A Cannibal's Hallelujah

Trolled, but still against cancel culture.

It is hard to believe there is any purpose when we suffer. 
Or to suffering itself for that matter.

And yet time and again in my life, it is suffering that brings me back to the mystery, to others and the centre of my understanding. 

It is not that you ever start to enjoy suffering. But you attune to its value.

Some think happiness is the absence of suffering.
Yet suffering roots you to the earth.

Our world has fragmented.
Since they killed God, we have floated away in our separate universes.
So much so, that it is only our own that matters.

Others become a threat. 
So we spend our days machine gunning the thought-bubbles of others. 

Cancellation?
The tyrannical fantasy that obliterating contradictory viewpoints validates our own.
When did they, too, stop needing questioned?

There is something dystopian about cancellation. 
That in cracking down on human nastiness we might correct our nature.
That we can control our way to goodness.

It is Darwinian: to ensure my values, I must eat all others.
Red in tooth and claw but dressed in the guise of righteousness.

And so we atomise into a society of plastic Messiahs. 
Become your own YouTube guru or risk indoctrination by another’s.

I have no desire to live in a monolithic universe.
I would rather get pulled apart by the opposites.
Feasted upon by the contradictions.
Dam, don’t they stimulate us to new life?

Yet amongst it all, one thing binds.
That pain hurts.

We cancel to protect others from the dangers we pinpoint.
Like lashing out at the branches of a tree to cure the rot in its roots.

Zealous miniature Mussolini’s barking -  “I am protector, thus I cancel!”

Obama warned of the danger of circular firing squads.
You look around, like Dostoevsky before the firing squad. Are you not next, friend?

We stand amongst the Jacobian nightmare, unaware who will be guillotined next.
They want to be Maximilien Robespierre. 
Because they got too distracted to read how his story ended.

It is propelled by the fantasy of a pain free world. 
There is no high like the hedonist’s high. 
Dam, how I miss it!

But my angel was always in free fall.

My own faulty logic leads to a defence of insult and being insulted.
Fancy that. I find myself arguing against myself.
Because I am in defence of contradiction.
And alive in the confusion.

Recently, trolls visit my Instagram more regularly. 
They disparage in the hope of stimulating a reaction. 
A familiar playbook.

Don’t they realise I am soul calloused?  
The toxicity of others no longer infiltrates the corridors of my heart.

It has devoured darkness beyond their imagining. And discovered the light that exists on its other side too.

Trolls do have one benefit though: they shows your audience is growing.
You will never control assholery. 
And repressing it only compounds it.

Allow people their minor grievances, even their noxiousness.
It exists.

No hoovering up insults. 
No trashing the rancour.
No disposing of the acrimony. 

It must feast upon itself until it wears itself out. 
Does it not even draw sympathy?
To live in such swamps is a form of hell.

Trolls bring a useful reminder: that violence exists.
It steals the spirit. 
You exist in the world. 
You can’t unmake it.

As the Buddhists said:
“…this world, just as it is, with all its horror, all its darkness, all its brutality, is the golden Lotus world of perfection.” 

Enter the arena of life.
Understand it is a darkened arpeggio, a dissident symphony.
You are flanked by madness,
Amongst a procession of the insane.
The kaleidoscope shattered before you came,
And walk upon its shards you must.
In the din, a cannibal's Hallelujah:
Navigate its echo.

Don’t run from your pain.
Every sanctuary is world rejection.
Outside, the desert is vast and canopied with stars.
We are connected by joyous suffering. 

Just as resurrection is forever bound to the crucified. 

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