It follows from a parsing of the most difficult logic away from its assault on the animal body—
that our inner awareness, the consciousness born of our natural organism, has more of a connection to reality than our external environment does.
We find this not only counterintuitive (we feel transient, as mere animals, in the stone halls of civilization and mountain ranges alike) but also unbearably painful to reconcile with, as we discover this sensation alone in ourselves, and with the world outside soundlessly barren without us.
It’s as though we are born with no safety to desire anything in our environment, but can refresh ourselves with the mere memory of life in a forest rife with food and comforts.
We have no means of survival except through relations to human symbolic structures and their relations of power. We are here by the grace of being incidental throngs. It’s as though we were dreamed into existence by a mere economic policy-one that may echo through starving, empty mountain ranges after all. This is a cold plunge. We are what is real.
We sense the alienation and numbness of our own awkward longing for wholeness, while rationing our distress with the terms of a world unsuited to our very survival. We are gasping.
We are, in a sense, born into capitivity-insofar as performance is the requirement for survival between ourselves and water, food, nourishment, love, rest, and solitude.
We are prisoners of the structures of a physical world that keep us suspended hell-like in perpetual need. And this is exactly the conclusion we dreaded.
Worse yet, the boundary is permeable.
The boundary is permeable by the mere existence of wildflowers, beauty, simple comfort, and star light—
like cracks in a doorway of myriad dimensions.
And more frightening still, what keeps us nullified, in somatic retention, are the peering eyes of our own species around every corner—
watchful from an oblivion of fiery demand,
not stalking the entryways within any sight of reason, but from a fear of being roused from the rhythmic hymns of machinery inducing the trance of a suicide cult,
paced in clockwork, engines and calendar years—
a hypnotic, fickle sect, whose church is a ruthless doldrums of function, boundless in misery for the mere sake of misery, as it provides a solution that does not demand any reckoning of its own birth by self-defeat at every tolling of the bell.
Some people really do feel satisfied with the earth—and all life from it—merely ending:
vanishing like a heartbeat and breath-bellows from the bone.
Deep down, we know that there is nothing beyond this. Everything is already bathed in beauty.
We are real, inside a dream made of stone.
