and done, even when they are done for the exactitude of duty only. What is forgotten and left undone is presumed to be of little importance, no matter the quick recognition of the eyes behind the eyes that speak more clearly than either the verbal or written word or any action based on duty.
We cultivate false hope and cling to group jargon for whatever may "stir the pot." Any original idea that is uncompromised is suspect; even as it drives deep into reasons stacked. To put forth anything that cannot be neatly agreed-up is taboo. We are rewarded for sublimation of self—to agree, to get along—to let authority intervene as we suck our thumbs and wonder at the control given; the power taken.
The stacking of reasons and the accordance with bland uniformity is voluntary. Sublimated will is the reward. Tranquillity of mind is the forfeit of self and the result of self forfeiture is the right of made-meant-mean intention in think-factory thought. We elaborately dramatize the working principles of reason. Man reasons and ponders his reasons, allows the machinery of the mind to move slightly and then, quickly reverts to produce a set of circumstances that are concurrent with cause and its predisposed and chartered effect.
There is no excused cause in the R.I.P. We trade our mental teeth in favor of softer food. We are processed beings living in a world of processed rules and processed dreams and processed hope.
Try as we may, we have not yet been able to process away the animal: our natural being. The beast is alive in us all. The tighter the noose about his throat, the harder he pulls. We have not yet been able to kill the beast and we cannot completely subdue him. What is it that we, so reasonably, fear? What is it that we take such pains to drape in the vestiges of knowledge and paradoxical agreement and impasse systems logic? Is it the beauty of our own illuminated substance that we have been taught to approach with fear and upon which we practice lessons of insignificant guilt and blame? To know fear, exclusive of reason, and to make it a friend, is to open the corridors to the dynamic self and the introspective sensual phenomenon.
If one has had occasion to listen to the faint beat of a heart near death, to listen carefully to this thing that is like a distant and uncertain drum, then one can understand well the cries of an intrepid and gentle beast. There are cries from humans that speak with the voices from dank reaches; from fields and forests that we once crossed for no reason at all; and to which we must, as mineral and dust, return. By the breaking down of the chemicals of our flesh and the falling apart of our fragile intellect, in the twinkling of an eye our lives are lived without ever having been lived. In death, there is no reason for pity. The pity is in our failure to live. The pity is in half life.
The R.I.P. is contingent upon ignorance and upon false levels of tolerance to the tightening of bounds. Paradox is the over and under perimeters that narrow and hold. It is a synthetic parallax that displaces and shifts two separate views into angular, directed points with meaning diluted and vortex obscured. Reason justifies and expands blame and excuse while passive feeling can justify nothing. Reason is an enlarged thing, its dominance based on conquest, on the braggadocio of what has been and what will be in constructed time to come through devout intention and proud objective for betterment of somehow, somewhat, sometime and somewhere. Reason is fortified by group cohesion to commonly held and traded beliefs, opinions, traditions and protected agreements. Only by authoritarian guard can the noose of agreement in reason be tightened. Only by absence of self or by self-abandon do we sanction constructs of reason that need validation.
We intentionally bury our thin and watery selves in solids that are as dense as granite and we admire the masonry no matter how grotesque the convolution of self, no matter the aberrance of our twisted beings who are in want of freedom from pain. We pursue freedom in alcohol and freedom in chemistry. We never pursue freedom in self.
We admire our reasonableness and pay homage to our heralded brilliance, rejoice in our quotients of intelligence; then we proudly display our neuroses as badges of courage and bravery.
No matter how happy we claim ourselves to be, inside our solid casts of factory-make, the R.I.P. remains in reason decay. We sense this in our contrite acceptance of mediocrity and we sense this in our willingness to deprive and to be deprived. We sense it in the split that we cannot deny. The R.I.P. is the gaping wound that, for reason, we refuse to repair. The R.I.P. is the fissure through which the human being falls, without once even touching the color and texture dispatched by the nerves of self. We prefer our safe numbness to feeling.
There is the impulse to stop, to give ourselves over to the caprice of completion. Feigning bewilderment, we do not question motion but allow ourselves to be propelled speedily toward time in future past. We reside in residuals. We can conceive the continuum of one long and unending day but we crave the acquisition of future relics sold by expert sale of noun/verb function. We hoard the products of linguistic prevarication for promise, as if we are incapable of our own determination of self and self constructs. The voice inside us—the voice of the self being, original self—intones the same message, and it is the redundancy of "a tale told by an idiot" and the myth of "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" when the perfect self is now.
The R.I.P. locks us inside the tragedy of not being and keeps us a single hair's breadth away from the magic of being: impassionment.
Blame is a profitable business. It R.I.P.'s the mind and plunders the human heart. This is the seal of political endeavor and religious zeal. Religion exacts redemption by a savior who is charged with saving both those who are blamed and those who blame, while utilizing the latter. Yet religion will condemn those who are without blame and without need to blame to exile in the word. There must always be arch sinners as there must always be saints in the name of hope. There is no such thing as evil except through reasonable and moral devise. A life spent on the outskirts of this premise often marks one as a traitor and as a paladin to a cause. Martyrdom is fraud. There are no saints and sinners and no saviors of our souls: redemption is now.
How can we amend a five thousand-year-old barter system based on the yoke and the plow, master and slave? Do we begin by giving things away and by making large, sacrificial donations? We cannot. Do we continue to buy and sell and to live the lie of goods that have no value? Is there choice? What is this thing that we claim to be our will?
We live in paradox and we live in the shadow of reason. By indiscriminate breeding, we are ethical robots. Political and economic inequities, starvation, pestilence and the suffering of the human being across the planet are either the result of faulty questioning or of no questioning at all. The timeless irony of "to be or not to be" is unconcern by reason. The question becomes, then, "What must we throw out and what must we agree?"
Hope is our eternal docility and the tractable method by which we sentence ourselves to the hells of our own making. Hope is the waiting for the nothingness in which we live to go away. Hope is bittersweet faith in stagnation.
We fail. Survival of the fittest does not apply. We are all quite fit to fail. If agreement is the universal signpost of intelligence for a species and, if we all agree to accept certain roles for the acting of agreed upon process, then let us act our way out of millennia of abuse and humiliation. Let us, by our exploits, remove the yoke of obedience and duty, remove the struggle between those who have and those who have nothing; for within this struggle for ubiquitous gain through numeration, we are assassins. We either idle in our ignorance or forthrightly kill by our forbearance. The judgments of tolerance are harsh.
It is our sensibility that reproves reason. To live in disregard of our senses is to live a life unlived. We condemn ourselves by reason alone. Death is not a choice.
Our antiquated systems of barter are falling apart. There is little room for consumptive gain. Boredom has reached saturation. Can we continue the perpetuation of self fear, sanctified ritual, biased sentiment, fawning adoration of self replication and admiration of the flimsiness that grants us passage into agreement? Are we satisfied with meager return for meager outlay? Are we content inside
