The Heart Goes First

 

不明白的是為何你情願　讓風塵刻劃你的樣子
就像早已忘情的世界曾經擁有　你的名字我的聲音

I don't get why you are willing
To be written all over by dust in the wind
Like how once this heart-forsaken world
Used to know your name, my voice

羅大佑 《你的樣子》

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Dear Kate,

Two news headline, which one is true?

ONE: "People who work with those struggling with drug addictions are warning that the Canada emergency response benefit program (CERB) — Ottawa's primary support for households left without income due to the pandemic — is helping to fuel illicit drug use and may even have contributed to overdose deaths."

TWO: "To accompany the pandemic, a new survey reports economic devastation impacts overall mental health, including an increase in suicide for parents with children under 18."

One suggests too much money kills, the other a lack of it.

Of course they are both true, insofar to report facts within each of its own context.  Yet the only "facts" to report are that people are dying, and we are only making educated guesses about the why(s).

What is interesting, actually entirely strange, is that two sorts of devastation both attribute their cause to one and the same, one to its presence and the other absence, as if to resist, even refute, each other's mutual reductionist reasoning.

In life we can accept such absurd contradiction (and many more) as long as we hold fast to the true tenets of our age, such as that Money Makes a Man.  Or to put it another way: you are what your money makes you.  Or as Jesus puts it yet another way: your heart is where your money is.

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."  But what can "they," the "System" do to us if we haven't lost our heart already?  And why is it up to "them" to worry about the answers but not us, not me?  Maybe I want to be served partial truths, easy explaining-aways, because these too are what I like to serve others?  Maybe I don't want any answer that doesn't serve me well, my puny morality, my shriveled imagination, my little little aspiration to live a tiny tiny life?  Maybe deep down I don't really care, not about the past or the future, not about others or even myself, as long as life continues to happen and I happen to clinch to the edge of the happenings, meaninglessness of it all fully meant?

Some says in dying the heart goes last.  No, it goes first, and we don't even remember since when.

Yours, Alex