iThis, iThat, iThe other

Much as I try to avoid it, it seems to be difficult for me to avoid a cynical tone... A recurring theme is people thinking they're so big and clever when they're in fact not.

What I'm sort of getting at here is the prevailing modern belief that God doesn't exist. I'm not saying I believe in God yet still I kind of think we're a bit spiritually lost in 'The West'. I am particularly interested in how the spiritual and the physical, or scientific, mesh. Is this what people mean when they refer to the metaphysical?

Despite this professed non-belief, our everyday lexicon is peppered, peppered I say, with God stuff. There are more obvious examples than the following, but the following is one I like:

Who are you to {tell me how to live my life/ say/ judge}

- I think the implication is: You are not God.

Bill Hicks did a routine in which he impersonates some kind of heckler. In a whiny voice he says 'Who are you to say, what makes you the judge, wah wah wah'; His response: 'I'm me, it's true, shut the F up', which is an enjoyable riposte from a man who believed in god but was vehemently anti the prevailing view of what God is, and managed to be articulate and hilarious in explaining this. Hicks referred to a god who loves us unconditionally and who will rain down gifts of forgiveness.

'Evolve ideas' is also Hicks, a phrase he often employed during his eloquentia, his rants about the stuntedness of humanity.

'Break on through' and 'The Other Side' are Jim Morrison. I love Morrison's poetic lyrics, particularly his song The Other Side. I looked at the full lyrics, contemplating making more use of them. I couldn't think of a way this time and I suspect his wordsmithery is best enjoyed along with the music anyway. Still, here's a snippet:

We chased our pleasures here
Dug our treasures there
But can you still recall
The time we cried
Break on through to the other side
Break on through to the other side


The title of the upcoming poem, possibly misplaced, is from The Cure's 'Close to Me'. Here are some of the lyrics:

i never thought this day would end
i never thought tonight could ever be
this close to me

just try to see in the dark
just try to make it work
to feel the fear before you're here
i make the shapes come much too close
i pull my eyes out
hold my breath
and wait until i shake...

but if i had your faith
then i could make it safe and clean
if only i was sure
that my head on the door was a dream

In the insulated first world, we have the luxury of political and moral belief, in quite an abstract way. There is no such thing in The South and because survival and subsistence are more clear and present, the personal and the political are indistinguishable: Human life is cheap or disposable, priorities are different. Things like personal responsibility or paying taxes are abstract and absurd. The world is generally an absurd place and again, of course, the third world seems more absurd to a first worlder. But it's a bit like growing up; safe little notions of what should be get successively trampled by what simply is.


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If only I Was Sure


Everything revealed,
double helix unravelled
having vanquished all
as if all were foes,
fear rears still
rears forth as it did to those
who thought the world flat
and the sky imminent.

Too much at fingertips
Not enough at soul
No bottom only bold
strides, giant leaps
no gravity, no tether;
free or adrift we cannot know
until it's too late
Soul forgotten, heretic soul.

Evolve ideas, break on through
the Other Side is waiting
beyond the Wailing Wall
Perhaps a climb-down is in order
from the widget-encrusted throne
the chrome asylum
the Googlegimmick high-chair
the REAL PLAYER.

iThis, iThat, iThe other
When all the iWhile
the games console us
we drift away from the shroud
away from the tallis
and towards the man-eating
blockbustering overlapping
waves of the many many many
kinds of violence.