How tired I am of the weeping public official I simply do not believe. How tired I am of suspecting that the picture of a doe-eyed, wide-eyed child staring out of some shattered window or door is just a result of a photographer's setting it all up. These are but two of my veils of latter-day skepticism. How I would like to look at a picture or read a story and slump back into credulity: Yes, I believe this because I can imagine feeling the same.
But increasingly, I don't.
And increasingly, I dearly wish I could be bowled over or quietly drowned ... and believe. I too would like to rest and relax in a social matrix of agreement and sorrow or joy. But instead, I am nagged and dressed in doubt. This morning, it makes me growl.
Is it sensible and realistic and all those other kool words? Sure. But I'd like to be as irresponsible as the next person and I chafe at the enforced donning of some responsibility serape. And I'm sick of all the one-stop-shopping, TED-talking mutts who are convinced they can improve and have found the wisdom that will confer comfort and clarity at a single blow: Go peddle your wares someplace else! "How lucky you are!" And by implication, "How lucky and wise I am!" Go fuck yourself.
Yes, even if I'm wrong, I'd like to believe and bask. And it ain't working. Maybe that's why music seems to come closest: Its potential for visceral love that bypasses the senses of sight and speaking ... well, that can warm this chilly corner.
Just muttering in my beer. Just circling what may be Voltaire's fire hydrant, looking for a place to take a piss: "If God did not exist, we would have to invent him." Without belief is, of itself, too often just another belief to be skeptical of.
In a book on astrology I once saw, Gautama the Buddha was labeled briefly as "an empty hammock between two trees." I, on the other hand was, "an Easter Parade." Go figure.
We all want to be happy. And we want to feel secure in that happiness, that it can't be taken away, that it won't pass as it is sure to do. I'm thinking that the only way to cling to the impossible is to believe it, in spite of the obvious.
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