Lindsay’s Scribblings

There is a danger to knowledge. A subtle danger to knowing, a certain danger to the lack of it. There is a danger – revealed in the twisting machinations of manipulation and emotionless frigidity of pure facts. Mostly, there is a danger in the harshness of what others can lord over you.
There is a danger to knowledge – a danger to another’s one-sided knowledge – to what you cannot know. There is a reasoning intensity, a plea for trust, but knowledge is treacherous. Knowledge holds no allegiance, commands no code of honor. Even the truthful are at risk of being struck for their impiety, their inability.
And yet I revere knowledge – worship it, a child presuming to be a priestess in the secular temple of infinite sagacity. I revere knowledge - idolize it, audaciously hoping to understand the enigmatic.
There is a danger to knowledge, when it isn’t mine.

Numbers
Flaunt their superiority
Teasing my words
My words
But I’ll share
Sweet-talk me
With numbers
And fluent methodology
And my words
Will swoon

Serial tics
Steady progression
Pages flipping
Fluttering leaden
In muffled silence
Disavowing
The impermanent shelter
Of fading opacity
Serial tics
Feeble attempts
To disparage
The convoluted certainty
Of foreshortened
Conclusion
Serial tics
Steady progression
Slow procession
The march of
(anti?) mortality.

When I die
You can open my little beat-up Compaq
The backspace key finally replaced
The power cable tenuously soldered
When I die
You can open my dear oft-used laptop,
My incarnate life-blood,
Or it’s certain successor
When I die
You can trundle through its clandestine
Reminiscences
And maybe I’ll still breathe

The icy ketamine-laced water chilled her naked flesh up to her navel, chilled her elbows and her breasts as she clutched her knees in a shallow semblance of futile fetal protection. There were no goosebumps. No raised hairs. There was nothing except the sallow cyan tint slowly flushing her skin, a creeping ascent to her face, to betray her frigid state. Had they been open, her eyes would have added a hue to the monochromatic madness sweeping her body – darkest royal blue. But after two shots of sodium pentothal, she was unconscious. Unconscious and dreaming deliciously. Vehement dreams; prescient.
In the fluorescent light, there was an unnaturally shadowy figure ignoring the live-feed vid-screens that other staffers focused on behind their surrounding Plexiglas walls – their keyboards clacking, rendering analysis. His attention was rapt - there was no movement from the knee-high sunken glass tub the woman occupied; there were not even the stifled screams she emitted in natural sleep. But her fingertips were white with insistent pressure against her calves.
Sustainable intensity is passing. He hesitated, allowing himself to momentarily devour her figure – swift curves, arched spine, muscles athletic and trim – then resolutely signaled the charge cut. Soon enough, he knew, when they finished, he would be able to stare at his leisure.
Webs of reality tapered into tendrils before disintegrating from the screens entirely. Doubtless, the impact of this feed was already ricocheting through the Washington office. Even with the assumptions such predictions had to rely on, the majority of future time-lines had been explicit: one more heavy assault would break the Chinese battle advantage.
Indoctrination, he heard her whisper, as the flush of longing rose again, equally unbidden and unchecked. Under her momentary sway, he doubted his cause.
It was, he reassured himself smoothly, a necessary and noble cause – the best and only cause, if empirics had any say: patriotism.
Liberty paled in comparison to security, a mere perk against the necessity of life. The patriot act, Guantanamo, the end of private media. It had started innocuous and grown to this: the “friendly” incarceration of a citizen for “the public welfare” – the trapping of a mind for it’s intellect; deliberate disregard for the ephemeral husk nominally recognized as the associated body.
And yet, this mind, this particular mind, would be deified, at least in his own private thoughts. The prophetess Cassandra made martyr for his great and noble cause, that best and only cause of all truly heroic endeavors. Pythia, showering him in obscure greatness, ambiguous distinctions – waiting for an Apollo to tame the intimacies of her enigmatic tongue.

************************************************

Harsh concrete steadfastly absorbed his pensive gait. Sharp clicks and the turnstile accepted his progress, registering his presence with the depressing semi-rotation of a numeric counter. The glossy metro-ride to his apartment was a duel – traditionalist loyalty wrestling sympathy for an unwitting vessel of fortune. Smothered beneath layers of swollen prescience was a drugged awareness laboring to inhale even the briefest clarity, gasping for external stimuli. He could wake her.

Don’t plead rationality
As you bleed your heartsobs
On the dinner table
Smeared across a casual talk
Don’t plead rationality
As you slander anything
Anyone
Which threatens your conformity
Don’t plead rationality
When desperation
Is somberly
Transparent.

