When first we turned on the TV set we found
the show already in progress, and so it had been
for a long, long time. But we grew captivated anyway
by the bright, moving lights and the catchy sounds,
laugh tracks, applause, and soaring, emotional music.
We merged effortlessly with the story in our own way,
not needing to know the facts of whatever had transpired
before. We merged effortlessly with the story, fluidly,
dissolving the immature buds of our consciousness
in these collective hierarchical levels of expectation,
of this-is-how-we-do-it, of this-is-how-life-is. In this manner
the years went by and the programming expanded
outside the living room to fill in every corner of our lives
in the world out of doors, and it was all fine; oftentimes
in fact it was too beautiful. One thing leads to another,
chaining, chaining onto the past, onto the framework of
unprovable postulates.
But buds must eventually bloom, and doubt intrudes
during the commercial breaks. The spell is temporarily broken,
and we wondered: What is this hypnotism, this irrational
story couched in the rhetoric of logic to make it so hard to
disavow? Doubts, yes, and we began to see certain
fine and elegant fracture lines interpenetrating through our
one-time perfectly unified view of the world. Something
was wrong, some things. Sometimes the storylines just
didn't add up. Sometimes the awakening me-inside
cooked up bubbling ideas that were so strange and incompatible
with the network programming, even while we began to notice
our erstwhile friends and companions remained unshakably,
incomprehensibly engrossed. And sometimes we even
began to wonder: Just because, by accident, this is the history,
must the future remain determined? The present?
What is absurd, and what is rational?
What is the distinction?
Is there a distinction?
Ah, I am
sick with these questions. I am
weary of it all.
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