Stasis vs. Direction

Sometimes you feel like you're almost stifled...but not quite. It is as though you are stifling yourself with thoughts, some state of confusion that you cannot exactly pinpoint, though you recognise some sort of disturbance in your.. mien. A professor mentioned that Kafka was upsetting because his stories draw your attention to the absence of values we previously held on to in our traditional perception of life; we are subconsciously made aware of their importance due to the chaos that occurs when they are eliminated, yet cannot alleviate our discomfort because the absence itself argues that these core values and ideas are lost forever. Certainly, the world now is Kafka-esque, but modern times should not feel triumphant at this; rather, we should take heed of the results.

Yesterday, I heard of people stealing HIV-tainted blood. Perhaps the tainted-serum syringe is the gun of the new age; although I maintain some hope that there are less sinister explanations when these things occur, I can't help but jump to such conclusions when similar sorts of baseness is fed into us daily from all corners of the media. It must be admitted that HIV is blackly magnificent; the way it completely usurps your own immune system to it's advantage is remarkable...maybe I should discuss it further some time later. One professor called it the king of viruses, which I believe is not an overstatement, though perhaps black irony considering the disease it causes. It puzzles me profoundly after seeing the sheer awe from my Professors' faces and words as they talk about these things we don't even consider to be living ...how they convey that the systems are painstakingly precise, fluidly elegant, highly regulated - and in the same vein, a product of directed randomness, a bundle of fine-tuned accidents, a collection of fortuitous glitches. The more you know in minuscule detail what HIV - even influenza - actually does and how it does it - well, it just seems to make less and less sense that it could fit together so precisely, and yet so uniquely. Is it just loyalty to the established current mindset that allows one to mask the confusion that must arise with such contradictions, to emphasize specificity in well-orchestrated systems whilst solidly proclaiming the lack of direction for such systems to arise? Meanwhile, viruses don't plan things out for themselves - just continue to come into our bodies and begin spinning their magnificent web of manipulation, blindly and beautifully, ensnaring our own processes for their sake. Perhaps one professor put it best: "Viruses don't do. They just are."

-pathopoet