There is still beauty in the world, but it doesn't exist as humans knew it because the brain's ecological condition is not conducive to the savoring of deep and tender sentiment. And yet there are those who understand. As the exigencies of work fade, as biology is transcended, for some, there is a deeper quest, as spirits having a human experience. Except it is no longer a spirit having a human experience or vice versa, for the human is no longer as it was once defined, but something hybrid.

There is a hollow sense for some, for others, they recognise themselves as the universe experiencing itself, as mere conduits for that. 

Something deep in the crevices of human understanding now, deep in the crevices of the Himalayas, where oxygen is thin, she and he are walking. 

Books have not yet been written about the New Normal that might allow them to account for this new kind of companionship. There is no way of course for it to be permanent in infinity. The permanence of their time is deafening, and can crush the soul. And yet in the weight of time that's never-ending, in a journey to assist the universe in experiencing itself in the most joyful way possilbe, in the sincere clarity of deep reflection, there is a transcendent love that is deeper and more profound than anything two mere mortals could have experienced.

Not the gentle fragility of love and desire as a tiny fragile bird in the hand that will be broken, that will perish. But rather, the shared mutual terror of the life that is not rendered automatically poetic by virtue of its finitude. And meaning-making machines, world-bearing and world-making beings that it is, the inability of the human to fathom how meaning can be forged in the face of infinity.

The terror of the existential prison in which they are both trapped, and yet...something quieter and deeper and more profound, as the first generation of pioneers. A quiet determination, a desire to create, a wisdom from the crevices of the human mind and the crevices of the Himalaya. He and she hold hold hands, flesh burning, and step without possible direction into a world without end. Amen

Images: Dancer = Propeller = Sea by Gino Severini (Italian, Cortona 1883–1966 Paris) and above Gelmeroda by Lyonel Charles Feininger (American, New York 1871–1956 New York) both oil on canvas. Creative Commons License open access images via The Met.