The slight amber tint of cold autumn sunlight trickled over the stone road and glazed the surrounding hilltops. Her father was certain to chide, even upon her safe return - it was not wise to walk alone through the outskirts of Milan in barren twilight. Not wise for a peasant, certainly less so for a distant Medici, a silk merchant’s coveted daughter.
But wares had sold well today at market, and foolishly, wispily, she had decided to detour through the quieting dusk. Her own tiny, weary sigh slid to liberty before she could stifle it, burdening her stride with the weight of consideration. Escapades such as this, however brief, were rare indeed in the well-monitored society of aristocracy – even the oft-snubbed mercantile lines.
There were not more than three streets between herself and her uncle’s small holding, where her father’s caravan was bedding. He was a worrier, her father, and though she longed to delay, he was already wracked with anxious preparations for their return to Florence.
With a single throaty gulp of air, delicately picking her way around the murky puddles socializing in the crevices of uneven cobbles, she began the pensive melody of an aged folk ballad.
It wasn’t until another voice – treble, full – joined hers that the youthful de’ Medici realized she had acquired a human shadow.
The knowledge snagged at her refrain, thinning her voice to a strained squeak. Thick skirts whirling, she confronted the owner of the assured, simpatico voice which had imposed a contentious duet upon her brusque solo.
“Maria de’ Medici?” the speaker softly inquired, dousing her temper with cool sincerity.
It wasn’t much blood she shared with Lorenzo – only a few drops from her mother, already a distant, if nominal, cousin – but she clung to any visage of authority.
“Si, who dares to intrude upon my regal solitude?” The words crackled with the taut caution of her mingling rank and fury.
Appropriately apologetic, he bowed his cloaked head and intoned lyrically, “Beg pardon, signorina , but the deed is done. I come only to assure you personally of Christ’s holy gratitude.”
Ahhh, but she should have known as much – his voice had the well-practiced discipline of the priesthood, and his vestments were ill-concealed to the alert eye.
With coquettish reverence, she murmured to the robed friar, “It is I who am grateful, father.” Conspiratorially, she squeezed his weathered hand, and he felt 10 discreet florins whisper in his palm.
Maria de’ Medici left the priest to his desperate rosary with a coy and painstakingly developed smile, confidently approaching what had been her paternal uncle’s villa.

You
(Plural)
Must realize
That this is why we don’t get along:
The immature humor
And attempts to impose your will.
I submit as much as a good guest should-
I don’t compromise my manners.
But you
(Plural)
Must realize
Emotional justifications
Won’t vindicate
Absenteeism.

This line fits just the right words to say
If you could only say them
Fits repentance
Fits absolution
Fits worry
Fits blame
Fits sacrosanct idealism
Fits relative truth
This line fits just the right words to say
If I could only say them

While a historical Jesus of Nazareth may have existed, there is no evidence he was the Christ. Proof may deny the potency of faith; using reason to critique the purposely irrational may be unfair, if not outright impossible. And yet, what are senses for, if not use? Why be able to analyze, if you should not? Using empirical evidence and my admittedly limited knowledge of psychology, I am able to reach certain conclusions.

I am a proponent of Judeo-Christian values, they provide a much appreciated moral framework from which believers base decisions – and the church regularly reminds constituents of their spiritual obligations.
Further, the idea of a Jesus – a theoretically perfect man: selfless, compassionate, infinitely forgiving, and omnipotent – gives Christians clear security and goals.
Other religious figureheads are similar – a means to show disciples, ancient and modern alike, how to live peacefully with one another; they are role-models given mythic status to incur the wrath of divinity on rule-breakers and non-believers.
This makes historical and psychological sense: before the advent of heavy reason and scientific inquiry, mere subsistence imposed violent hardships, and the mystic nature of even the simplest phenomena left the wisest soothsayers in awe. Hence, belief in the grandiose was less uncommon and of greater necessity.
Yet, there is backlash to the pristine obedience such religions command – a reason to depart from them and to move towards an individual enforcement of moral values: the carrot-stick mentality of an afterlife, while good for reinforcing moral standards, causes much tension among worried mortals. As grace and salvation are limited to singular and conflicting groups of people whose memberships are primarily composed of ‘God’s chosen’ – the culturally and environmentally pre-disposed – holy wars are the naturally resultant invalidation attempts waged by one religion on another.

So, are there other routes to the peace religions profess to defend, without the animosity which they inspire?

There are the Lockian ideals: life, liberty and property, and Nozick’s Libertarian vision of moral side-constraints – no action should be taken that will violate another’s rights; no harm should be done to another. If somewhat religiously inspired, they nourish no need for resentment.
Even more primal, however, there is the common human trait and ability of empathy – best summed up in the ‘Golden Rule’: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Blending this premise with Descartes, I am able to affirm that if I think and, therefore am, then others think and are as well. If I do not wish to be harmed or persecuted, others too, will not wish to be harmed or persecuted. If I would want food, water and shelter, then I will work to ensure others have those necessities. While the argument can be made that this is forcing westernization onto the world, that argument is defeated through pure Darwinian self-preservation: all humans wish to survive, and wishing to survive, they wish to excel, in order to be best placed for the propagation of their own genes. Therefore, they will accept any means of advancement. Further, the need to avoid harm and pain is a universal value, not simply a Western one, as all races grimace when tortured, and only the psychotic, emo, or especially kinky deliberately engage in masochism.

The only reason left to pursue religion in a progressive era, in an age yearning for peace, is personal contact with the divine. And yet, even among the most devout, there is never an absolute answer in prayer, only an innate knowledge of what should be done – a knowledge derived not from ‘conversation’ but from the forced focus on, and weighing of, morality. There is simply meditation with self and self’s own code of being, where “God” exists solely to impose an imperative on this routine self-acknowledgment of goals and wrongs done. Selfless and global, in retrospect, pious resolutions are clearly correct all-along, but put-off until there is such an audit.

If empathy can proscribe morality, and inner-peace is brought by honest reflection, what need is there for the intolerances of religion, which betray their own cause?