If you think everything is simple, I have news for that thought. It is not, nothing is. There are no more organs to speak of, no thing to differentiate between you and me. No vagina or penis leading us on, to doom or ecstasy. No Marxist propaganda or democratic dance will sway me, or you, because simply put, they constitute the same manure. As do those beautiful organs that make the world rotate, diabolically poetic, maliciously if not but tinged with a kind of morbid hope, the kind that turns back on itself at the last moment, attempts to claim it knew that it was absurd from the get go. That kind of thing. So your body is of luscious matter, desired but repellant, lusted after but despised, and I long for that kind of endearing futility, that pointless happiness if you can call it whatever. Nevertheless, I digress for more astute, if not abstruse, concerns. I am looking for it, must get to the bottom of it. Of what? Yes, yes, of what indeed…

I can’t tell you where I find myself, though I know it’s far away. Is that so? The basic premise of this story relies on a fundamental understanding of movement. Movement as dictated energy. I am plodding along, guided by nothing but my mind, and it is spinning me in circles, confusing the already lost recipient of misfortune. To be a slave of your own thoughts is a frightening prospect, no? But consider this, you have no idea that you are being controlled, you have no idea that you are lost. You only have ideas, and those are implanted by the before-movement clause, heralded from something unknown, but not separate. If it is understood (which it is surely not) that all comes from before but is always present, that you are displaced as one, thus never able to excuse your actions as being fated by “the above,” then you can understand how it is possible to be a slave to your self, yet fully in command at the same time. I can choose to get out of bed and walk around and say meaningless things to people I don’t care about, and yet in doing so I’m also subjugating myself to a priori circumstances that tell me (command me, almost) that what I am doing is what I am indeed doing.

There’s no substantive proof beyond the mass agreed upon, that anything I do is of my own volition, and yet I do it of my own volition. This at first glance seems to be nothing more than paranoid delusion, but it’s not so far off the path as you might think, me calling it a double bind. The awareness that control and choice is elusive, seemingly at my fingertips, and while it very well might be, it never makes contact with my fingers, let alone my mind, and yet I partake, and could do so without asking any questions about the validity of my being in apparent control. The task must then be to get to the bottom of this quarry, uncover the quagmire of deception, of which there is no such thing because of course deception implies something is in fact hiding that which cannot be seen. But this is not so. The information, supposedly (as one might gather from my inquiry) secretive, is in fact directly in front of us, ready for the taking, but our eyes have become so accustomed to the screen dually created by us and not us, that we take everything “normal” for granted, not bothering (and I don’t blame you) to delve deeper than surface appearance.

The point of this pointless expedition is not to preach, is not to feel intelligent (another screen created to both oppress and suppress, to include and exclude), is not to convert those who feel differently (as I’m confident my words can do no such thing...I am not a holy man, mind you). What we’ve created with the help of existence itself is a shade, a variegated shade, multi-faceted, designed to forever keep us locked and freed at the same time. Time, that's the gift of giving right there. And it is to that sacred (not really, but it sounds so lovely) concept without body, without, without which we cannot be. Here's to that which there is but is not. We can't keep it, we can't do anything, but we can. That is you and me, I am still looking.

Isaac Johnson is a senior Media Studies major and a Literary writer for Generation.