Cleave the Sparrow

by Jonathan Katz

Right, because the clearer you see a fiction, the harder it is to break free. And the more elaborate the fiction gets, the further away you are from truth.

To know a thing is to sever ourselves from it so we can see it from the outside.

And so you’ll have to choose which one to follow, and this self-conscious act of interpreting your own divided mind is why you can’t have nice things, because no matter how hard you try, or how desperately you desire it, no matter how much ketamine you take or heroin you inject, at the end of the day, for as long as you’re here, there’s just no getting away from yourself.

Belief clings, he wrote. Faith lets go.

But I’ll tell you the main problem with Islam, and it’s the same problem with Christianity and Judaism and others, probably. It’s all humorless. And religion was never meant to be taken seriously. That’s how you get the Crusades, and the Inquisition, and the London Bombings, and all that shit. Say what you will about Zen Buddhism, but at least it’s funny.

One of the Stonefish’s favorite disciples, Alan Watts, used to joke about our real decision making process. What we do, he said, is we sort of go through the motions of worrying for a bit until we get a vague sense we’ve made ourselves sufficiently miserable, and then we call it a day and do whatever we decided in the first two seconds.