The hermetically-sealed illusion creates many terrors, as you might well imagine. The old illusion creates many errors and many terrors. It creates innumerable false terrors just as it creates innumerable false joys. We all know this, yet no one knows it! We prefer not to know – that’s the thing, of course. ‘I’d rather not know, if it’s all the same with you’ I say, playing for time. I’m always playing for time, and yet time’s the one thing I haven’t got. Time is the one thing there just isn’t any more of. It’s all run out…
It’s a love affair of sorts, I suppose you could say. It’s a love affair that’s been going on for just about as long as anyone can remember – the love affair that each one of us has with the hermetically-sealed illusion. We expect everything out of this illusion and we get nothing and so that’s quite sad, isn’t it? Yet who says that love affairs are always going to work out well? The love affair with the hermetically-sealed illusion never works out well, but it’s a kind of a love affair all the same.
Not all stories are happy stories, are they? Not all stories have happy endings. We love stories that do have an upbeat, morally uplifting ending – it’s gotten so that we think that’s how stories should be. But that’s only because we don’t like to face reality; it’s part of our inbuilt mechanism of denial, just as Disneyland is. We require our storytellers to take us to Disneyland. We require our storytellers to tell a story that ends in a positive note because at the back of it all we know that this is something that never happens! Not where our long drawn-out love affair with the hermetically-sealed illusion is concerned, anyway!
It’s a bit like trying to carry water in a wicker basket, expecting to get a happy conclusion from our problematic relationship with the HSI! We are all very hopeful however. We are not so easily put off. We on keep dipping the basket in the well but by the time we draw it up again there’s nothing in it. ‘I could have sworn there was water in that well,’ you say, perplexed and bothered by your failure to draw water successfully, ‘I’d better try again!’
It’s easy to make fun, isn’t it? It’s easy to have a laugh at someone else’s misfortune. ‘Ho ho ho,’ we chortle, grinning from ear to ear, ‘you made a right prat out of yourself there, didn’t you?’ It’s all too easy to take the piss out of people who keep on making the same old mistake, time and time again, just as Einstein said we shouldn’t, but we ought all the same try to find a little bit of sympathy for their plight. Their plight is our plight, after all…
It’s all too easy to be mean and heartless to people, and I know that as well as anyone. It happens quite naturally, and one never thinks of anything of it. It’s not something that we ever tend to dwell on, is it? It’s easy to judge and condemn, I know that as well as the next man. It’s easy to be a total utter bastard – you don’t have to tell me about that! No sir you don’t. I’ve written the book on being a total and utter bastard. It actually turned out to be a bestseller, now that I come to think of it! A runaway success – you might say. Number One on the international bestseller list.
So the point is I guess that we shower all this love on the HSI and then we just don’t ever get anything back, and that’s kind of sad. It’s an old old story. Do we even get the odd smile back? Anything at all? It’s a sulky old bastard, the HSI, and yet we can’t do enough for it! You can never do enough for the HSI, can you? One day it will be happy and then it’ll treat us right, we think. Sometimes we jolly it along: ‘Come on you old illusion,’ we say, ‘cheer up a little bit you miserable old bastard and stop being such a wet rag’.
Many are the things that the HSI lives in terror of and many are the things it craves. So it has a kind of a life I guess! A kind of a fearful life, a kind of a greedy life. Fearful and greedy, fearful and greedy, fearful and greedy. A leopard can’t change its spots, after all, any more than an old dog can drink new wine. That just can’t happen you see, but the point is that we’ll never face up to it.
The HSI lives in a world of its own and yet it has an opinion on everything. It has a finger in every pie and that’s a lot of pies! The HSI dreams of a golden future and yet it always suspects the worst. It’s a bit of a control freak and yet it doesn’t have a clue as to what it’s doing. It always wants to get its own way but it doesn’t know what it wants. It loves to tell jokes but it’s got no sense of humour. It has endless fantasies of being famous yet at the same time it is secretive as hell. It engages in charitable works but it cares not a jot for anyone. It believes in salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, yet at the same time it doesn’t really exist. ‘Will you miss me when I’m gone?’ the hermetically-sealed illusion calls out slyly, catching my eye just as I turn to walk away. I can’t answer it however, I’m too choked up to speak…
