I am emptied and turned inside out. My body is a reflective surface, bereft of will and volition, a mirror only to what it is fed from the “outside” in the form of news and media. The inside is outside, and there is no inside behind this surface.
This is why and how it’s possible to feel full and empty at the same time.
The metaphor I’m looking for isn’t exactly one of a machine. But I suppose it is a kind of machine part – a battery, say, or maybe a circuit board. Things are simultaneously running on it even as other things short out, fuse, or just blow.
Yesterday a bunch of things happened, the news cycle was dominated by guns, shootings, and horrific burning buildings, fires caused by criminal negligence. There were more bombings and shootings, too, in more distant lands, but we hear less of those. It’s enough that we’re daily slaughtered in the media by the events which are covered. See? They slaughter us, the consumers, too.
I don’t understand the outrage which nitwits on both sides of left-right political spectrum, who think we should care, feel, or even think more about the outrages happening around us, express, because what they’re advocating, it seems to me, is additional self-harm. We are all already being slaughtered. More outrage, concern, or care just slaughters us harder – especially if we allow it to continue on media terms.
It’s partly in reaction to this that I’m writing these morning pages: an attempt to refocus on the less topical, less ephemeral, by focusing (paradoxically) on what might be called ephemera. Cloud formations, the quality of daylight, passing observations. But maybe those “objects” reveal a truer nature of focus – namely, that it (focus) is always there and we just have to become aware of it, notice it – whereas all the too-loud clamoring for attention and focus all around us is just distraction, the opposite of focus.
Collectively, we’re losing our tiny little minds. Hence the feeling of being turned inside-out. The circuit board (and I’m not sure that’s really the right metaphor) is the continuous, steady state of always-present focus, of awareness. But it’s overloaded, with distractions, energy pulses (generated by social media and news cycles) which are causing blow outs and fuses. It’s a bad state of affairs. Blockages. Wastes – gigantic wastes – of time.
I don’t know how much longer I can stand to be here, specifically. Everything is pissing me off so much: the weather (although it was beautiful yesterday and today), the non-stop noise from E.-Street below me and from construction and/or yard-work (heavy machinery). Yesterday afternoon I thought I’d go mad – what with the nice weather, I opened windows only to be flooded by the incredible racket of traffic, machinery, etc. Jump out of one’s skin levels of noise. Jump out of skin – there’s that “turned inside out” image again, in variation. The noise is a constant distraction, hard to ignore, hard to become aware of true focus when distraction takes you away …as media distractions do online, too. It’s all related.