We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver

Ecclesiastes 1
Everything Is Meaningless
1 The words of the Teacher, [a] son of David, king in Jerusalem:
2 "Meaningless! Meaningless!"
says the Teacher.
"Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless."
3 What does man gain from all his labor
at which he toils under the sun?
4 Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
5 The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
6 The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
7 All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
8 All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9 What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
10 Is there anything of which one can say,
"Look! This is something new"?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
11 There is no remembrance of men of old,
and even those who are yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow.

What is there, but ascensions and endings? Is the apex any more substantial then the initial arousal, or the hope, an anticipation of guesswork? Kingdoms are slain over presumptions, assumptions and the demotions that arrive with the reality of our cyclic tendencies. Granitic intrusions are merely the Pharaoh’s sand hills, the delusions of ant lions. In conquest, in writing, in running, in consumption, all is tuned in the key of finites. Our thoughts are uniform, direct, intentional; but when we’ve gone mad, when psychosis wracks our senses, it seems there is no end, that we are absent of lines and lineaments. Distinction is the catalyst for assumption; as coitus is to tactic purpose?
“Original sin is not something man did to god but something god did to man, so monstrous that to this day man cannot understand what happened to him. He shakes his head groggily and rubs his eyes in disbelief.
The great secrets of the ages is that man has evolved, is born, lives, and dies for one end and one end only: to commit a sexual assault on another human or to submit to such an assault.” Walker Percy, Lancelot

What is this assault but a continuation of the wrath initiated in the original ‘monstrous’ sin? We propagate for an existence we’ll never see; Abraham IS Issac, as Jacob is Judah, and I am Krishna; the stray black cat: GW; the Sassafras: the cup of salvation. The leaves turn with the pumping of the rig, as CONOCO and Chrysler yet again reassess, ponder and probe for new ways to control waves, to reinvent the leaf, the detritus, to peat, to lignite, the coal, covered, subducted, exposed, evaporating, to salt to gypsum, consumed and covered, in sequence, the bouma sequence; all in time, all of cyclic exposition, it faults, it fractures, the salt plumes, moving like fire, like water, like nature, in taking the path of least resistance, in filling the fissures most apt., and again evolving, like Lucy, like Lepidodendron, like Coleoptera, like Nyssa Sylvatica, it arrives, subsides
and becomes…
it becomes and is and continues, the coal miners lament, the rice pickers waning twilight. We aren’t worthy or ready to ever conceive it, of it, about it. We are it, or were it, or will be it, worship it, smoke it, destroy it, love it, dig it and leave it.

“The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.
The continual effort to raise himself above himself, to work a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man’s relations. We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Circles”


For the soul of man walks all paths
The soul walks not upon a line,
neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself,
like a lotus of countless petals.
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet