Posted on November 30, 2009 - by Rasham
In Chase Of The Sun
From notes on a page from my long-lost love; ‘People move west in chase of the sun’. Why of all the things you inscribed is this the one I remember most passionately? Because I loved you, you who chased the sun.
As I begin to devour all my useless preconceptions, as I become thoughtfully polygamous I discover that I live on the edge of some fragile cliff, constantly experiencing instability and prone to random fits of irrational lament. ‘How to deal’, I wonder, as the world moves along outside the coffee house window. The sun peaks up from behind the arms of the highway and I am wrenched from forward falling landing back upon my heels as I think of what you wrote: people move west in chase of the sun…
Uneasy I begin to weep, sharing this moment with a pinch of sugar spilled center upon the table. Moving west, or simply moving, the sun’s presence is now irrelevant, though the chase still breathes in our time. And now what is being chased? Illusions of an abstract reality and manufactured fulfillment; we tick to the tock of the theory of timely progression. ‘Hmm’, I think. ‘I wonder what it would look like if it all just stopped’.
I walk towards the escape and slip through as the doorbell rings an awful note. I stand erect on the corner of two married streets and I breathe deeply, wondering about the cars and how they move; forward, linear, predictable. I step onto the asphalt carpet and my mind races as my eyes shed worry and regret; cars honk, voices shout, the symphony of an urban orchestra with piccolos of profanity plays; people reacting, responding to the traffic intruder, slowing, halting, then stopped. I sit down at the heart of four points, propelled to inaction by an uncanny force, the same that drives some men to suicide and others to war. I sit and I wait for the chase to stop. Does it? No: it only changes. I look towards the sun, resting my weight in the space between my anointed hands, squinting through a fog of emotion, disappointed at the answer. “People are happy chasing anything”, I thought I heard the Gods say, “even the sun”.
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November 30, 2009
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Agent Smith: “Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered…where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” —The Matrix
We “chase the sun” because we need to struggle against something…anything. Without it, we become unhappy and unfulfilled. We might rail against it, but deep inside we fully understand that without it, we might as well be dead. We all are Willie Coyote chasing our own individual Road Runner.
Theologically, “the struggle” might even be the very purpose and meaning of life because it would seem that only through it, can we experience happiness. Have you ever wondered why God sent us here when he knew life would be excruciatingly difficult? I’m sure it wasn’t because he wanted to torture us. There must be something we can get here that we can’t get in heaven. If one is to believe that life is a gift not a test, then I suspect the gift has got to be HAPPINESS through the overcoming or acceptance of life’s struggles.
Interestingly but by no means a mere coincidence, one of the most powerful and transforming ideas in human history is: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.”
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November 30, 2009
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I moved east to try and catch up on time. It didn’t work. BTW, I like piccolos of profanity. I was the section leader of 26 piccolos.