The Good News

You are leafing the news with remote interest. It has been a while and although not missing on anything essential, you give in to the jingle of “ breaking” and the (pro)found sound (of) understanding. The news? From this a-distance mostly predictable: gregarious, senseless, and forgettable. Yet some reprieve that out there, in the dust or mud, emerge more vigorously the springs of pretty brighter blossoms: handfuls of good news, signs of breakthrough, and innumerable measures of normalcy. Dynamic days, vociferous squares, hefty conversations. Alas! The poison of the poly-ticks is flowing in artsy, insouciant meanders across the endless prairies of unfaltering principles and values. We give to “now” our most and best. Still. With notable exceptions.

Then, out there in the wilderness of things lurk shadows and originals of hoax, of less-than-so, unlike-the-truth. The semblance of style, the simulated wit, mimesis of the n-th grade. Tense and pretense of knowledge, understanding, unattachment, freedom, truth. Goliathic endeavor to faken the faked a tad more fakely and liken the unlikely more intently, thus send into the world a risible projection of what we-are-sure-and-we-think-we-know. Except, you don’t and rarely we do. Let us remember we read the “old masters” to learn to tell the virtual edifice from that of porphyry and marble, to treasure ruins over steel-cum-glass, to separate the world “as is” from that of as a few would rather have it. In truth, if you can poison all the oceans, you can’t account for all the endless rivulets that shall remain unspoiled, unmapped and barely attractive to greedy eyes and opportunistic forays. One may have all the facts and still be eluded any comprehension as illo tempore the most telling tales remain untold. Perhaps with one, one just exception.

It is about tense*, you fool, and not pretense, sentence, or tension. *Not even time, if we must, by all those means, be understood. Just tenses and their aspects.

True, knowledge helps: the mind misunderstands.