Spinning Wheel of Death

Once, when I was young, so very long ago, the world was a different color than it is now. We had so many colors to choose from, you see, and we chose all of them. It was wonderful to see a splash of orange upon a deep blue sky, or a bright glint of white on a rolling river. But, I fear, we took things far too far. There is no color anymore, you see, not as we had it. People started pointing out tings, real things, like red was just a shade of purple, and purple a shade of blue, blue of green, green of yellow, yellow of orange, orange of red, and so on until we couldn’t tell one color from another. That’s when the world became red, I think, because of all the blood. We couldn’t talk anymore. Without any clear definitions, we could only struggle and fight. There was something to that red world, I’ll admit. Passions, high, great and mighty men doing deeds too great to contemplate, but it all passed into the purple, into princes then kings then emperors. Men aping God; and what a blue world they made when it all came crashing down, when we saw that our idols were just flesh, that there was nothing really very regal about them but that we thought they might be more than us. What deep and sorrowful poems came then, bemoaning the loss of all our ideals. So, we just gave ourselves to nature, letting whatever would grow—how green and dark the forests of our minds became, how unsearchable! As if from a dream, we woke up, declared reason our god. How bright and golden that yellow world was of pure sunshine, how intense. We kept turning up the lights until we couldn’t see anything but that brilliant yellow. Our eyes grew dim, and that yellow began to bleed, just a little. The orange world was a very silly place of outrages. Flamboyancy ruled everything, an age of marketing and lies. It was perhaps the shortest age, for we quickly fell back into the red carnage, the struggle, and the whole cycle came on again, only faster this time. Now that color wheel is spinning so quickly that it’s hard to say what age we’re in, for at all times, we’re constantly bleeding into the next, and there is no color anymore, just an insipid admixture, all the paints poured out together into one brownish sludge.