Leader

We’re developing a wine belief. Isn’t that something? That we’re ascending a wine-ladder.

We believe in wine-meaning. In an eschatology of wine. We really think it’s going to make sense – in the last bottle. That it will all come together at the end.

We believe in Cicero, in other words. We want to believe in Cicero.

 

A wine pattern. That’s desperate!

We are desperate. We want to find meaning in all things. We want to find the delicious in the disgusting. We can’t believe in the disgusting. Which is why we’re missing Cicero’s most fundamental lesson.

 

We want to have had a leader – of course. Even an ambiguous leader. Even a misleading leader.

We’ve wanted to be led – all along. We wanted Cicero to have been guiding us.

We wanted there to have been a Cicero path. That she’d laid out for us, step by step. A yellow brick road – why not?

 

We want to be led – of course we do. We wanted someone to have been in charge. For none of this – none of what’s happened – to have been by chance. We wanted to be part of the unfolding of fate.

 

To have trusted in Cicero – that’s what we wanted. To have been right in trusting her. To have followed her cue. Her clues. The path she left us. To have been good little boys and girls.

 

Authority – that’s what we wanted to see. To trust someone. To believe that someone had the answers. That we weren’t just duped. That it was leading somewhere, all of it. That we weren’t just on a hiding to nothing.

That it wasn’t all about a pile of crappy old wines that Cicero didn’t want to take wherever she was going!

 

A greater Meaning – is that what we wanted?

We still believed that there was an antidote to nihilism. That this wasn’t nihilism’s wine. That this wasn’t nihilism’s campus – not entirely.

Were we credulous? Were we just like all the other fools, looking for some new religion? Wanting some maharishi, or whatever. Someone to tell us that it all made sense …

Was there something wrong with us? A pathetic dependency. Were we meaning-cravers? Meaning-beggars?

 

We yearn for meaning. Our hearts beat for meaning. We call out for meaning in the world’s night. Meaning in wine, and in disgusting wine. As if the disgusting should itself be meaningful. As if errancy were truth.

 

The wine was a reminder. Not to trust the world. Not to take comfort in the world. Not to seek out meaning in the world.

Which meant the meaningful lay in the meaningless – in the disgusting. In relation to the meaningless. Meaning was to be found even where there was emphatically no meaning. When there was even anti-meaning. Anti-wine.

 

Victory in defeat. Glory in vanquishing. Clues in the clueless. There was something to be found in loss, after all. In our exile. In our banishment …

 

The way down is the way up. Our degradation was our exaltation – our lifting up. Our descent was an ascent. Our debasement – our exaltation.

We were climbing. Rising. Even as we fell.

 

And our stupidity – what should we make of that? What is its significance? Our idiocy was brilliance – the highest brilliance.

The true vine is the false vine. The messiah is the anti-messiah. Sin is salvation. Perdition blooms.

 

We want our lives to make sense. To have made sense. Every slight. Every indignity. The whole humiliation of part-timing. Every perceived slight.

 

Our paranoia. Our masochism. Our learned helplessness. Our self-sabotage. Our war upon ourselves. Our ruination. Our self-devouring. All our lack of confidence.

Our impostor’s syndrome. Our sense that we shouldn’t be here. That our very existence was wrong. That a mistake had been made. That we’d slipped through, unaccountably.

That we were chancers. Footpads. Thieves in the temple. Desecrators.

That we were a sign of the end. Marauders. The equivalent of Viking pillagers. Enemies of all true thought. Thought-pirates. Ransackers. Ruiners. Burn-down-the-village types.