the girl by the road in the ditch at night
The conversation is like a movement back in time. Soon they are pre-industrial. Soon pre-Christian. Pre-Greek. They remove their clothes, after there is no more speaking. Then a long intercourse: broken phrases of what she sees.
Then they come aware of each other again. There is rose light from the earth in the east. It is the moment of morning. They are up and there is a brook, a stream, trees, woods, plants, a beaver, birds, and a strange, almost total, almost primeval quietness. No bank, no road, no fence, no cemetery. But the stream, and rocks, and up a ways the sound of waterfall—and their clothes are gone.
She sees her legs and arms—they are unshaved, and a touch of earth to them; and as she rises from where they have lain, and stands and looks about, there is a strength in her legs, a strength in her arms.
Classical American Freedom
I am not at heart or in my blood a member of this generation, this century. I don't fit in and I don't belong—it's obvious to me.
But really the choices they offered me weren't good.
Most people are a part of the times they live in—as if manufactured for consumption in their age. Do not be frightened by the words; it means they belong.
But for me I choose this age to live in. I choose it over all others: I do not belong to it but would have belonged less to any other historical age.
This is by far the only really free age—where the people have freedom. From the 1960's to the year 2010 or so—that is it. In fact here in 1976 we've already passed the peak of freedom. But any other age—and what freedom is there for people? Look at Egypt 4000 BC. Look at the early Chinese civilizations. Look even at Western Europe two centuries ago. It is only in the last two centuries that Western Europe has had even a liberal amount of freedom.
I hardly had a choice. Who wants to die a heretic during the early Renaissance? Or be part of the executions in China whenever a new dynasty comes in? Even the old Greeks and Romans did not create worlds of freedom, and tribal Africa was not much.
So that they showed me what there was—and this was it.
And even this period of classical American liberty is short lived: maybe it will manage to last 60 years. Already we have passed the high mark and the decline has started, and little by little our freedom is gone. Even the high mark itself wasn't all that much: but it is what man has to offer.
For people who live in the age as if made for it, the passing of their freedom is no great thing: they were made for the age and not for the freedom. They will follow the age, whatever it does.
But for me, and the others like me, who choose this age over all ages, freedom is our lifeblood or might as well be.
We do not belong to the age; we are vultures sucking after freedom wherever it be.
And so 30, maybe 40 more years of classical American freedom; then three hundred years of despair, and the snapping closed the final hunt of steel traps upon the ankles of freedom.
And after the 300 years?
I don't know. They showed me nothing after: it was not part of what I could choose.
the girl in the ditch by the road at night
The girl's brown hair might as well have been invisible in the night, so too her brown pants and brown shirt; they were not to be seen. The sky, too, was brown but invisible because of the night; and the invisible stars were hidden by invisible clouds. It was a dark night. And the asphalt road, because of the trees and the invisible brown banks, was a dark road. The girl was sat in the ditch by one side of the road, lain back against the bank. She rested there, like a mute, looking out at the night as if somehow some part of it was within. The night was in her eyes, and brown. Her face, her ankles, her hands, all were brown in the night, against the brown bank.
Across the blacktop road, made of a billion pebbles cemented by men and laid in a river that wound between banks where stood the trees, across it and down a ways towards one edge of night was a fence; and behind the fence, she knew (though she couldn't see them) cement stones, markers, crosses—a cemetery, though not much of one. And farther down the road, a shadow against the two small beams of a car coming, the body of someone walking. Yes it was a body walking, the two feet moving and the arms at the sides and head straight forward, walking, conscious of the car behind it, and feet slapping at the stone where the road met the dirt.
There was the tension between the body and the car, as the car flashed past, 4 feet away, like a massive bullet through the night: a miss.
The headlights shot upon him, like pulsars in the night; and instantly she could see him—the pants brown and the features of his face, and his long hair as he pushed his eyes away from the lights—as if burned by them.
“Hi there,” she spoke out.
His walking stopped and he looked up and into the ditch with his face.
And then he spoke out, “Hi, how are you?” He was stopped, and he stepped into the ditch, almost blindly, a few more steps, and sat beside her, and laid back against the bank. She did not know who he was.
They sat in silence a while.
“It's all pretty silly. All the cars and the lights and the roads and the buildings. And the clothes. And the fences, the houses we live in.” His voice was soft; brown like the night, and he looked straight forward as he spoke, not a bit to the right, not a bit to the left to her.
“It's strange that we do it.”
She was suddenly more mellow and silent than she'd been a moment before. Who was this she wondered. And yet there was nothing strange to the night, which was made of strange things.
Might as well
Considering the world we have made for ourselves, I might as well be from Mars.
Botan
I don't know why I react against so many things. I don't like to be so reactionary about things. It's just that so many of these things rub me the wrong way, or violate something sacred inside of me, or turn me off. They do something to me I don't like. And so I am the revolutionary, or the reactionary, condemning half of everything modern.
