Gone
I can’t find my baby.
I am back from being back and it’s just so wonderful. I went back and it felt like a dream. Now I’m back from being back and looking back, it’s become rather a bad one, if anything. That’s what I’ve been going around saying, in any case. Maybe it wasn’t exactly true the first few times around, but I suppose it is by now.
A bad dream isn’t any less worthwhile just for being bad, though.
Tradition is often seen as trying to hold on to the past, but what parts of the past? We can’t look inside the hearts of the people of the past, so we turn to what’s left on the surface, but is that really what we want?
Happiness is not simply receiving what we desire or think we desire or remember ourselves or others desiring when we were small, but it is living according to our own and current desires and being part of what we love, moving according to what we love. It is in movement only. Don’t bore me with objective reality. I know all too well what that is like and there is no happiness to be found there. Happiness never lasts because it itself is not a thing. As we like to say instead, happiness is a habit.
Like, a drug habit. Not worth it anyway, probably.
Regardless, any true tradition lives in process. What we often call tradition is no tradition at all. It is inventing new things, quite literally through perversion and fetishism, rather than managing the improbable act of reviving the old long dead and buried. Or otherwise, our efforts toward preservation of what still is pretty much amount to holding said thing very, very still and in our trembling, we crush its poor, little neck, while our mind, for whatever reason, is somewhere quite different entirely.
Wait, that’s not too far off, maybe, actually.
Either way, we forget and it takes rather long before we are ready to admit we have been filling the voids inside dead things with new things of our own clever design. We don’t remember how it died; we definitely didn’t kill it, though. We wouldn’t do that.
But I guess this creative activity inside preservation is itself the persisting tradition anyway. Okay, then, I guess, forget what I said.
Forget I said anything.
