The Philosophy of Tooth and Claw
Subtle thoughts come thronging soft, delicate, crowding rooms of the mind. But only when silence is had. And silence gains purchase only when isolated by a sense of security, something harder and harder to come by in the world today. A luxury so astonishingly costly, at times, that the mind can blank: a different kind of silence, the enforced tranquility of shock, an epinephric dousing.
But no, nowhere to be found is the unobvious. Not found because not searched for, not abided. These soft and delicate thoughts require the utmost care and the air of time to find their way out of complexity and nuance and into the harsh and awkward and desultorily ponderous light of language, then agreement, then broad acceptance.
Who would sit at Philosopher's Table to create? And which of those would labor to champion that which is not so easily seen or so easily understood?
Who might care to show that the not-readily comprehended isn't incomprehensible after all?
When the naked philosophy of tooth and claw is so ragingly insistent*, when the harsher elements of the immediate kick off the velvety festooning tapestries of a kind and decent and decorous and polite society, God makes a fist instead of presenting open arms of welcome. When a surplus of good will is traded for the surplice of a priestly soldier or a surfeit of sacred is traded for the conceit of sanctimony, when the chasuble protects not the child but those acts of the predator upon the child, there seems to be no chance that those who dare...with good conscience and good intent as concomitant companions...to permit their reach to exceed their grasp are given the chance to do so. And how else are we to forgive the future?
Instead, a priori angels swoop in, Votaries of a Lesser Godhead and notaries of a soul-management bureaucracy, offering truculent piety instead of beneficent humility.
Too loud, too rigid, a theopolistic cocaine that regiments the thoughts and focuses them on only that which can be seen, disgarding subtlety and variance, whimsey and caprice, in favor of Normalcy and a labored indifference towards Other.
* from Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again
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