Illusions take us down a winding road, maybe a dead end, or they illuminate our deepest thought and emotion, human intentions. They can also take us to places that find common ground, common desires and experience. Sometimes they’re an archetypal trip suffused with memory, desire, and fable. A eulogy for what never was meant to be, a lost time, or dreams we covet that are lights in darkness.
Then there is the theater of the marketplace whose spectacle is well-lit by its practitioners who peddle their wares in the society of the spectacle. Human bodies festooned with the costumes created for the masses, The elite and the wannabees, the directed and the survivalists. The soft parade takes us wherever we want until it doesn’t.
It’s easy to be a cynic in today’s marketplace. Rationalizations frame our escapes, inability to encompass those who, or for that which we find ourselves unequipped. But don’t feel guilty about it. The human algorithm is infinitely pegged to rearrange its reality to conform to our visions, challenges, and desires. We run the show; we’re raising the curtain. And what a spectacle. But are we calling the shots?
“Influencers” are now everywhere peddling their self-proclaimed credentials. We want to be out there in the marketplace proffering self -help programs, analytical analyses, political prophecies, health tips, gimmickry, romantic advice, political chicanery, ad nauseum. Trends now are the currency of the cognoscenti. Everyone has an immediate voice on online platforms. We don’t have to analyze we just have to ingest.
We love the death-defying, pulling things out of thin air, fooling our eyes and ears, amazing our senses, shocking ourselves with the unimaginable, the rabbit out of the hat. Could it be we create conflicts just to prove our ability to resolve them? That feels perverse. The idea can’t be to run away from them. Is there a God that puts them in our paths so we can comprehend our true place, always faced with the same basic challenges, the bondage of human nature itself setting up the same lessons to be learned with each generation over eons of time, the goalposts of growth?
Human societies have created pathways through imagination, often brute experience at the end of which, should there in fact be any, the arrival point: A consciousness that frees us from the confusion of life’s repetitious enactments. We the enactors of this drama or comedy, subject ourselves to all ignominies and gruesome subjugations, the dizzying flights and disappointing slights, towering power and the humbling resignation.
We are faced with accepting a world which has everything we grow to love alongside the grotesque. How abhorrent the spectacle of the recent vigilante shootings in cold blood? The Trump administration that obliterates human compassion for the sake of manipulated material gain. All guardrails have been torn down. Yes, people are fighting for control, the guardrails, the bigger picture of what humanity owes itself; what it owes to a planet and universe that bears continual witness to our follies and our triumphs.
The farce of this tragedy has become an unconscionable force reducing the mind to either servitude, or collective action! Who needs presidential elections? Our tears are painful tears, our anguish grief knowing that we are not fooled but will be the fooled again if we do not gather the collective will to resist the impoverishment of authoritarianism.
If we are freedom fighters, we must rectify the moral wrongs committed in our names and replace repression with the cooperative powers of love and inclusion, listening and respect, admiration and reward. The thief who is out to reward himself by whatever means sacrifices true valor for opportunity. So far it’s taken a long time for the farmers to notice the hens disappearing, soldiers the compromised peace, and the effects on our surrounding world with tears of sorrow.
We choose to buckle under, or we assume the roles history has long provided; indulge in the prurient stew and illusions of those who feel no obligation to respect the great struggles that brought us to where we stand. Go and rob the till, pander your illusions, let your ego swim in unctuous flattery, the destitution of the forsaken. Just remember that it’s simply the illusions you’ve built, harbored, and allowed to rule.
Or we can all win the fight for inclusion, well-being, magnanimity of thought, sincerity of heart, recognition that we have one destiny — the power of love, the power of peacemaking, the respect for all of life itself, the magnificence of a world so immense and painted in beauty. It is our destiny to rise above our limitations, become whole again, sing loudly. We are fractured and divided only when we forget who and what we are. Deliverance of the sacred is inevitable when we channel the immense power we have for change.
Alan Harris, wife Jane, and son Paul live in Shelburne Falls and wish everyone health and community. We are so fortunate to be where people care. Reached at noblefeastcatering@gmail.com.