Fire on the Mountain

“It’s an interior holding, a clenching – years ago you had a plurality of well understood, field of relations (words, mores, customs) that permeated private and public life that were informed by common sense and a belief in purposed appointment, inscrutable as the world may be. Again these were never taught, they seldom had to be self-consciously articulated but it was a time that the individual inhabited personal dimensions of liberty and apprehension that are hard for us to imagine today.”

"Who are You?"

"Um- I like beer, football, I like South-Park, uh..."

"Yeah, exactly, like describe yourself - we can't do it anymore we're working with the wrong first definitions."

“OK, but people have always been such as they are now? I mean look at Chekhov: people then were just as screwed up, lazy, alcoholic, depressed, horny, sad, and stupid as they are now.”

“Yeah, but he was writing about a certain group of people in pre-Bolshevik Russia – I mean go to any party in Germantown and you get the idea, it’s just one group of people who have enough money to not work, but not enough to move or properly maintain their estate, so they’re just kind of dwindling along with their money. The great mass of humanity lived in a world without usury and without…”

I’m cut off, I can hear a huff like wind over an open mic and I know she’s already starting to flip through the channels on mute or look at her facebook page.

“So it’s the whole self-as vacuole – I equals what I see equals what I buy equals boom, boom, boom, And we’re made into animals in the jungle again responding to shapes and colors:
GREEN= GOOD, RED = BAD.
You’re a pariah for a bumper sticker.
We don’t know anything. We’re a people that knows how to feel good at a rock concert. It’s all impulse and instinct. Not a lot of room for, prudence self-control, and all of that.”

“The Mountain is still there though”
“Yeah, the mountain is still there, but if I can’t see it, then how do I climb?”