Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Watching the Disillusionment of Loved Ones

There is something profoundly sad about watching the disillusionment of one that we love. The sadness is perhaps proof that we still love them. Disillusionment is nowadays called "Reality check", thanks to the Seventies hippie generation.

That we may have been partly responsible for sustaining their deluded state;
that we may have loved them because we wished to share their deluded state;
that we were unable to find for them a gentler let-down when the disillusionment finally came;
that we have to SHARE the let-down itself.

These are facts known to any intelligent mother, whom has had to grapple with the "Is there really a Santa Claus, Mum?" So Child would never have enjoyed the illusion that Santa Claus existed, but for Mum. Mum would never have loved the Child so much if they never believed what did not exist. Mum later tries to tell Child that Santa Claus does not exist, but cannot find an easy way. Mum feels pain when Child eventually discovers that Santa Claus does not exist, and both their whole frames of being are knocked down.


So it is sad. That's life. An endless string of illusions clutched, each followed by grasping at the harsh brutal truth. As I believe I have always tried to seek the truth, I feel particularly qualified to say that the truth is like the multiverse of universes. When you have uncovered one, so you find you are buried deep within another one that you yet do not understand. So too do I feel qualified to say that there is no pride to be gained, from understanding more universes than the next man.

Yet I want to be sad.
For spring here, faltering,
does not smell the same
As where I left.
I am homesick for a place that I lived in and loved for so long, but whose ruin I could no longer bear to watch.

Funny that, as if I hadn't seen most of it ruined, that I should have been so bothered. Perhaps disillusionment sometimes is the wrong diagnosis.
Perhaps realities change, and we are belittled by our powerlessness to halt the change.

So here in Britain, we wait for spring. There are daffodils out now, and crocuses, but none of the trees are springing into leaf. Nights are still cold, and nothing much is growing fast, even when we have a sunny warmish day.

Today is Budget Day. As if I care. All the farting economists in the world could be piled into a gas oven and it set alight, and I would not be any happier.

I call the world the Planet.
The Planet is too big for me to hold.
Its billions of people are too many for me to scold.
Its development is too much a horror for me to behold.

Thank God we die when we grow old.

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