Supermoon by NASA/Joel Kowsky, Creative Commons
I left when I knew that the moon, the stars, and the sun had become inessential. That is when I became what I am. Through busy towns I wandered, with concrete streets and painted window frames. Where lightning is harnessed like a horse to light laneways and lives. A place where thoughts upon thoughts, shared by flapping tongues, grow like ivy on the walls or dirt upon the street; burying them like ancient ruins. Even the sky, the moon, the trees, and the faces of strangers and friends have been obscured by layers of concepts, considerations, and deliberations—and so have become impossible to appreciate for themselves.
To see below the voices of thought to the mumbled magic beneath… for that I have run, I have searched—no I have not! I have merely wandered! And happened to find a place not emptied out by disassociation.
And now I sit on the mountainside. I stare at the moon. I record a few words.
The silvered moon that dances between the clouds!
There is as close as a soul can get to the world as it really is. A world that moves by itself, lives by itself, that really has no need of my affirmation, my yes-saying, my complicities. An existence I do not need to convince myself of. That is really something… the system of life, moving as it will, and asking no more. I see myself in the sky, see what I could be: a purposeful movement so self-evident as to be unfathomable to the thoughtful mind. For a moment.
I think to myself: at last, something that does not need to make itself upon my imagination. That does not demand to be called by its name, that is fleeting and changeable enough to avoid being pinned down and incorporated by thought. An experience running free as feeling—something I can feel and love for itself without ever questioning if it could be more.
I will never see this moon again. Good. I have seen the world all around me caught and captured by chains of imagination; by words, meanings and representations. Those things that made what was in front of me, what I saw and felt, merely a representation of something immaterial—something “better.” So that what I had became a worthless copy; and worse became in every other way invisible. Looking at it, I could only see a thought about a thought about the thing itself—layer upon layer of abstractions. The actual experience, the magically inexplicable and beautiful experience of a thing became hidden from me… yet I see such a thing now, in this moon; and if I were to see this moon again I would lose sight of it and see again only a tiny representation of the abstract world of human life. Tonight I am not sure if that world is a better one.
In the light of day now, I feel it necessary to write an appendix; to trace out the next few steps of wandering so as to keep the feet lithe and to show the potential reader a hint of direction.
A brief story of those busy towns would go like this: once there was a village of people who needed concepts to share their knowledge of the essentials of life with others, and so they put upon their lives a set of concepts and were nevermore without them. Soon they needed more concepts for every facet of life, and eventually concepts for their concepts. A lattice of interwoven ideas develops, and slowly expands to serve not only as a shorthand for information but also as a barrier between those people and the world. No longer did information need to be passed in totality; be experienced practically. Now it could be related by concepts. The practical became more and more unnecessary until even the most obvious things in front of them became concept first and reality second. Layer upon layer of this lattice grew, further separating these people from the world until that barrier became a world unto itself. One replete with its own domain of knowledge: knowledge about knowledge. In this domain, knowledge of experience became distilled to and replaced with theory so that experience itself became increasingly less necessary… and all this serves us very well until questions of feeling and humanity begin to whisper. At that time it will mean something to look at the moon.
These days abstraction adds new layers: in-the-head and on-the-page. Where worlds of abstraction (worry, theorizing, planning, etc.) take center stage in the mind, and where mass-produced abstract representations of the world create and propagate singular views of what really is…
In all this I forgot what I am and where I am… caught between an animal and a divine being; unable to satisfy myself as either. For this I began to wander; to see if I could ever be just what I am. Without this struggle between a strange and alienated animal life and a constant yearning or divine levels of empowerment and perfection.
So I would rather wander, and occasionally see a sight like this… and if one thing were ever to transfix me and end my wandering, let it be this one.
