86. A caustic substance

Have you felt recently any rebellion against reason? Seen irrationalism peak here and there, either denials or blunt attacks, pronouncing intellectual stances null and void. That the mind is impotent, totally incapable of separating facts from fiction. Reality being nothing more than a delusion, even simple references to it ranked unfashionable, our thoughts hardly related to the world we think we live in. Forbidden to say that I am myself, for I’m not supposed to know who or what myself is. Or that a thing is a thing. Stuck in full-fledged inadmissibility, whatever knowledge I may claim deprived of a sound relationship to what my senses perceive. Everything in the realm of the hypothetical. For the function of thinking might not be to contribute to intelligibility, as I had initially thought.

I get so confused, my darlings.

I get so desperate at times.

I wish I could excel at epistemology. Explain what a cheap drama it is, this crisis made of beliefs. Opinions camouflaged, disguised as concepts not supposed to solve any problems. As if that could make sense. Oh, but yeah, making sense does assume existence, and since that can’t be proven, why bother.

I do get worried, you see. For you, your future.

Under the cover of philosophy and logic, many of our contemporary essayists, our thinkers, are developing a new religion. Articulating a mystique. Presenting their cryptic representational system as a rationale to renounce sanity. Caught in the fallacy where a mind that is said to be invalid still must be used to validate the invalidity in question.

A dominant need for the inscrutable, blanketing all with sophisticated forms of occultism. The impossibility to rely on oneself to perceive and understand. Denying, in fear, a status to knowledge. Denigration. Vilifying ontology, transforming it into articles of faith. Not texts, but incantations. Not arguments, but values. Evacuation of the notion of fact, my perception of the apple in my hand an expression of the abuse committed by the established social and moral order. Maybe. Maybe. Just a spectacle. An idiosyncratic impression. No apple there, but another opportunity to completely fool myself and confirm the eternal state of ignorance and helplessness linked to my human condition.

There is no longer a way, it is claimed, to deal with the meaningful. It is out. Uncool. Retrograde. A pastness. It is no longer there, in my field of vision, only a vision. Not there either, on the tip of my tongue. On the edge of my brain. Tested by my fingers on the paper. It is no longer accepted, received, welcomed. Or expected. I’m left with statements of repudiations. And it’s professed that’s all I have, all I’ll ever have. Told I must believe this. Accept that it is true even though truth is from now on an arbitrary something. A deep conviction, a warship of worship, I add.

Is someone saying, at this very moment, that I must be stupid beyond repair. A vulgar, stiff pragmatist.

Did I ever tell you the story behind my choice one day to be a bit schizoid, not that involved with people I mean. Maybe at this point I don’t really need to tell that story. It would just add oil unto a bonfire already well fed by contempt and allegations about physical forces. Despite despots, see, I do remain reasonable. And know what inflammable spells out for the reader. Sensory faculties may no longer be reliable, but our sense of duty should be.

Laolao