Perched here on a bar stool, though not at the bar, at a high round table near the window, I imagine I can see the fissures of which you speak, which I further imagine to be the cracks that Leonard Cohen refers to in his song Anthem:
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
In this there may be a suggestion that to be broken is necessary or that our defences should never be so effective that no light can get in, no new life to subvert our institutionalisation. In our fear of monsters there is always the danger that we will attempt to shut out anything that appears different, to control outcomes, to give much applause to those who would claim to manage. What is really meant by manage is a mixture of deceit, outright lying, bullying and general manipulation. All this is to be seen in the daily circus of politics and a further example currently on view is the attempts of the Murdoch Empire to stem the leaks of their sinking ship as their evil ways are displayed for all to see.
T.S. Eliot in Burnt Norton has the two lines:
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Cannot bear it, but also doesn’t want it . . . our view of reality conditioned, shaped by the latest fashions, lived through the eyes of our current mythology. On the other hand we do get glimpses; like your yellow eye of the blackbird. Thinking of which let’s have the second stanza of Wallace Stevens’ poem:
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
And if I happen to, accidentally, so to speak, glance in the mirror, what sort of reality do I see? I might remember the fact of being 65 as I peer in and ask: is that a dragon, lizard or blackbird? At the same time there is this story that I’ve been told, from before time began, about the sort of being that I am seeing in the mirror: we say, human being. We are the act of being human: laughing, jumping and falling in love, storyteller, myth maker and scientist. Check out the evidence, the scientist proclaims . . . and then what? Well, tell a story and try to include some of the evidence stuff. Like the blood squirting from the throat of the dragon.
Oh yeah, the dragon thinks, I got it in the neck again.