Wounded Emotions
Wounded Emotions
by John Bennett
He took a long hard tumble and ripped up his emotional ligaments. They no longer rise to the occasion or reach out. They dangle at his side, blocking mundane input. They take refuge behind a wistful smile and glance away from vending-machine headlines. They shrink from the dark cloud of artificial seasons. And all this without drugs.
They know things that disaster brings to light. They know the past lives in the future, that under every eight lanes of freeway lies a wagon trail, under every sidewalk a foot path. But where has the air displaced by skyscrapers gone? Such questions give rise to suspicion in the humpty-dumpty people who bob around him like air balloons. Perhaps that’s the answer to air’s mysterious departure–the humpty-dumpty people! No-no, don’t go there, say the sentient watch-dog emotions, focus on the vacuum that’s been created by all that’s been excavated, go underground where each skyscraper leaves a gaping hole. The future is the past reconfigured, the present a transition.
This is what transpires when the iron fist of Moloch fails to kill but only mutilates. This is the soil of wounded emotions from which a Brave New World will rise up in glory.
It’s the oft rumored shay e ætforan (betwixt ne’er didst thy hast don witnessed as thine own legendary foreskin noted entirely in evidence by its singular absence) thar be a true yon Moloch-ness Monster!
Die to self through compulsory immolation of the flesh has been the mark of most Mortification Rituals but here it is shown as entirely an emotional baggage (basically invisible carry on luggage) required for future excursions on the road to what comes next.
I lost my boarding pass. Can I still get on with it? Virtual everything else nowadays, perhaps virtual benefit in belonging has come into its own. Membership has its privileges even if the members only sign is a branding of culture on what makes us individuals. Shibboleths being what they are….our time finds them in HTML with salvation from the fate of The Other found in the details inferred through hypertext. Stranger still, those unknown to us are only virtually unknown with knowledge of them as unknown our litmus shibboleth.