Meditation On a Broken Philosophy: Duck, the Empiricists Have Guns!

[Joseph Armstead]

An Evolutionary Anxiety
by Joseph Armstead


“Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.”
-- George Santayana (1863 - 1952)

"Dubito ergo cogito; cogito ergo sum" ["I doubt, therefore I think; I think, therefore I am"] -- Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650)

Somewhere in Infinity, the plate of Reality
has slipped from numb fingers, falling
to the proverbial floor, shattering...

(...proverbial as descended from "proverbium"?  
"resembling or expressed of a proverb" --
ants marching through the dilated pupil
of a blind angel knelt in bitter prayer,
it's simply chewed wormwood in the mouth of Fate...)

God is hiding. The dam of turbulent
emotion behind my eyes bursts.

I should cry, but tears are meaningless...

This should be about something.
Something insightful.
Something noble and hopeful.
There is only the rushing wind of Unreason
howling
across the restless ocean of Chaos
as its waves crash upon the worn,
fragile shore of an ancient beach
litered with the remains
of old, dead bonfires.

(...symbolism: "bonfire", the Celtic festival of Samhain,
a contraction from the words "bone fire", intended to ward off
malevolent spirits -- scorpions skittering
across the coldly beautiful flesh of a fallen seraph,
it's music to the stone ears of a tone deaf Fate...)

Behind the pitted concrete of the beach wall,
a circuit closes, electrons race,
the sleeping Machine sparks, pistons pump,
fuel races up the serpentine
labyrinth
of hollow tubing under steel plates
as gears begin to churn and levers flex,
and rocker arms swing, sliding twisted cable
across pulleys mounted on smooth bearings --

turbines whine

The tattered Flag of Anguish
flaps in the oceanic breeze,
decorated with the stripes
of Repentence and the gaudy
badge of Penitence
while the big wheels start to turn,
rolling the mighty mechanism
across sand and grit.

The Different, the Beautiful, and the Mythic
are ground beneath monstrous tire treads.

God is hiding.  A growing wellspring
of insubordinate passion fuels an urge to weep.

I should cry, but tears are meaningless...

The scream from the Machine's revving turbines
fills the Revival Tent of Creation, deafening,
and, as I stumble, a sharp sliver
from Reality's broken plate
cuts deep into my foot.


 Image courtesy of Dreamstime Photographic Stock: "Human Brain" by Winterling, dreamstime_747418.jpg