Do not watch the video above if you are squeamish. It's an unpleasant thing to see.
I watched this video yesterday. I saw that somebody had posted it on Facebook. That ubiquitous evil that we all know of and collectively curse towards.
Just imagine what this video would have done to poor old Nietzsche....
Of course last night I dreamt of horses. A beautiful tan one was in my dreams early. It was going swimming in a lake of open and clear waters, it seemed arrestingly pleased. Later, as either part of the same dream or some fragment from somewhere else, disconnected though tethered to the other dream, or perhaps somehow harnessed... the horse was dying, it was drowning, it was desperate. It was sunk in an unforgivable part of the lake now, only its pleading head emerging, covered in lake weeds and algae, covered in death. By those unknown, inner, mental means, the water was now as much swamp as it had been lake. It was forbidding, beyond my ability to help, or enter.
The distraught animal surfaced from the mire of the mind, a large and desperate brown eye searching the shore, pleading for help. There I was on the shore, useless, eager to be in another dream, unable to help, unable to leave. The lake was no longer pleasant, of course, or possible to enter. Now the shore cut steeply down into this dark, swampy water that would clearly be the ending place for this dream beast. The incredible creature was sinking and tired and pleading and dying. It was the end of where my mind could follow and still let me sleep. In dreams even helplessness reaches a point of panic at which my sleeping mind will not force me to endure. If only this waking life were the same.
I woke up and went to the bathroom, trying to shake the awful memory of it, wondering why my dreams were so disturbing and off-centered. Then I remembered the video from above, from yesterday. It all made sense but that sense alone could not relieve the feeling of desperation and sadness, the helplessness of it all, the anger. I lied awake wishing the memory of it all to go away. I eventually rose and sat on the edge of the bed, wondering at the feeling of loss.
A few days ago a good friend called to tell me of her father's death. I was, as I am at all times as those, speechless though still talking. Unable to say anything, to change anything, but still trying. Meritless fragments emerge as if on cue, hoping to place words where feelings once were, knowing how poor and awkward the attempted substitution is, but hoping that somehow I will say the right thing, make a small difference, decrease the empty and senseless suffering by a bit, a sliver, anything, anything at all.
Life.
It is all a useless parade of endlessly absurd pain, each of us only hoping to ride the carousel just once more, to forget the misery in the distraction of the spinning lights, to laugh aloud at each blurred rotation, the carnivalesque music cheering us on with its demented crescendos and sea-sick descents, the feeling of an ever-expectant return to joy, all of the the shrieks and laughter eventually falling away to distant silence. Not even in dreams does life return with its complete fullness. For all of its painful confusion it's still the carnival though, and almost everybody is still there.
.
