Let's Have a Think

A pub crawl of conspiratorial thoughts all high on Chaucer

photo by author

A crowd feels a bullfight. There is some ancient ritual of the man dancing with the bull, flagging it down with his skirts and then stabbing it with big knives. This is the ritual of the tightrope walker with his balancing pole. It’s hard to stay balanced on a high wire if you’re being distracted, pulled in one direction or the other, sensing the center. Ignoring everything else. The understanding is in the feet. This makes a great meditation, crossing an abyss on a high wire. One step at a time, but sometimes the feet be dancing so they be all over the place. Nevertheless, they are feet which are woke.

Those feet rise up, albeit one at a time, and demand equal rights with the hands, but the thumbs and forefingers stand in opposition to giving an inch to a foot. Feet are people, too, and it does something to a person to be black bagged and rammed into a boot without even a little talcum powder. They are neglected, mostly because they live across the tracks from midtown, south of the head, where all the gated communities are. The hands get taken out to casinos, all painted up, playing cards, but the feet are warned that showing the soles is insulting, a sign of disrespect.

“How did you feel when you realized you are offensive?”

“It was beyond my under standing.”

“And then the hands put a sack over your head?”

“They called it a sock, but yeah. My toes were petrified.”

A cross can come alive in your dreams and turn into chopsticks which don’t drop things, or drumsticks, and you can hear a beat, and you make things happen in time.

What makes us one society is that we are all connected to the one thing, freedom, and it is the jewel that is worth all the rest of them put together. We are free and self-governing, still, because we can’t imagine admitting that we let the thieves into the sacred space, knowing they would steal our freedom. In olden days the carrier of the fire was usually reliable, but eventually one of them pissed on it. The shadow gets too strong to resist.

Power, ungrounded in the sacred, is plowing through, oblivious of the meaning of the rituals, they are making knockoffs of what they’ve stolen, and threatening everybody if they won’t say they’re real. But they’re obvious fakes so people say what they know is false, going along to get along. We are careening along at the speed of thought, ungrounded to anything real, trapped inside the mind of a madman. It eats up our hours, it eats up our days. There are so many things we could be doing instead.