(Heart) Breaking News
Each successive stage of development brings with it its own measure of responsibility. The idea we have of progress and change is mistaken. The movement of light to dark, from hurting to helping, from creating to killing is never more than a series of masques, broken mini-narratives, reoccuring in more or less the same manner from age to age, through all time and for all time. The Hindus have always had the clearest picture of these changeless stories and archtypical characters. There is Shiva the destroyer, unquestionably in the ascendant now, Vishnu the protector, the preserver of the cosmos, upholder of the universal laws, and Brahma, the creator. It is no use to think that events are gradually revealing progress, developing. They are not and never will. It was an occasional, shimmering bright dream to think for a few moments that humankind was getting a better picture of reality. Pictures, yes. The whole picture, no. It might have been true, or seemed to, if it were not for the fact that we simultaneously, as a society, forget as much as we have learned, and sometimes even more than we have learned. Those fragmentary stories, or broken dreams as I once called them in a poem, are alternately exhilirating and pulverizing. What's the use of trying to derive a universal pattern? When we are not out there murdering each other, as in Basra, we are observing each other furtively trying to figure out how to get more of what we are so pursuaded we desperately need from others or from the earth.
We should watch over each other more and try to ask things of each other or influence other people more gently, more considerately. Far too much bullying, shouting, bossing, berating, cajoling, hectoring, screaming, yelling, sternly explaining, , arguing, angrily debating, hating, criticizing, contemptuously judging, classifying, correcting, deriding, condeming, assessing, testing, categorizing, obtaining, verbally and sarcastically torturing, chafing, arranging, putting down, hurting, damaging, wounding, killing. We never stop, won't stop, can't seem to stop. We never leave each other alone in the sense of allowing the other to complete a thought , see a set of related feelings and then ideas and then convictions emerge and then mutual projects develop in a reasonable period of undisturbed time so we have some shape to the picture of how we are feeling, before we give into our strong need to intervene. We hardly ever or not nearly often enough leave one other alone , even when trying to communicate with one another in the sense of allowing the other person time to figure out something to its conclusion on their own, turning things over and over in their minds, appreciating their ambivalent, ambiguous and multi-dimensional aspects, allowing time for ourselves and others to appraise the situation in a wide-ranging way as we exchange opinions, and take the time to consider what is apropos, each of us hearing all the others. If we are ever to cope with these sudden heart wrenching, terrifying paradyme changes by means of a changed frame of reality, we must learn how to sense and comprehend what masque we are presently in and find a way to acquaint each other with the changed cast of characters and what this ageless dynamism is trying to tell us. We like the movies because they are the closest thing we have to a way of visualizing the big picture as it is, unearthing and tracking a way of seeing the underlying universal archetypes and their interrelated motivations, drives, illusions and delusions, track and plot this archetype of rage and destruction as it really exists, and pervades our every feeling and thought. Ah Michael Moore, Michael Moore, bless your brilliant, insightful, profound, caring, good hearted, hilariously outraged and rousing soul.
