Prose monologue.

When I was So High.
By Terry Miles.

 

Like, when I was so high. Well, how do you just sit down and philosophise? Like you just don't have to look at the world, and when I say 'look' I really mean look, with a view to understanding it - that really is difficult; I mean, we might think we understand the world, but do we? Like we might just think we do, like it's our opinion, like everyone has one, a different one, but everyone thinks theirs is the one to be believed, like it's belief that's truth, like everyone is describing the same thing only differently, but then, how do we know that? That it's the same thing being described, only everyone disagrees over the differences, like it really matters, like it's war, like you ask the question, "Where are you coming from, you, me and everyone out there?" Like it's all about gooseberry bushes, storks, bodily functions, man's energy or a woman's internal economy, a creative mind called god, capable of acts of divine intervention like a benevolent dictator, only he couldn't quite get us right with our disagreeable faults, but where is the communal spirit, the agreement, the social contract and where is the observation and the correlation between the description and the object being described? The difference between appearance and representation! To be sure, certainty is just too easy. Like you don't have to think 'no more', like it's all been written down in black and white, there, paged in the book, where even the question marks are in rhetorical quotes. Like does some recontextualisation really have to take place? There now, hidden in the centre of the inner space are hadrons and quarks, the building blocks of the universe. But ask the question, "What does it all mean, from the depths to the four illusive corners of the world, inner space and outer space and the void beyond?" And all the response you get is , "You don't ask questions like that." Well, what sort of answer is that? You get the kind of feeling that 'they' know less than 'you' do. I mean what sort of a world is it when you can't ask a simple question? After all, the question wasn't how to build an aeroplane or anything difficult like that or anything embarrassing like "Why is it that Uncle Tom has never married?" Nothing like that, and then when we ask the question, "But why?" "What for?" What is justice when it is just not fair? Like being told when we are so high, that is how we should experience the world, like it's quite different from how we actually do experience it, the real world out there, like it's a really nice place, and when we say we don't quite see it that way, we just get a clip around the head for speaking whilst the T.V. is on. "Well it's for your own good." But then no one asks the question, 'What is really good?' If you ask a question like that they just give you some hand-me-down answer that they don't quite understand. Well, I think they don't understand. It's just the same old story over and over again. Well isn't there a better way to understand it? Like understanding the interior of a snowman? It's crystallised views? And its poetry? Copyright 1995 by Terry Miles.