47094: 23 Light and Fervor
So you see, even if this time was a thermometer measuring both cold and heat, it was always just hot. Dreams were full-fledged and stood up as if equals to the day. It was as if everyone was living the fantasy that years of struggle will in retrospect strike them as being the most beautiful time, but they were doing it in a shorter version. There were friends who rushed about seeing everything in a new way. They charted vast expanses of vision from a single calculation. Had anyone tested it? Everything was a tributary rushing towards a better future. Social media was a kind of prophetic eternity. Its tone reached way beyond folk song to the further, deadlier distance of a narrow wasp stinger. It’s psychology was a denial of melancholia. Its intoxication was fermented in myths of a different century and the dreamy fragrance of a mysteriously erotic justice. Behind all this flattened form and paltry composition is of course what really happens.
‘You’re bewitched, in love with your causes. It’s deeply felt and genuine. And that’s why I’m sometimes afraid. You’re never more defenceless against suffering when intoxicated by love,’ she said.
‘You strike me as a cynic some days,’ but he didn’t actually think that.
It was as if someone else inside of him was always muttering against himself. It was a parasite reaching up from hell to turn himself against himself. That’s what he felt. This was why he felt sick and sometimes unable to go on. He spent days and nights wishing to kill the parasitical version inside. He felt like turning to violence, a complicated brutality screaming inside of himself. And he began to think everyone was like this. Everyone had these parasites in them, crawling out of the depths to make them think that being loved was what they needed. This was just pure ego. Vanity. Narcissism. Hateful hateful hateful longing. He wondered about a different world where these hellish voices weren’t always crawling about. But the whole situation wasn’t lost on him even as the marches and demands grew across vast swathes of the world’s cities.
And that is a scandal that doesn’t fall from the same skies, she frowned.
All this rushing about, all this work, the passion and cries, the wailing, the waving of banners and fists and endless, endless streams of proclamations and indictments, accusations and promises, the streaming about from hither and thither, the spreading and the rising, the cravings and addictions, the ready tears and heaving hearts, the rage and rage and rage and rage and its beating drums, all of that was the obvious, necessary response to a secret, unacknowledged trauma running its course by other means. This was just a detourned explosion of mental illness, its major depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, manic-depression, personality disorders, grief response, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, etc.—on a scale none of us had witnessed before. Waving arms and muttering underneath the excitement, everyone seemed as if they were the only ones completely awake in the whole world. They had seen the staggering truth, its blissfully crazy proof, and were adjusting themselves to what it implied. The fullness of the sounds and images leapt out with unprecedented force, or so it seemed to them. It was like a gangway had dropped onto the shore. Everyone was chided to disembark.
The terrible event was filmed.
And of course she remembers clearly the image as it did the rounds on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and everywhere else. The news on tv was more discreet but there was little point in this holding back. The sickening footage was something everyone carried inside themselves when alone. It glowed like an inner monument lit up by halos of sorrowful lights. It was an event so terrible it betrayed all the secrets. It oozed from the pores opened by the refusal of lips and daylight. It distributed a vulturous night over everyone, even those who didn’t see it, even those who refused to . From that came a charge of emotions, all mixed up. Aggression, scorn, rage and most of all terror rumbled about. Fear always lives in allegiances and makes demands all the time, everywhere. It makes souls rush to other people to look them up and down, to ask them questions, to receive confirmation. Everyone listens and gathers portents and they do it for as long as it takes to satisfy this fear. And when sometimes the fear stops and something else takes its place its like being stuck on a sandbar. In certain extraordinary times there’s a shock of spontaneity, impulsiveness, expansiveness that carries itself in a fierce blinding illuminatory light and fervor.
Gone is the usual inertia, resilience and instinctive ability to survive no matter what. Now there is the hope of overcoming some enigmatic thing no one at first is clear about and never can be. It is a moment of utter surprise. No one is clear why it happened at this very moment. There had been worse things that had happened before but nothing like this had happened because of those. And for a moment everything is hard to understand but easy to feel. After the strange pause, there comes a release as if a boot breaking through a door. The secrets begin to come through. And everything supposed is true. Which raised the question: where was truth before? And another question: where would truth go when forgotten again?
Be quiet.
Read 47094 from the beginning here.
Read the complete novel 'The Ecstatic Silence' here.