"Luchador Mascara"
"Peering into the Heart of the Matter"
"Watcher at the Threshold"
Lately this world has seemed so flimsy and crumble-prone. Polarization and sectarian chest thumping seem to be the order of the day. Maybe it's the gathering energies leading to some 2012, Mayan-Epoch shift. Maybe it's the End-Times. I won't lay a claim to any specific diagnosis but a glance in almost any direction (political, economic, environmental, social) puts me in the mind of the William Butler Yeats poem...
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
I guess what I'm feeling lately is this same overriding sense of widespread entropy. It seems as though the vital winds and energies that churn up new ideas and melt others down have been depleted. We're left like isolated primates adrift on ice floes, gnashing our teeth at an empty and unfeeling sky. In the face of this I haven't given up. I try to meet people in the middle when I can. To listen more than rant and I'll assume I'm not the only one. Still, the loosened threads of this world are sticking out everywhere and the merest tug seems to make the whole fabric fall apart.
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