  Who is it that this is?  What is the purpose and point?

What is it that I want?  Out of this?  I keep writing in order to hopefully delve into something significant.  To find the truth of things.  But maybe we are just layer upon layer of tragedy, hiding nothing?  Like the onion.  That is the secret of that poem.  The truth of it.

What if people read this?  Who cares?  There is no significance to it all.  Musubi, the dog, is panicking and is jumping in people's laps.  He is terrified, and scared of all the noises, and he is trying to stop it by barking at it all.  Maybe that is me as well.  Anxious of it all, and making empty noises to try to convince myself that I could change the world.  The world doesn't care, there is no posterity, there is no point.  To despair is perhaps the hardest thing of all.  To sit in the full knowledge that there is nothing I can do to change or stop anything.  Why, the dog is asking, does the world not notice the end?  Why doesn't the world panic?

I asked myself this when Donald Trump was elected president.  It is as though no one cared that the most foul, evil person in history had attained the highest position of power in this land.  And I realized that there was a whole contingency of the population that was ignorant, and/or evil (morally bankrupt).  It is the way of things, it is the decline of our democracy that we are dragged down by our lowest common denominator, that we are so ignorant that we are malleable to the efforts of russians.