Jonas Guigonnat MICRO CHANGES - JAN/FEB 2019 Prose

Under A Butterfly’s Wing

Written by Jonas Guigonnat

Finally, the night has come.

At this time inappropriate thoughts get a free pass. The unclear mind is ready for endless ambulations, accepting – with the quite welcome help of narcotics – the challenge of the unknown.

“The unknown?” one may ask with a grin.

If one dares ask himself what kind of knowledge, which truth, is irrefutable, it may take more than a lifetime to find any convincing answer. So far, humanity has been working on it for, let say, a millennium or 10, but still trying and still failing. (A large dosage of the narcotic is now needed)

Let’s try to follow that thought.

None is true, but does that makes things unreal? We see things, hear, taste, touch and smell them, but how do we know what things are? (Shit that’s a tricky one)

We need to know how to behave, to have an impact on the world and to reach our goals, individually and collectively. Tempting, the idea that with enough – or the “right” – knowledge, individuals may possess the blueprint to do just this.

But there is always a catch, somewhere, around the corner, waiting for the right moment to reveal itself. In this particular case, it is clear which one. Our dear old friend: chaos.

Photo By Ian Parker

The theory speaks about a butterfly in Guatemala and the effect of its battling wings. Where does it bring us? To a tsunami in Indonesia, or an avalanche in Tibet, who knows. That’s the torturous point – nobody does.

Those trying to read into the future fail consistently. Economists and their always “surprising” worldwide crises, historians and their surely speculative understanding of the past applied to the present, or tech-scientists trying to robotize the world and intelligence itself. The battling wings have done it again, brought confusion to humanity, showing that our lives are at the mercy of this butterfly effect.

Are you listening? Is it your heartbeat? Or maybe mine? Are you scared? Are we? If the butterfly possesses such a power, but that ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘I’ are not able to see it coming… What then?

Photo by G ambrus

To embrace the chaos seems the only option. Let’s take some more of that narcotic, but without brackets this time. Pupils dilated, on the edge of insanity, no emotion is strong enough to tame the roaming nothingness. Let the mind float until it finds an anchor, an illusion, a childly consolation for the impossibility of human understanding.

Each of our movements is a battling wing, every respiration, even the blink of an eye. The storm is thus coming from nowhere, everywhere at the same time. No rest for Chaos. The dance doesn’t have a start, nor a finish. The flow is constantly destroying human dreams, bringing them back to their essence; emptiness and superficiality. We build as if heaven can be reached. But what if the destination doesn’t exist, where is Babylon really going? In the silence of the night, nobody knows.

One may say that our hopes and strives are to forget, that none of our emotions, or perceptions count. There will only be smoke to chase, blurring every piece of reality. What if one dares to accept Chaos, divinity of permanent change, and its microscopic transformations that build and destroy civilizations? Then, the possibility of life will have many more meanings, asserting the realness of change and revealing the lie behind stability. The gods of nature may send as many butterflies as they want, we shall respect the force of their wings and maybe, only maybe, deploy our own.

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