THE FOOL

Let me wander aimlessly. Let me set my feet on the edge of every cliff. I want to be free. I want to explore. To see the world. To let my feet and mind wander. To go always to the new. So let my soul be filled with color and with music. Let it dance in imagination and sensation. Let it be filled with joy.

Reality is yet to be determined. The future is yet to be born.

There is only now.

In my sleep I dreamed of an endless road. And awoke to find that I was still walking. That I’m still dreaming. That the world is an endless dream. It giggles and calls to me. “Come and play with me” it says in the voice of a mischievous child. I’ll never know where it leads. I don’t want to know. I only want to follow. For I am an eternal pilgrim.

In this infinite universe every possibility is realized somewhere.

Somewhere along the road of stardust.

Once I wandered as an old man, weary with wisdom, into a pool filled with oblivion. Its waters were deep and white. Shining like an unblemished moon. Shedding my clothes I waded into its depths. Walking until the bubbles stopped. Drowning in ecstasy. I washed up once more on the shores of the infinite. A young man filled with hope and forgetfulness. Innocence and ignorance. The fool has been born before, since the first cell popped from the ooze. The fool will be born again, until the death of the last dwarf star.

The fool has forgotten in his heart that there is a sharp edge to the real.

But this is divine forgetfulness.

The fool is drunk with the ecstasy of wanderlust. He walks naked in the snow and in the desert heat. He drinks the water of sewers and rain puddles. He sleeps under the stars. And he feels their gaze pierce his soul. He is found nowhere twice. But wherever he is he is in its deepest secret part. Always excited. Always overwhelmed with the wonder of every detail. He is a happy nomad. Going to his death happy. Living beyond the shadow of death. Perhaps immortal. Perhaps ignorant. But certainly free.

I wonder. Is freedom a kind of irresponsibility? Why should we be chained to the future. Is the future not a fiction? It’s a trap set by emotionally dead social engineers. By blind watchmakers. An insurance agent laughing in the backrooms of a sleazy sex lounge. A banker camping out every night in the cash vaults smoking powdered baby teeth. Fear was invented to sell car insurance. Money was invented to sell low risk mutual fund management services. Time was invented to sell year old dried up wheat. And I still can’t eat it without milk.

Damn the future! I don’t care! I don’t want to care! Let my conscience stop. Its throbbing is unbearable. This anxiety is unbearable. Let me forget and be in the moment. This long trek through work and life is just a joke. It should be a joke. But I feel the bitter weight of its reality.

I pass a homeless man on the street. His eyes, weary and hollow. He’s shivering. I can’t look him in the eye. But I can’t look away. A ruin of an old man before the age of thirty. And from the pit of my heart something terrible wells up. A question. How easily could that be me? The difference between us balances on the edge of a knife. And I feel sick.

How many lives have settled into long unhappiness? Quiet misery? For how many of us is the skull a prison for secret torture? The lingering remnants of a broken life? Shattered irreparably? A life which has become nothing but the consequences of the past? The mistakes of the past? Or the random pitiful cruelty of fate? The long, so very long, lingering of what was never meant to be? Something that needs to be coped with? It needs an army of the most sophisticated mind games just to be made bearable. A life built on the need to hide from itself. Hide from the whole core of what it is: something broken.

“Well I guess you’re fucked,” says fate, objective and cold.

The pains of age are the consequences of the foolishness of youth. This sounds so much like wisdom. So much like truth. The wisdom of cynicism. What I want to believe least of all must be true. Age is the agonized realization of what’s real. A reality such that realism is despair. Realism as the cold strength of determined machinery. Still functioning despite the reality of its long fate. Even despite knowing it all too well.

Is the best we can hope for being numb to pain?

Being numb to life?

It takes a lot of strength to be foolish and wise. To persist in foolishness even when you know all too well what you’re doing is wrong. This is the most difficult path of all. Uniting opposites as though they were always meant to be one. The marriage of opposites: opposition consumed in consummation. They ought to make love. To fornicate. Love is the child of wisdom and foolishness: their original unity. Love for the world and for every being, animate and inanimate, living and dead, born and unborn. Past and future.

Can we treat death without the deadly seriousness of the grave?

The fork in the road that hides monsters is worth taking also.

Every fork. And every road.

This is the fool at the height of his strength.

Life and death are a game even when death is terrible and real. The future is a game even when what’s past can never be undone. Life is a game even when it’s absolutely real.

And what a game it is.

Let us be in everything that we do as though it’s the entirety of everything we are. Even when it’s not. Because of course, nothing ever is. Let the entirety of our being dwell in the moment even as every moment explodes beyond itself. Let every “now” hold a whole life, even if it’s only a single moment of that life.

Every moment should be filled with the infinite depth of a whole life story. Shot through with meaning and direction. Suggesting its place in a greater whole. Offering new avenues for developing that endless project that is a single life. And yet each moment should be free. Complete and sufficient in itself. Isn’t every moment enough? Able to containing the whole of our being. Capable of justifying all of existence merely by the fact that it’s happening? The fact that we can live it? That it shines with its being alive?

Yes, every moment is inescapably connected to every other. The now is pregnant with the future and shaped by the future. No moment exists without its future and its consequences. But is every moment not at the same time a universe within itself. Infinitely deep within its own finitude. Both a universe and an atom within that universe. A tiny part of its own wholeness.

All time is entirely present in its smallest moment.

When the fool embraces the smallest thing he also embrace the whole of the world. And when the fool embrace the whole of life he cannot help but embrace all of the tiniest details of every moment he’s lucky enough to live.

One and many. The world and every world. Wholeness and separation. It is the fool who sees that the two are one. Though held together by nothing but a shimmer. Like the shimmering water of a mirage on the desert floor. This nothing, the connection between everything that’s unconnected, is the secret joy of the fool alone. This is madness. This is his joy.

But in the end this is what is most real of all.

All is One and One is All.

And of course this all sounds like nonsense.

It too is only a game.

This is the fools deepest secret.

- Matthew Turnbull