I didn’t expect this, the self says

by DRM


What do you make of a moment when you real­ize the you are a super-structure, or an out­crop­ping, and that the foun­da­tions that you relied on blindly aren’t squarely placed on earth, but are adjunct and extraneous?

We are seduced by the frag­ile beauty of these images when we encounter them: beach cot­tages on stilts, gothic cathe­drals, storks stand­ing in still water.

The mad poet, the drug-inspired musi­cian, the inspired genius all pro­vide the human metaphor for the uncer­tain sta­bil­ity of inspiration.

Maybe we can’t see the crazed beauty of the uni­verse with­out releas­ing from gravity.

Yet there are those moments in life when we rec­og­nize that our own per­sonal struc­ture — the sturdy peas­ant hut of our life — is really an oddly-conceived addi­tion to the big col­umn of mankind, and at that moment, when we look down and around, we feel the dizzy­ing swoop of per­spec­tive van­ish­ing, the jit­tery antic­i­pa­tion of the begin­ning of a fall, the naked vul­ner­a­bil­ity of light going to black, and we want to curl up, out our hands in our ears, and wish it all away.