“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” – Frantz Kafka

February 16, 2019 4:36pm

Today, getting ready to go out and run some errands, I was pulling on my pants and suffered that stabbing recognition that I am a finite being in an infinite universe, living at a time about 13 billion years after the birth of that universe. I concluded that me, my entire memory of my life and the time and space through which I appeared to travel are not real. I find myself more and more saying this to myself when I am alone, “none of this is real,” I say. But it is.

I hear the war drums of the neanderthals, the Sumarians, the Romans, the Mohamedans, the Vikings, the Prussians, the British and I see the rape and destruction of Nanking in the Sino-Japanese War. We are beasts in the costumes of men, The absolute violence is unimaginable.

In our day and time, we think we are far removed from this violence but open your eyes. You will see its subtle undercurrents in everyday interactions. It is in you and in me and only waits for some excuse to rise again and assert the preeminence of the organism – which is only following the prime directive…..to survive, whatever the cost.