What is Seen is the Scene [Flash Fiction]

Seen is the Scene

[a polemicist speaks]

A series of observations concerning knowing, seeing and understanding. There are many ways for the sighted to choose blindness. Some of them are as simple as not choosing to do what is necessary to know.

1. To see, to know, to understand–the latter, understanding, is not what it purports to be unless we stand under what we hope to comprehend. To see, to know, what then do we? To stand under is another way of wearing the necessary shoes to walk in. But do we want to walk in our own shoes let alone another’s? No, we do not want to walk two blocks from where we stand steadfast in our own randomly selected conclusions, let alone a mile in another person’s shoes, sandals, boots.
2. To know what another person thinks we must hold fast to what he sees, experiences, knows.  I wonder how nations of starving masses can avoid holding us in contempt, as fat as we have become. But to walk a mile in another man’s shoes is not what we would do, as lazy as we have become, or as effete as our current epistemology is. To know has been undermined; knowledge is impossible, we have now sung in chorus.
3. Why should I walk in another person’s shoes to know another’s reality when inside my head has become the limits of reality? I ask.  All I need to know is inside my head, what I think the limits of all knowing, the limits of reality because we have concluded, as I have already asserted, that knowledge is impossible. Therefore, what I think must be as good as what anyone else randomly extemporizes.
4. Wise men and wise women enter the dark, at least of their souls, as perhaps you could see in San Juan de la Cruz, his Dark Night of the Soul. The intellectual, as well as spiritual, path of Truth is a crucible we avoid because we have become soft in direct proportion to how we have also learned to be less cruel, which is not an invitation to return to cruelty. I do recall the Psalms, though, “Yea, though I walk through the valley in the shadow of Death,” but this does not mean we should tolerate mass murder at the rate it seems to proliferate in America.
5. Perhaps there are many who might say that to be American is to be violent, but then there is violence of a different order in other societies, and we must remember that Berlin in the 1930s was a very safe city by the standards we measure safety or the lack thereof  today in our urban centers. We also have to remember that the Soviet Union had nothing like the gun violence we have in America today, nor did they ever have our murder rate, at least not with respect for simple separate citizen committing a murder of another simple, separate person. Violence is another kind of blindness; there are times when it fufills absolute clarity; times when violence is right action.
6. It is possible for us to live without the violence that is on the rise in America. What then must we do if the only thing we can imagine in response to mass shootings–which I am still wondering why we think them more heinous than any other murder–is to put the Bill of Rights under assault.

You can imagine what the objections might be to what he has herein said, a reissue of what had been published in his our blog on his own political commentary website.