Truth and Lies
Using the future to escape the present.
Last night I dreamed of a man who was building an island. He had taken sand and dirt, filled it in his truck, and was building a new, free land for people to come and live on. He had his life saved long ago, in some sort of drunk driving accident, and this was his way of redemption. I saw and walked his land, it was in Florida, and it was right next to huge houses. I decided to live there. I decided his island was going to be my new home. It made me happy.
I sit here and write, and mostly think. I sit and think what I should be doing with all these resources in the land of so much, and I come up short. There’s cars and plastics and phones and instant images, but no substance. We can instantly transmit and receive a million little ideas, but never experience. Never depth or meaning. Instead we get tiny fragments of a feeling.
Shopping and working and pretending. No more myth and mythology, just blind self interest and rationality to guide us through this future of perfect and immediate distribution of facts and financial justification.
That’s what gave us our original powers, that’s how we won the entire world. We had this inherent emptiness, and we sold it to keep ourselves free. Free and empty. That’s the way we chose to be. Us in the US. A thousand million souls become bean counters and we are free. We are free to count beans and to buy Chinese. Buy Chinese plastic and break and buy it again.
Our fungus chicken, our moldy soybean meats, we are the land of freedom to choose. Torture and release, we have the choice. Bailouts and banks, singing and dreaming, we are free to choose. Choose light beer and organic dog food. Choose green lighting and an SUV. We are free, free to buy.
Kerouac and Vonnegut tried to give us a new mysticism. Of searching and nonsense, but it’s never stuck. It’s time for a new lie, a new dream bigger than self-help books and rights or equality. Before we all lose that giant flame of power within us, the flame of irrationality, of believing the impossible, despite all the evidence against it.
It is the rigidity of belief that destroys us, that corrupts us. We must be open to multiple truths, all at the same time. Rigidly holding to ideas, that’s the downfall. Even the most beneficial of beliefs, even the most true of truths, if held they bite back. Truth and lies and beliefs must be played with, not coveted and protected.
