by Steven Sills
Chapter 29
Emotions, Sentience, the Fallacy of Words, and the War Within
For all this time of deliberation, now ending, set free from all tasks of professional drudgery, as fettered and burdensome as that freedom has been, I have only succeeded in getting lost in the vast labyrinth of myself, these natural caverns of perception and sentience and unnatural catacombs of language and existence in society blended together intricately and indistinguishably. Solitary travels, vigils without Virgil141 through subterranean self that words can only half express, it is no wonder I have been desultory, flummoxed, rattled and rambling on matters inconclusively. But it has been in this trudging through neurological circuitry, hoping to arrive at some truth to it all as though caverns within were conduits to the heavens without,142 at times a thrill seeker bungee jumping from highest rock and rafter of the underworld of self, that I feel more complete as a man. And yet as I seek to be a complete man, I would repudiate manhood altogether if I could, for just one moment, hug my grandparents the way the I of yesteryear did long ago, in that time, as a child, of believing that love in the presence of those one loves will last forever, a happiness that quickly disperses when truth is known of how temporary it all is and how people slip out of one’s grasp like sand in his palms no matter how tight the grasp.
It can only be hoped that in the aftermath of the demise of human civilization in perennial wars for scarce resources and against barbaric jihadist states that seek the destruction of global Rome, horrific natural disasters, and pandemics from thawed glacial microbes due to a global warming catalyst and those making deforested exoduses, calamity engendered by man’s avarice, that from the android successors true logic not predicated on emotion will exist on the planet; that if humans and artificial intelligence merge into some hybrid, partially alive stature,143 more fully alive in some respects, where gluttony to have to bolster being at the expense of others is no longer needed there will be true equity on the planet; and that friendship of introverted and empathic beings in lieu of extroverts with specious smiles and contracts of reciprocal advantage will be had amongst all denizens on the planet.
Black celestial celerity, brooding and billowing, is at last an ablution from clouds deluging filth and stench of this muggy city, beating down the sweltering heat and the exhaust of traffic so thick, dark, and tangible that without the rain looks to be more than a gas, the smoke of sidewalk restaurants on every street now asphyxiatingly curtailed under large umbrella awnings, its decaying trash less of an obnoxious odor, minutely dulling the barbed wire and glass bottle fragments fastened onto the tops of walls around the property of the rich, and its rats that now refuse to scavenge openly and so are no longer scurry around the movements of feet. But there is no ablution to the menace of man. He goes on, rain or not, perennially without the least respite: each in every generation with that insufferable itch of hungers for pleasure of companionship and sex, the forces of life itself, that unless one gives into it from time to time, foils any sense of sanity like a pesky persistent fly, and the preoccupation with money and ambition that monopolizes over the rest of consciousness. It is now time to flush all my drugs down the toilet, prepare for classes, and begin anew.