PISH-POSH FROM MY VIRTUAL SPACE 

Idle Musings of the Hypothetical Citizen

Here again, he thought, before the silence and nonsense. Ah, the perfect place for the hypothetical among us!

"The woman expects a miracle. She wants everything to occur, whatever the consequences." He was musing on his latest acquaintance who had insinuated herself into his life and, now, pounced like some lovely panther into the core of his being. He thanked God for action and that most people acted outside themselves among things and others so that those who suffer inwardly can shake themselves loose of their morbidity and see that things are simpler than they appear in the mind.

His intuition was simple and a part of youth. Things in general have done a kilter; the worst is in authority, the worst in human beings is given encouragement, and the best in human beings is reserved for some innocuous room in the soul on whose door fear knocks. The most bitter thing was to observe a natural vitality released in the form of desire and ambition only to have shock and disillusionment level these energies into compliance and rigidity.

And after this embarrassment: the provincial self sitting at the place of birth to watch the world disappear into the speed of light. "Hmm, and I feel free to go anywhere I wish."

At the provincial level it was the wishes of the community that came first. The wishes of the immediate and extended family imposed by unconscious acts quickly integrated by anxiety. Anxiety however led to disrespect, a hatred of "things happening under no one's province of control."

It was life in the old style; slow and with little capital, captured by roles and rituals until there was no defense against it. Old Victorian houses in a row with windows decorated with discolored white curtains and little gardens in front. It was tricycles with ornery horns and dogs barking but never malicious and a kind of acquiescence to things. And, as one grew up, they didn't know whether to shake it off or embrace it. The women were a comfort because they had sacrificed the most. The men were hard and expected a certain way among the young. "It changes so fast," he thought. Even the good intentions of good people disintegrate and so the fight starts all over. What new wonderful things emerge from these, the new people in this, the new circumstance?

The mind was an idiocy that thought it could enwrap everything and subject it to its judgements. Democracy was born out of a realization that the mind was a dangerous animal. And yet, the mind had to spring up, free, and bountiful grasping everything in its path. This was the wonderful contradiction the hypothetical citizen took on, early one Sunday, as the birds pecked at bits of bread along the mucky lake and the music played softly from the amphitheater.

Perhaps the miracle could be summarized as, "I see all but have power over nothing." At that moment the democratic person began to emerge, unafraid of anything before him or her and open to the flows of knowledge that came like a salt-tinged wind through the Gate.

It certainly wasn't contained in bitchy women who gossiped about things they knew nothing about or relations who knew nothing about what they spoke of. They usually spat from the grinding wheel that was their life.

The hypothetical citizen had to admit that the creative type desired nothing more than power. The whole nature of a creative type sought power; that was the "awful" aspect of this nature. And sometimes he could perceive this power as a plasma; a clean, transparent organism on the planet and with a life for one reason only; to gain power for itself. And this power was taken from several sources; first, the power of antecedents; the power still contained in the past, moving at a high velocity within itself, waiting for release out of its dead eyes into the eye so that man or woman who would take it up to the next torch. In this exhausting struggle power was real.

There was another source of power, operating in the world at the time the creative type lived. If the hypothetical citizen bared his soul naked to that world for only a moment he sometimes glimpsed into the nodes of power emanating out of all kinds of places. Some places were obvious, tangible, physical. Some were more subtle, abstracted and hidden.

© 2005 David Eide. All rights reserved.