We know this is a bi-polar world, two sides living within a one-sided argument, Harvey Dent cursing The Batman’s name, humanity progressing towards its own demise, each conquest over what it calls nature a step up the stairs to its final evening, a sad and lonely room waiting, where a sick son named Norman dusts the corpse of his mother, neon flickering through thin curtains, signaling the Hitchcockian end.
Like a hermit crab making its way through Costco, we have encumbered ourselves with so much artifice that we can no longer move, our lives divided by and immersed within the invented particulars of the static of reason, the dizzying whirlpool of action and correction we call civilization, our part in the charade of society, the tempest of culture and war, class and crushing despair.
We first embraced the cool stranger in the red shadows of our birth, wailing at such a God’s fury, a creator so demented as to make us arrive unfulfilled, our tiny bodies craving sustenance, demanding survival, building the platform for greed, the very basis of man’s haphazard pirouette across time’s fleeting stage, the epileptic ecstasy of Martha Graham.
We are brutes, pure and simple, monsters growing terrified of our own hair, the remnant pelt of our ancestral primitivism, Lon Chaney Jr. baying at the moon. We are a creature who has absorbed his artificial world, sending it through his very blood, shitting it out in a vicious stream, his splayed legs like the posts of a gate blown open by insanity’s fetid breath.
We, thus portioned, tormented, cannot but see the world lying about us in halves, in this and that, in them and us, in good and evil, his and hers, Fiddle and Faddle, Tom and Jerry, Turner and Hooch. We project our sickness on the morning and the night, on land and sea, on father and mother, on daughter and son. Half of us dream of bringing the parts together in harmonious joy, progressive Bambis grazing the liberal fields of the modern Democratic Party, the other half plotting to keep it apart, Rush Limbaugh barking at the microphone, Dick Cheney moving things in his basement bunker, everyone frothing at the mouth in their episcopalian hubris, waves of drool clashing as words are exchanged, grievances aired, desires made known, enemies so born, armies thus made, the toys broken before the dawn.
How I wonder what we would have become, had we never picked at the peace of the moment, had we never squinted into the light, seeing two suns, closing the book on a graceful existence.
