THE GREAT WALL, pt 4 - WORKADAY WORLD
Work, food, sex, money, shit, piss, laughter, tears. These are the tools, trappings, and trifles of the workaday world. Perhaps the answer to my Wall riddle exists without as opposed to within?
Even though my inner world is chaotic, I can impose some order upon it, feeble minded as I am. Whereas the chaos of the external world is beyond my control. Hell, it doesn’t even ask my opinion. I interface with it or hide from it, but it keeps on chugging along with or without me. Even still, mightn’t this external world of smells and textures, conversations and silences, orgasms and shits hold some key to my quandary?
Let’s assume so, for the sake of argument. Now the question is – where to look? The world is vast and full of information. Full of people and other solid objects, every one of them full of instincts and plans. In terms of physics, it’s a whirlwind of forces slamming into one another, setting off chain reactions, forming new realities moment to moment.
I, too, am subject to these forces, and try as I may, my individual plans and notions are challeneged continuously by these forces. In many ways, the external world is also a Wall, separating me from the realization of my idyll by it’s persistent lack of concern for my personal opinions and proclivities.
This is basic stuff, elementary snot-nose shit. Even so, it’s the bane of adult existence. How to fit my selfish, idiosyncratic self into this complex system that doesn’t need me? And how do I do this without giving up too much of what makes me myself (assuming there is such a thing as a true self - i’ll get back to that)?
One option is to protect oneself with a hard emotional shell. Inside the protection of the shell you create a private world of imagination and fancy, and the shell works as sort of a filter so the information coming from outside is reconfigured to fit into this private world of rarefied languages and image systems. But that’s just building a different kind of Wall – an external Wall that keeps the bad stuff out. But whether a Wall is keeping you IN or keeping others OUT, it’s still a Wall. And moving THROUGH Walls is what this is all about. We don’t want to build MORE. So protective emotional shell is right out.
Ok. So that means that we adopt an attitude of anti-Wall towards the outside world. Sort of a “Hey – you’re welcome in here. Note that there’s not a Wall. That means come on in!” That sounds pretty good, right? A real open attitude.
Oooh. But then I remember when that attitude has gotten me in trouble. Indeed, some people on this planet see a guy with no wall and they get big hungry eyes and they start salivating. They come in all smiles and eyes and then they ransack the place. Raping and pillaging. Laying waste to whatever you’ve got. And in the end, all they can say is that I was a sucker for not having a Wall.
So, practically speaking, in this world of external forces, it won’t do to have no Wall at all. Unless you’re Jesus Christ, eternally turning the other cheek, over and over again. And we know what happened to that guy.
So I guess we need a Wall of sorts. But maybe this Wall can be a discerning, flexible Wall. Not like the stubborn, black-souled Wall that lives in my shoulder. After a little bit of practice, maybe we can leave this External Wall to his own devices, and most of the time he’ll keep out the time-wasters and love-takers with a small margin of error.
And if so, will adopting this exterior Wall teach the interior Wall to be more flexible, and perhaps let me through?
