If it were a game, if it were a project aimed at selling rubber trees, if it were anything other than what it is, a person might be able to accept the extra cost of some commission for the active parties.

But here, where so much emotional strain has gone into one’s own end of the proceedings, there can be no filtration of winnings... it must be all or nothing; it is the only way, in this case, that a life can be sustained without some incessant threat of collapse.

Nourishment equals entirety, here, where there are only questions and emotions and a language for the dispossessed.

We are back to speculation as to whether a being has earned its turn at being, or whether it is that everything, no matter how personal or intertwined with one's understanding of what is true, everything can, under certain circumstances slip away, disappear or be revoked, without any slim incision in the skin of justice.

To live is to live making life, and that life is the right we have to speak and to be heard and to exist unextenuated by riotous ambitions leveled by others against this continuation of whatever it means to have come into being, in the first place.

Everything earned, won or acquired or given, is filtered through a vast and indefinite allowance of continuations, against which one can, if aware, balance the threat of dissolution.

© 2002 Joseph Robertson

 

ON THE FILTRATION OF WINNINGS
JOSEPH ROBERTSON

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