Chapter XVII: Rockin' and a Rolling

Everywhere

Article I: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

This was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…

        …where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid of reason and light and spirit that the mind could not grasp it on any sort of conscious level and if you came close the mind would reel backward, unable to take it in. It was a vision so clear and real and vital to me that in its purity it was almost abstract. This was what I could understand, this was how I lived my life, what I constructed my movement around, how I dealt with the tangible. This was the geography around which my reality revolved:

i. it did not occur to me, ever, that people were good or that a man was capable of change or that the world could be a better place through one’s taking pleasure in a feeling or a look or a gesture, of receiving another person’s love or kindness. 

ii. Nothing was affirmative, the term “generosity of spirit” applied to nothing, was a cliché, some kind of bad joke. 

iii. Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. 

iv. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire- meaningless. 

v. Intellect is not a cure. 

vi. Justice is dead. 

vii. Fear, recrimination, innocence, sympathy, guilt, waste, failure, grief, were things, emotions, that no one really felt anymore. 

viii. Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. 

ix. God is not alive. 

x. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in... 

There are no more barriers to cross. 

xi. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. 

xii. Is evil something you are? Or something you do? My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone, in fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape.

xiii. But even after admitting this, and I have in just about every act I've committed- and coming face to face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge of myself, no new understanding can be extracted from my telling. There has been no reason for me to tell you any of this. This confession has meant nothing...

-P.B.

For there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

-E.O.