Hitching A Ride To The Promised Land

I was hanging on to the goodness, hanging onto it for all I was worth. Hang on to the goodness, hang onto the goodness – I told myself. Hang onto the goodness. My voice was a robotic drone, any human nuance having long since fled. Hang onto the goodness I droned, make sure that you don’t let it slip away unnoticed, which is what so easily happens. My hands were making little clutching movements all by themselves – futile little clutching movements. So very futile, so very futile. So very futile and also so very sad. All vestiges of my humanity have long since, you fled, you see. I am just a shuffling creature now – a commuter dressed in a filthy, stinking clown suit. I was inventing my own private mythology, a mythology that dealt with the darker side of life, the side of life that we don’t normally want to know about. This is the dark side of life that pertains to The Realm of Futile Clutching, that least glamorous of all possible fake realities. Firewalkers come walking down the street towards us, a welcome distraction from the misery that was playing itself out in my head. Cries of wonderment issue forth from the surging crowd – the fire walkers are always a great hit. The crowd roars its approval like the great beasts that it is and it pushes forward greedily. I look on unconcerned, protected by my private mythology: in this mythology I’m an Immortal, condemned to survive from century to century – abused and maligned, lacking in kudos, but immortal all the same. Lacking in kudos but destined never to die. Ordinary folk have no interest in me, beyond cursing me when they happen, as they occasionally do, to come across me. I stay out of their way for the most part however – I have no more desire to encounter them than they me. This is a darkly baroque mythology, as you have undoubtedly picked up by now, and it is not to everyone’s taste. We are racing towards a future that contains nothing but insincerity and bad taste and everyone concerned is very excited about it. It’s bad form not to be excited. The others will shun you. The future is the future after all, and we’re all going there. We’ve all jumped on the bandwagon and we’re all going to get what’s coming to us – there’s no way out of it, obviously enough. That’s all in my mythology anyway, it’s all part of the rich and resonant tapestry of my personal mythology. Some people will find that it resonates, some undoubtedly won’t find that. Most of us like to believe in personal freedom after all, we have a need for that particular illusion. The idea that we are sleepwalking to our doom whilst imagining that we’re hitching a lift to the promised land is far from being a welcome one, after all! No indeed. The change in perspective is simply too great for us – we think one thing is happening whilst really is the complete opposite and that’s something you just can’t tell people. The flexibility simply isn’t there you see and so we’re starting to look awfully strained, hopefully uptight. No, we say, that just can’t be. Your wrong there buddy, we say. You’ve got a problem if that’s the way you think. Small cracks are starting to appear, the visible signs of impending disaster. That’s my mythology anyway, and as I say I don’t think you’ll necessarily like it. That’s my mythology of the future, that we’re racing at a truly phenomenal velocity towards an event that has already happened and it’s not an event that will be to our liking. It’s the ultimate cataclysm. We are cheering loudly and laughing like fools and waving out of the windows of the bus because we all believe that we’re going to that special good place that we have been told about, whilst all the while we’re careering crazily at breakneck speed towards a disaster that’s already happened, a disaster that could never not have happened, a disaster that was always going to happen right from the word ‘GO’. We can’t appreciate the irony and as we travel a cloudy sheen of very fine cracks starts to appear on our immaculate alabaster faces, an ominous harbinger of the unthinkable event which is soon to come…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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