Apparently global warming is progressing faster than anyone anticipated. And the Lord remaketh the face of the Earth and causeth the waters to run freely over her surface. Or something. I don't know if anyone has noticed something that is becoming clearer with every newspaper I read...probably some have, some haven't...EVERYTHING IS FUCKED. I don't mean everything is a little bad but maybe there is enough good to outweigh it, I really do mean EVERYTHING IS FUCKED. We are fucked right down to the bottom of our apathetic, scared little souls. Fuck you and fuck me too.
I never used to follow the news at all - couldn't care less about politics, economics - never intended to have a job if I could help it...but ever since NATO invaded Kosovo and started bombing Serbia I've been buying a newspaper or reading the news online, every day. And at the same time as I am increasing my knowledge of the fucking bullshit and suffering that makes headlines every day, the lesson is not being lost on me that in buying the newspaper I am part of the problem.
We have to have STORIES. We are bound by the nature of our thought, our need for stories. To see the Hero rise and fall, to see the Good Land destroyed and rebuilt, to see the Great Cycle playing itself out a million times, a billion times, it would never be enough because through the stories we are bound to our own wheel of fire, the endless wheel and labyrinth of our mind, our collective mind.
The collective unconscious is many things, and one of them is a vast communal store of psychic energy, what Freud and Jung called libido, the endless whirling of mental force through the patterns of myth and story and image that are the underpinnings of our thoughts, learned from when we first started thinking as infants, even in the womb. This energy whirls inside us and out of us - impels us to motion and brings us to rest - emerges as the cyclic and storied patterns of human history and art, dances us to its pattern as we smile in the happy illusion that we are masters of our destiny. WE ARE NOT.
For as long as we are slaves to the story, for as long as we fail to realise that we are, literally are this strange, luminous awareness that will continue - even though the stories will come to an end forever - then we will continue to perpetrate every form of suffering and stupidity on each other and the world in blissful ignorance of the inevitable result. We will continue to be characters in Shakespeare's Tale Told By An Idiot, this nightmare of gibbering and howling in a wrecked and infinite space.
DEATH, DEATH, the story ends in death, all stories end with an ending: IF WE MAKE OUR LIVES A STORY THEN WE ARE WALKING HAND IN HAND WITH DEATH. We aren't a story. The universe is not a great novel being read aloud by some kindly and wise being. NO STORY. We will never, finally, know how it all turns out. We are here; we do not know what is going on. We do not know the truth. There is no story. There is no-one in charge. You do not have to hurt your brother. You do not have to hurt your sister. You do not have to do what you are told.
No one can threaten you because that which you truly are does not die. What a different world we might understand this to be if our news sources reminded us of that every fucking day.