For my Wise and Generous Parents, to creatures of the Blue Planet:
Life ~ The Road to Nowhere
ore than a little nowadays my host edges towards tears and morbidity. In his sixth decade he sees clearer than ever the end, and the path of futility leading there.
This, Beloved Parents, is affecting my productivity a little, and indeed my dispassion. I can’t but emphasize with him, let alone ignore the coursing chemical vectors signaling his mood swings.
He mourns the cheerful infant that begat its first sentient dawn, invigorated by spicy chilled breath of mountain forest nurturing those early years.
Fiery glories of sunrise, somber warmth of sunset embers, gray winter’s chilling desolate winds, summer heat’s balmy luxuriance.
An exalted ten-year-old tumbling in delighted anticipation from sun-up’s bed in fierce hunger of the day’s adventure amid estuary paradise and magic wooded hills.
Scarred already, he was, by the vicious schoolyard coliseum where it emotionally-fraught parents vented their horror of life through crippled tortured personas of their offspring.
Some children, I note, are gentle giants of intellect and spirit. Others, vile thugs from birth, briefed only to rip the wings from the butterfly-souls dancing naively about them, to crush innocent happy faces in the mud.
These dark internecine spirits of the school ground, those children who never were, patrol the borders of joy and creativity besmirching, ridiculing, and defiling the dreamers.
From this bedlam survivors march through the Gates of Juvenility to a darker terror, the teenage. Maturing thugs, social and moral imbecile, fully confident in their criminality and inured to authority’s threat, stand padded inadvertently by a throng of apathetic filler-material - the soon-to-be masses of no mind - the Silent Majority, who for the remainder of their meaningless lives wear full blame for Earth’s horrors.
The arrant ugliness of the juvenile world derives from its faithful replication of adult society, of which it stands a ferociously emotional, banal, and simplified caricature. Play-acting and grandstanding of immature, intellectually stunted young adults is a sorry display to any off-worlder holding faint, if not great, hope for what is soon found a bromidic scenario from yet another wearisome, arrogant little would-be civilization.
Following this raw decade of maturing bodies and decaying minds is the final loss of ideals: few fail to strike bargains with the dark side, in no matter how trite or subtle a form.
And, of course, at the extreme, as usual, the criminals criminalize, disrupting and insinuating to a putrid gray the great divide of good and evil, they cancerously erode the shiny arrowhead of potentially a great and free creative society.
The Silent Majority comprise the metallic inertia of this evolutionary metaphor and, befitting their role, never sense the speed, direction, or promise - or ever imagine the view from the shiny edge - of this noospheric dart.
The creatives - that weary, abused, battle-scarred collective of optimists and hopefuls - willingly and earnestly (naively?) continue polishing the gleaming surface of humankind’s missile of intent, as eternally they will, generating life and love from void.
Even these human angels in blinkered self-interest fail to grasp their destiny, much less a raison d’etre. Toiling for a lifetime (the only one it’s sadly believed) they halt suddenly dropping both hope and acquired tools of creation, surprised and disappointed to see an end.
Almost without exception they stand atop the slide to darkness, age weakening their foothold.
Humans fail to separate body from self, despite spanning several intellectual birthings. Tired bodies weathered by ceaseless little failures, the mental helm gripped by hopelessness, two or so decades remaining represents only a waste of time to navigate to the grave.
So from here decline insidiously steepens, exponentially towards the end.
The saddest aspect, Great Teachers, in following progress on this impenitent little oasis in the Great Vacuum, is seeing the creatives lose hope in this way - almost without exception. The erosion of their dreams is simply heart-rending.
At ‘retirement’ they simply retire. It is confounding! None (well, few) grasp they can expect two decades of intellectual product under totally free reign from the ‘flying start’ of language, learning, and wisdom already won.
Rarely do any from this prodigious advantage achieve ever a fraction of the average child in his first decade.
Despite this potential some are rightfully without hope, trapped like insects in amber, in a duality so typical of life’s fickle feign of justice - creatures of aims lacking means.
The great irony of my host is that his life’s achievements lie within the arrowhead - he is undoubtedly ’societal filler’ - yet his mind lives on the gleaming surface. This cruel duality befalls too many of the pensive who sense, crave, and visualize The Greatness forever beyond their grasp.
These mental ‘also-rans’ cruelly know and understand genius almost as their essence, yet cannot have it, or be it. This wasteful Hades is what breaks such sturdy souls, our survivors of the Six Decades, in the end.
For enduringly loving life in its every aspect, they have suffered the thousand deaths of letting go each cherishment, stubborn fingers pried, time and again by formidable relentless vicissitude .. till they live near the end as sepia shadows of the great beauty their joyous infancy once beheld.
