Mornings

Dante's Five Levels of Aquarius

What holds the world together?
I am writing, and it is becoming apparent that there is more "realism" in my writing than there is in the world.
What I mean is I labor under the belief that things need be explained, that there be a certain type of causality for the reader; I assume things must make sense, and things must be explained: there is to be a simulacrum of the Real, and this we call "realism".

But there is no such causality in life. Things are beginning to happen in chaos. There may be a chain of events leading to foreclosure on a house, but afterwards, all is chaos. There is stress and panic, and panic is our reaction to a sudden experience of "nothingness": no realism nor fantasy, no fact nor fiction.
The first time I saw nothingness, I was terrified, and came crawling back to the world "caused" by World War II and mens' suits and crew cuts and the crystalline structures of alcohol, race, and religious intolerance.

You want me to add something here, because it seems incomplete. After the words "religious intolerance" there should be more, something like "Now I have grown used to..."  - something to finish out the train of thought, something to segue into a moral for the story. That's where we are now: we are in the Colosseum of the present where there will be reforms of the way we live and, thus, increased chains of causality and morality, or there will be a breakdown, and life will be truncated, discrete, and intermittent like a slowly moving line of Russian shoppers in 1995, all queued up and waiting for salad greens...
or the chop of machetes in DR Congo and the countries in the Lake District of Africa...
or the furious incompetence of the Gulf of Mexico...
or the quiet depletion of water, the disappearance of the Chad, the coming fruition of all the woes that form our modern litanies... aquifers of water as unseen as the gods, only the memory of Aquarius...
hate and spittle and crowns of thorns.