Us Naked Fools

What we cannot see we deny; what we cannot touch must exist.

The garden is in full bloom for us all as, self-indulgent and willing; we choose to ignore our inconvenient fates. We hold no time for dread, no room for regret. To dread or to regret would be to live in a time that isn’t now and therefore in a time that does not exist. This is both impossible and undesired. And so, in haste and retaliation, we drown ourselves in excess: every pleasure known to man must be consumed until our bellies protrude with fleeting satisfaction and our minds are occupied with a rush that grows duller and duller with each offense. Such temporary content will not hold us over for long, nor would we expect it to. We live to consume again and again, for pleasure can only be fully pleasing if we believe it to be never ending. This pleasure is ours for the taking, and its consequences cannot harm us now, only then.

Only then, and how dark our then shall be. By the time then finally arrives, all that was once good will have been abused. We will have taken the very things that lent us light and squandered them amidst our reckless consumption and pleasurable deception. Relentless, unforgiving shadows will take their place, following us as death follows the old and sick. When then decides to come, all pleasure will turn to anguish, all hedonistic joys to a single primal fear. Our pleasure-seeking bodies will tremble with deterioration as we watch those we once danced with decay, those we indulged with wither, and those we made love to collapse. The earth will abandon us as we abandoned ourselves.

And so we dance. We relish in such things, for it is through this very abandonment that we are free. Furthermore, it is through our self-abandonment that we all (secretly and with grave hesitation) hope to find ourselves again. Twisted and contorted, foolish and insane, we roll through pleasure after meaningless pleasure in the hope that we’ll someday be brought back to who we were, to who we desperately want to believe we still are.

But we all know the truth. There is no reverse, no possible way to return to simpler times. Upon tasting sin, it was etched into all of our senses; the only way to attain any form of satisfaction is to sin more deeply than we did before. We hardly remember what once kept us intact. In fact, we cannot be entirely sure there is anything to return to.  All we know is that, if any true goodness remains, we are hopelessly undeserving. Us naked fools; in splendor and deafening angst, we defy our Creator in order to define ourselves, devastatingly unaware that in doing so we unravel all that we could have been. Us naked fools and our terrible lives with which we are so in love.

What we cannot see we deny; what we cannot touch must not exist.

We forget the past’s grand vision, while we’ve yet to feel what is to come. 

The Garden of Earthly Delights. 1503. Museo Del Prado, Madrid. By Hieronymus Bosch.