The Spider Catches the Fly
Randomness: A poem/story/anecdote/prose-vomit piece
*Don’t ask. It just came out. I left it, typos and all. I’m fascinated by this. I don’t know where it came from. But it felt real.
~
I don’t know anything. Why would I?
Who am I, anyway? A man. A white man. A 42-year-old white man, an American, living in the bizarrely futuristic year of 2025? All these things and more, yes.
And what does my life matter? What does anyone’s life matter?
We wear these meatsuits and we live and we suffer and struggle and die. The generations rise and change and churn, over and over. Pointless wars are fought. Politics is fought over. Control is exerted. Identities are made sacred, then dissolved. One generation mocks and rebels against the one that came before. Drugs are consumed, technologies revealed, mankind repeats itself endlessly; antisemitism being the oldest, most primal form of this basic truth.
Self-hate, other-hate, identity obsession, racial or ethnic or both. History revised by both and all sides; he who controls the narrative of the past controls all, correct?
People live, sweat, suffer, work and die. Their kids are the natural fruit borne of the family trees of their long, foolish existence. Symbols teach us to see ourselves; myths show us who we are on a deeper level, the deepest perhaps. We believe in gods or Gods or religion or our own insufferable vanity, our precious, fragile egos, our determination to be seen and heard.
Life is a game and yet also deadly serious. Life is manic and palatable only by chasing something while you’re alive, meaning, love, hatred, fear, invention, identity, Art, creation, failure, something.
And between all of this our machine evolved bodies eat and piss and shit and fuck and hurt and grow strong and weaken and finally dissolve into death; nothingness and The Void. Pre-birth is also post-death; one and the same. A brief crack of light between two abysses, says Nabokov. Greek myth teaches us how to live. We explain ourselves to ourselves constantly, through writing and painting and anger and sex and perversion and taboo and chasing whatever it is that makes us sing in this brief crack of light called life.
Dawn rises, the day moves quickly, we work and think and becomes obsessed with ourselves and our silly little thoughts and ideas. We try to become known, seen online, we try to get attention, seek forgiveness, understand ourselves on the deepest level, survive the day to day bullshit that is existence.
We feel a plethora of emotions: Shame, anger, fear, guilt, love, joy, sadness, sorrow, acceptance.
We see ourselves in inaccurate, distorted ways, cracked small mirrors showing us back to ourselves in tempting or terrible but tumultuous, vaguely sinister ways. We fight and fuck and fondle. We forget who we are, what we are, why we are. (But: What are we?)
We chain ourselves to masochistic desires. We flood our bodies with dopamine to feel in charge. We numb ourselves with drugs and alcohol and make pretty excuses for what that’s perfectly okay. We beat ourselves up on the daily because it’s easy: Our inner lives full to the brim of ragged thoughts, constant thoughts, dialogues, monologues, who conversations with people who don’t exist, or people who do that you’ll never talk to or have this fictitious conversation with.
We break our own hearts by not doing what we know to be our true calling. We rely on our egos when we should be ripping the thin tissue of terror within apart and looking at our genuine, authentic selves, which is no self at all but a sacred, somber soul.
We use tribalism and politics to attempt to belong to something bigger than ourselves but in the end we only alienate ourselves from our deeper selves, the Non Self that is You. Humans are a mass collective, for sure, but also deeply held individuals, each and every one of us. There is no Racial Experience which any human being fits neatly into, but all minds and lives and experiences are different. The only race is the human race is a cliché but a true one. (How could it not be?)
The pearls at the bottom of the seafloor that is your mind are polished and perfect and plain to see. Dive down, pick them up, consume them, make them a part of your desire and holiness. Remember though: The dive itself often takes a whole lifetime. Deep, deep below the surface of things, where language doesn’t even live. Where only inner knowing is certain.
We have childhoods: Battles with the gods (parents) and with peers and with social pressure, the shallow ego of simple conformism. If you think differently you will he hated, mocked, disregarded. You are the artists, the weirdos, the freaks, the non-somnambulant, the ones who tear yourselves apart in order onto to rearrange yourselves indefinitely, through Art and sacrifice and existential movement and change and growth. So imperfect we all are, yet the imperfections, the blemishes are what give us the most grace.
The most sincere thing we can do is accept our own death. It’s loveliness. It’s inevitability. It’s graceful feline approach from so far away, little dark spots appearing in our line of vision here and there over time. And then one day that spot becomes a boulder, becomes a forest, becomes the world and swallows us up. This is not to be feared but enjoyed and respected. Black neverland; the extinguishing of consciousness. The cessation of sensuality. The disregard of feeling, tasting, touching, hearing, seeing and thinking.
This sounds less like death and more bliss, does it not? To no longer face this human form. To no longer be chained to the rock as Prometheus, no longer endlessly pushing the stone uphill, as Sisyphus. To understand Camu’s words when he says that we’re all dying, right now, forever, all the time. To be human is to face a death sentence. But along the road: Gorgeous, sensuous life. Breathing and consuming and loving and trying, working and doing and being and thinking and acting and forgetting and battling and running towards…what? In Buddhism they say: Don’t just do something, sit there. This is beyond wise because: Where, really, are you going? Death captures us all. You can move around the globe endlessly but eventually the spider catches the fly.
So let go. I say this to you and as a reminder to myself. Always, always, always let things be as they are. There is no god in a Christian sense. No Jesus who walked on water and was born again. That is only our collective western frantic egos creating myth, symbolism, meaning. Suffering happens. That’s not god. It’s not good or bad. It’s not “meant to be.” Everything doesn’t “happen for a reason.” All phenomena is random, inherently meaningless, corrupt, pointless, and therefore beautiful because it’s a miracle we’re all here. Sit with that. Own that. Accept that. Allow the god that is no god enter your body, heart, mind and soul.
Sit with this crazy, cracked reality that is no reality at all but only the wild dream of civilization.