Avalanche

Talking with JP last night I lost my train of thought, trying to explain the impetus toward civilization. I couldn't find the words no matter how hard I tried.

I knew JP was listening too, as there was silence on the other side of the line.

When I found the words there were too many of them, nothing's clear, I say the same thing over and over only with different words. The outcome's the same, I can't find the right words, but I keep speaking anyway because I have a buyer on the line.

We were speaking about an international situation, I forget which, it doesn't matter, when the words wouldn't come to me. Rather too many words came to me, none of which I really wanted to say.

It was clear whose side I was on, but I failed to articulate my real meaning. At least I think I failed, I might be wrong, it's possible JP understood my sentiment, that things have always stunk, that it's nothing new. There is a sort of power that wishes us to think ill of our condition, such power uses our depression as a control technique.

After I'd spoken and failed so miserably, JP brought more of his own belief system out into the open, quoting Marx, Pericles, Malthus, and T.S. Eliot to reinforce his gloomy arguments. I listened for a while and then said suddenly, STOP!

All I was trying to say earlier, I said, is that it's not so bad, it's always been so, stemming from mankind's inability to live in the present. Our failure to live in the present has brought this blight upon us – our dysfunction, ills, and the other inequalities that beset us. And if we think we can change we are truly crazy.

This persuasion seem to calm JP, while restoring the confidence I've always had in language, to get across the essential point of my own thinking. We spoke amicably for a few more minutes, the tension diffused, his tension created by my inability to articulate my thinking and mine by the same inability to find words for a situation I felt so sure about.