Monday, October 13, 2003
I don't know which feels thinner this morning, me or reality. The me of ten years ago would have been quick to point out that there may be no difference between the two. The me of now lacks the arrogance or faith for even that much certainty. I think therefore . . . what? René Descartes wasn't trying hard enough.
Or he was trying too hard, to hold on to something. Something that can be sensed, if not grasped. I suspect he knew more than he was willing to say.
The leafblower men are outside. They come every Monday and wander about the grounds, blowing this pile of leaves over there and that pile of leaves over here, so that next week they can come back and reverse the whole exercise, which allows them to start anew the following week. I have almost begun to suspect that the leafblower men are some minor expression of a supernature. They seem to be possessed of no particular emotions. They wander about, eyes trained intently on the nozzles of their leafblowers, raising clouds of dust and grit like veils to mask the progress they're not making. Really, it's the noise that bothers me, and the exhaust that leaks in through the windows and the cracks in the walls. Otherwise, the leafblower men are fairly innocuous phantoms, as phantoms go. I don't think they've ever heard of a rake. In the yard the leafblower men come and go/Talking of Michelangelo. Truthfully, though (and that's several different sorts of lies), I'm not sure they have voices beyond the machine noises that their leafblowers make. If they do, I've never heard them. And I listen.
I need thicker walls. The world of phantoms presses too near, and I can honestly do without the distraction.
If there is a consensual reality, as I have often argued, than, perforce, must there not also be a consensual insanity? Or is every madwoman an anarchist, her madness determined solely by her particular, unique deviance from the present reality of consensus? I think the latter. The phantoms divide madwomen — diagnostically, pharmecologically, psychologically, institutionally — to protect the illusion fostered by consensual reality. Together, they might be a threat. Apart, they are only dissmissable mutterings lost in the gales of day to day to day existence (assuming, for that moment just passed, the conceit of existence). They threaten the insubstantial lives of phantoms, and phantoms are The Everytyrant. Like the leafblower men, but in six billion shades of oblivion. They must sweep constantly along, here to there, and back, waltzing because if they stop, if they become mired in something beyond consensual reality — they begin to solidify, becoming mad, and, in the stream of CR, madness is stones that slow the stream, stones that must be weathered away to sand and carried down to the sea.
Grain by grain.
Water breaks stone.
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