The Lead Feather

Image credit: Unsplash/Mahdi Bafanda

By Augustine Wasef

A feather fell through my psyche like a lead brick. No imaginary ether propelled it forward, no ancient spell, and no spiritual awakening worthy of attention. And yet it punctuated the sonic landscape with a deafening cry. All else went dark. 

We all feel despair. The words of a ancient Catholic chant “what we have done and what we have failed to do” illuminate this feeling with such a mathematical precision. We have all spent time crying alone in bed with nobody to. We have all walked away from the theater of life into the agony of loneliness in a world of people traversing an infinite landscape alone. Around five years ago I felt a different type of loneliness. It wasn’t as easily satiated. 

A couple of years ago I was at my grandparents house and I vividly remember playing on a carpet. It seems an peculiar thing to remember. Somehow though I remembered it. Something feeling wrong as a thought flickered: What if something happened on the carpet? What if I am in a kind of coma unable to grasp for the mental light switch? 

To imply that reality, the very fabric from which our existence is predicated on, is merely just some game or some movie was simply too much for my childhood self to understand.

The feather had fallen. The final realization occurred like some cognitive awakening; it is logically impossible to disprove you are dreaming. Logic is not absolute and the logical axioms that hold in our lives might not hold in the lives of the world from which we are dreaming. How can you say human logic is the immutable language of the heavens universal and perfect? Then you are just waxing poetic. 

This dramatic thinking has been remade over and over again throughout history from Zhuangzi to Descartes, but it was simply too much for a child. Even worse I had wrought of it myself without the veil of unparseable academic language. 

The mental shockwave that resulted pierced my psyche, a gunshot. 

Now, around five years later, this episode is no more than a passing memory isolated and fossilized by the passage of time. When I discovered others who gone through similar thoughts I hear the same motif and chant over and over again. Paraphrased it is Alone But Not Lonely (no relation to the song and book with the same title). Quiet acceptance. 

I can’t live by that mantra though. I knew I would never surrender to a form of spiritual apathy. And I still haven’t.  I know within me that solipsism is wrong. Not because I have discovered some miraculous and hidden proof. Not because I have within me some innate distrust which is nothing more than wishful thinking (which is the most common workaround).

I have seen the shocking humanity contained within us and that is all the proof I need.

Thank you for choosing Inflection Magazine and human authorship.