Eight Days

VIII

“He who can no longer pause to wonder
and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead;
his eyes are closed.”

—Albert Einstein



Eight days. I woke after a fairly long sleep to find that yesterday’s fall had horrendously jarred loose every cell in my body. I gave up early and took refuge in meds, flat cola, and a bit of tobacco. My body may feel like a bag of hammered shit, but my attitude is actually pretty good. Thanks mostly to friends and family who called, emailed or dropped by.
Jenna and her baby grrl Sofie visited. Jenna is my sister, though we don’t share blood.
And Sofie could make the devil himself smile. For a little while her squirmy joy and bright laughter drove off the thunderclouds.
Mom came over and we had a good heart to heart talk.
Then Jackie brought me a present and the happy news that she can help watch the crib and help my angel Kirsten watch Wingnut…If I think about leaving him I get all mushy. So, more on that later.

There is precious little time left until I leave, holy crap.
The research has ended, I know as much of the Untethering as I can with out actually watching it happen to someone else, or going to medical school. Now comes the real work.
Hope. Faith. Words that need no sentences to hold them up...the real symbols that dominate this journal.

Lord Byron wrote, “…But what is Hope? Nothing but the paint on the face of Existence; the least touch of truth rubs it off, and then we see what a hollow-cheeked harlot we have got hold of.”
Despite the fact that I have many times agreed with that brilliant, arrogant, monolith of a bad-ass wordsmith; this time however I must refute him: [And don’t even let me get started on the miasma of sexist crap Byron spouted there…]

If you are bold enough to force Hope and Truth together, as you might two polarized magnets, you find yourself face to face with every brick you have ever laid in the wall we all build between the miraculous and ourselves. For the inexplicable, the wondrous reality of life is lying right before us, indeed, wonder is living within us.
And what is hope but a yearning for just such miracles, in an Existence that daily feels hostile and given to spite?
Though the betrayed and the jaded will scoff, I say that hope does not always spoil or wither at the touch of truth, just as often it glows like a bride.
It is only our refusal to be vulnerable to the crushing of our hope that stops us from seeing that glow. Such cynicism as to make one call hope a harlot is the bane of modern life. I know of no one who has entirely escaped it. Cynicism, an infectious fatigue of the spirit, is infused into our culture; it is woven into our attitudes and painted onto the masks we wear to hide our true faces. Flaunted in the media and incited by our celebrities, this form of cynicism seems, paradoxically, to be a sickness born of privilege and affluence. Even such relative wealth as the poor in America toil for, which is great when viewed against the uncounted truly and abjectly poor living in countries all over the world. So too in this country there are people living in a wasteland, dying but for the mercy they have to beg for. This atrocity occurs on the same city block where the swells do a little shopping and stop for a latte. Lord Byron would love it here.

With my own eyes I once saw an emaciated man eating from a dumpster that was on the same road as…fucking within sight of…the Whitehouse. Whether we acknowledge it or not, this happens every day in every community.
What, you ask, does this rant have to do with hope?
Have the meds worn off and pissed you off into taking it out on us by shoving guilt into our faces?
No. There is a thread here, frayed, tangled even, but stay with me.
Cynicism, sibling of greed, is the reason why one human dies of hunger every four seconds.
It is the souce of our disconnection with the wondrous.
Cynicism is the midnight strangler of hope.

It is also the tool of the fear-goblin cackling that in eight days nothing will have gotten better in my brain.
To Byron and the Goblin I say,
Hope is a deep well, faith is the water. And I am drinking deep.

—End Transmission—
Dawn McKenzie