Faces On My Birthday

Image by Hermann Rorschach | Public Domain

Today is my birthday.  I have survived the ? I posted on the calendar. It was daring to post that.

At 85,I dare to say I see them everywhere, the faces.  In the clouds of course, and in shadows, but also in trees, in different shades of cement on a wall, in the rug, everywhere where they are least expected. They do not suddenly appear from nowhere. They are already there, reforming and redefining the shapes of things, allowing new experiences of seeing and being seen

At 85, I see them. I do not project them. They are not Rorschach reflections of my stateless mind. To psychiatrists who presume I am projecting, not seeing, I ask, do you see them, and if they say yes, then I will ask, how do you know you are not seeing, and who told you were not, or in what book did you read the text that told you you were not seeing but projecting? And to those who do not see them, I ask how do you know I am projecting and not seeing since you have no experience of seeing upon which to base your misguided apprehension that I or you are projecting?

To all rabid empiricists, I respond that you are correct: there is no such thing as a non-empirical experience, and to add insult to injury, I posit that philosophy is the idea of experience, that mysticism is the experience of idea, disproving the most spiritually ignorant statement I have ever heard, that we are no more than protoplasm and biology who will become nothing when we die.

Enough.  I cannot speak anymore to such ignorance.

At. 85, the Faces are not looking. They are seeing.