The imminence of rain has hung over the skies of Los Angeles for the past couple of weeks. Today at about 1, the clouds darkened, threatening deluge, so eagerly we looked to the smog swathed grayness above, hoping, waiting. Outside the library, I felt a few drops, but it was a poor showing. Rain cleanses me, I feel, and sometimes when I drive through it, I feel cheated and dirty, like those days I sit at home or in my office indoors and miss the press of the sun's heat on my skin, trading it up for the ghostly luminesence of flourescent lights and computer screens. Unnatural.
The consciousness within me balks when I come indoors. It's like the unnatural bites in and drains the venom of simulacrum and plastic into my blood, making me weak and sickly. Trying to escape, my mind races frantically to find some escape; I get a headache and have to step out; I have trouble breathing and need fresh air. And if I am strong enough to douse those urges, I find myself feeling sleepy from inactivity, dozing amidst the pale light and paperwork, all the names swirling around me in a thick ooze of numbers and letters and miscellaneous symbols.
This afternoon, to keep from sleeping I looked up torri gates on Google: I'm feeling lucky. The people's string of virtual conversation about a religious symbol seemed strangely out of place; religion is where people are, where their consciousness is; the digital multiverse didn't seem to have a language for the explanation needed: What exactly is sacriligious now? Is it putting a torri gate in a garden? Submerging a cross in a bottle of urine? Rejecting tradition or change? The fascination is peaked by the taboo -- what will happen? Will we get away with it.
Yet, across the gate between what is seen and what is unseen, the goings on of heavenly beings are, I imagine, untroubled. The worst has already been done, the head of a prophet served on a silver platter, the statue of a god broken and discarded, the Almighty throne challenged by the hand that served it. The meaning is lost down here, yet we ask the same questions, unsure whether the meaning was supposed to be important, unsure of whether there is some significance to a symbol beneath the surface of lucidity, the icons written on our genes, but unintelligible in writing or speech. They are natural and engraved on our very subconsciousness, somewhere between soul and frontal lobe. Meaning or none, they remain, unreachable, unerasable, but grounded firmly in the beginnings of humanity many years ago, a time forgotten but simulated in our lives everyday.