stranger than fiction

i have been COMPROMISED

i have lost the ability to separate my own consciousness from that of others. when i watch television, i have a difficult time understnading whether i am the one watching or being watched, whether i am the man on the couch whose hands hurt though he continues to knit, or the man fighting demons while detecting a mystery.
The Detective.
HE haunts my dreams, you know. for i have become him, i have always been him, and i hope that one day i will meet him somewhere besides the bathroom or the bedroom. when i stare in the mirror. because he mocks me there, with his twilight eyes, somewhere beetween reason and emotion, capable of connecting past with present. we are living a social drama, the disruption existed before we were born.
our leaders have spoken. they have stood. they have been compromised. we have taken our last stand. we have been compromised. but The Detective, HE has not been so compromised.
while we have to live in this world, he lives in another, a different place, in the space between our ideals and the people we have become. between the person wondering what this means and the one who will rise out of sleep tomorrow to give into the tragic routine of this american life. HE haunts me there. speaks in my ear when i am about to give up, prods me to continue.
i am watson to his Sherlock. HE is the ideal that i attempt to live up to. why? why would i want to be like such a Man? poised between being real and living in our imagination. i can't tell myself from Him, but the REASON that i must follow Him is because He can bring us together. HE can collapse the facts into reality, fold time and space so that present and past connect, become woven into the experience of having been there and having never existed there at all. HE can make us feel even after all the darkness in our world has seeped into our bones.
who is HE? i have been questing after this knowledge.

the SEARCH FOR REASON is rough going. in a world with so many voices, where the only certainty is that nothing is certain, knowing anything at all is a dangerous business. and yet it cannot be. we know we are here because we are. we know the world needs to be saved because it falls farther and farther into the spiral that is our own teenage-like angst ridden struggle to destroy ourselves. for the sins of our fathers. for the sins of reason.
is HE our father? was his hand the one that dealt the blow, that attempted cruelty for kindness? or was it the right hand of God, the Invisible Hand that directs us all. Adam Smith, DETECTIVE extraordinaire.
No. NOT THAT> ANything but that. If reason was god we would melt in our graves and transform reality into currency and currency into our souls and our souls in the the malarchy that is corporate consciousness. corporations cannot make meaning; they can only take it away from us.
And I hold my head in my hands and weep. Because nothing is certain; nothing can be real without certainty. I cannot feel the hand on my shoulder, the voice in my head, I cannot bring the sense that I am alone to gether with the fact that I am SURROUNDED by so many voices, so many people, so many selves. I MUST make reason from this, make order, find the connection between where we've come from and where we must go, from destruction to rebirth, from death to the person that I am. I must MAKE MEANING. We must become the Meaning-makers, not the Destruction-bringers.

He is in the mirror again, mocking me. No, I have become him? In searching for meaning, I see myself truly. I have become the DETECTIVE, I have become HIM. I address the issue, I organize action, I find the woman with the short skirt and the long jacket and help her to become not-the-damsel-not-the-femme-fatale. I answer every question with due recourse and rational emotionality. I temper the voices with the uncertainty and recognize the best possible people we could be. I make meaning and see the past and present in the movement of our feet walking in the streets.
My heart quickens. My hands disappear. I have gone too far, I have become the symbol, the savior, the DETECTIVE of what must be done to find order in chaos. Like Ra, Maat, Yahweh, and all the prophets by whatever name, I feel myself disappear into the dark, deep night.
In seeing the inside, I have lost my place within. As I fall away, I glance into a mirror, see myself shaking his fist, and whisper through the fade-out-frame
'go no farther'..