The truth is I am not a human. And I never was. I am Xlessika Naocp Xwarsi of Mars 3 (the third moon on Mars) planted on earth as sac-human in accordance with the latter Sonarite Phase of the Third Martian Recolonization Directive of the year LD10073 Botan. That I was born naked of a mother in a hospital in Tallahassee Florida was only a formality and cover. And I only violate the sacred trust in revealing this because I know, deep in my Martian heart I know, that no one will for a milli-moment believe me. So be it, because I do not care. I have gotten this earth into me, into my blood and sinews and fingernails: so that it might as well be a part of me and, Mars 3 aside, I might as well be a part of it.
But understand: by earth I mean the bio-planet, so much like Mars; not the mean little man-world created by men.
Music Pills
Ours is a society that couldn't live without music. We love radios, loud bands, albums, records, everything. Our movies have to always have a sound track of music.
(This has resulted in many ruined films, places where silence would have been golden. It happened I saw the movie Jesus Christ Superstar through the opening scenes once when the sound track wasn't on—then a few minutes after when it was. That it was better silent is without question—a more complete experience.)
Our t.v. shows must have music—even the Olympics, as all sports nowadays—is damned with music. The thing is, music is fed into us to create our moods and emotions, rather than us making music—singing—because of them. The whole process is become reversed. Again and again I get fed music which destroys and disharmonizes my mood, and I don't like it.
We have become a people that uses music as therapy for our strains and troubles. We seem to have such a psychological need for it: as if it keeps us sane. It makes our emotions for us, as if we were no longer capable of making them ourselves. As if songs were little pills to bring us up or take us down.
My own nothingness
It takes a strong man to be weak. It takes a strong man to stand weakly and unwaveringly for what is known by his fellows to be wrong. It takes a strong man to be weak and stand for what is immature, meek, shy, and old. It takes a strong man—if he has no hand of God to lean on, no cosmic religion, no absolute science or knowledge. If he knows he will not be proved right in the end, will not be enshrined for his stand, nor his philosophy enshrined.
It takes a strong man to make a stand for weak thinking that lies on a small weak path to be overgrown and forgotten, lost in time. To take a stand for which he will receive no meaning. To know that obscurity and eternal absence is all that awaits. That there will be no eternal life and no eternal fame. To be lost among men and among men to come.
For strong-minded men it may be easy—they goad it over the world like a king, forcing it to verify them, at least in their own minds to verify them. But to be weak is to know that you will never be verified, your beliefs never borne out, never legitimized. You have no meaning among men, no meaning among men to come.
It takes a strong man. Yet it is always the weak men like me who believe in the weak things. It is always flowers that believe in flowers.
A strange mind I have, that it sees its own nothingness. It doesn't quite know what to make of it.
the world going by
How strange it is for me, being alive today. Everything is half nightmare. Why do I think so much and am so afraid without it? I do not dare give up my thinking.
Why am I in college? My salvation must be in being literate. Or it must be I've assumed that. And so I'm as crazy as the rest. Or as blind.
The sun set tonight out the window, and the sky from light to dark through dark blues. Now it is black. And tomorrow in the morning the sun will rise. Again out the window. And tomorrow night it will set again out the window. The world is going by out the window.
The world is going by out the window. This is our basic knowledge. It is ignoring us, passing us by. And where are we? We are 'students'; we are in college. In some classrooms we do not even have windows for the sun to rise and set through. We have doors, that you go through, instead. Classrooms without windows, doors gone through and to be gone through, are what education is all about. At least you would gather as much from a visit.
More and more I think I must be an animal, and not a human. I do not think like a human, I hardly feel like one. I am hard pressed to keep up the front and the act. I want so much to be a human, for these others to like me and love me. Human is what they are, or say they are.
But for moments I'm beginning to wonder now—could it be a few of them, too, struggle to keep up the front? Could a few of them, too, not be human?
Often I would be persuaded it's so: but only while they are shy and quiet, or their minds appear shaken or shy. Only then, when they are supposed to be students and they fail for a moment. But in the next moment, when they are no longer supposed to be students, in the next moment, when the bell has rung and class is gone, when they are supposed to be 'young adults', 'people', whatever; suddenly I become unpersuaded: they make such unfailing 'young adults' and 'people'.
So that I cannot continue to doubt but they are humans, and I am not. And their failure as 'student' was only illusory, or perhaps 'student' is not quite, and not totally, 'human'. But most likely the former: I was deceived by my own imagination, and not by the magician's sleigh of hand. It is I am the magician, in pretending to be human.
Yet I can't help wondering, and hoping. What if they too are the deceivers and I am the deceived? If we are all magicians? And all of us our own audience?
What then, my friends?
theNakedAtheist 