The Rhetorist

At times like these, a combination of providence and attentiveness contributes to life experience.

None of us knows what will be encountered through the course of the day. Outside there is light. Inside, light needs to be welcomed. Blinds…. why are they called that? An expected inquiry will be required through history to an ancient culture perhaps, to Venice.

And this, another day than the day being presented here, I do not feel philosophical. Mine is a retrospective state of mind: experience is past brought to today for the future. Or is this future anterior? It is what it is. It is.

I have seen this building many times over the past few months, but to photograph it as you see it here I must step into the street, a very busy street. That means a small risk for me, an inconvenience for any oncoming traffic. What are the benefits? Well, shared experience through photographs will be one. Satisfaction for finally fulfilling the conception I may have envisioned over the past few months. I took three shots of this building and chose to share this one. I don’t often bracket anymore and without a digital SLR it is not convenient.

This building is in the first town in the first state: Lewes, Delaware. I can be here in a few minutes and come here. It is [creepily] historical as I find many colonial haunts to be at times, depending. Lewes reminds me mildly of a trippy place I found outside Philadelphia where there was evidence of a historical phenomenon that questioned one’s perspective on whether things were as they seemed.

Like I said, it is a creepy story. I was outside Philadelphia one night back in the early 80s and stumbled onto a bar/restaurant where the facility was near an old mental asylum. The bar itself had people working there who were peculiar, e.g., too tall for the short ceiling, etc. The urinals in the men’s room were strange as well, as the drains were not star-shaped with five points, but with six…. And finally, the posts outside along the walkway had woodworker punch marks in them that were not unlike inverted crosses. Just a carpenter’s design, no…?
The mind may apply logic and understanding to acquire wisdom, but the head is riddled with too much opportunity for miscommunication. Still, we seek to acquire answers. Some answers take a long time to come, even years. “There is safety in a multitude of counselors.”

We tend to see what we want to see, just like we tend to watch TV channels we want to watch, the ones that support our personal ideological perspectives. I often return to the film The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum not just because it is one of the best films ever made, but because it has a most-intriguing conclusion. At the risk of providing a spoiler in an attempt to share its value, I will only go so far as to say that it supports any conclusion drawn here that we see what we want to see. And even when the error of our vision and its derivitives is pointed out to us in plain view, we will habitually or consciously or however it may be choose to cling to our erroneous thinking. Is it pride or our failure to want to critically think through an issue, a laze or laziness…?

Perhaps it is most indicative of a heart condition. I was driving this week in traffic when a verse from Jeremiah came at me from memory: “The heart is deceitfully wicked above all things. Who can know it?”

Well, nobody in his or her right mind wants to believe such a statement, as it subscripts a state of depravity. Yet, there it is. What could it mean? Just more spiritual mystery from a man we may or may not believe even existed in a book we may or may not believe holds truth or functions as a blueprint for successful living…?

The duality of our personal existence, for all of us, need not be predicated on the babbling of an old prophet if we don’t want to see things that way. Yet Goethe was not known for being spiritually in tune with our prophet and he came through life with the determination that “There is no crime of which I do not deem myself capable.”

Are these two sides to the same coin? Are our hearts, not physically, of course, deceiving us when we think we are somehow different than the rest of humanity, especially the most evil: warmongers, torturers, murderers, liars, hypocrites, and the like…? Have we learned to differentiate between doing and being? Between action and potential? Is any of us safe from the self or do we deceive ourselves if we do not at least acknowledge our capability as Goethe?

A lot of questions being posed here and I am leaving it up to the reader to answer best. This isn’t a planned post, it is stream of consciousness moving along with the first statement I made in it.

We want to believe the illusion. The house above is more interesting in its shared hyper reality than the one some family not ours lives in. As fellow creators of the world we inhabit, this is always better than that. There seems to be no constant. Illusion portends hope.

Yet this is Spring and Easter weekend beckons. An option for second birth through a man who claimed to be God or else was a lunatic. Came back from the dead. Crazy….

Or is it? Is there any possible respite from the culpability for capability for the human who sees inside? Have we no veritable hope?

The world and its answers may lie before us, outside, as evidenced through suggestion in the reality of nature: at times, dangerous, but most often unpretentious, beautiful, welcoming, surrounding us…. real. But to bring the real inside.

Back from the dead… It’s not ‘can I believe it’ but will I? I can choose to believe anything. And what if I do…? There’s only one way to know for sure: I must sidestep the head for the heart, the illusion for the real, just this once.