Let Them Eat Cake

So I entered the realm of Cake again today, forced to purchase one early in the morning under the usual if (as it turns out with some surprise I’m relieved to report) thankfully less frequent goading impetus of waking up with the vividly specific vision of a supermarket-faux-buttercreme-blue-rosette-adorned white birthday cake which had shoved me out to Key Foods on Avenue A the last time I ‘had to’ have one.

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Not for the first time - this happens about every six minutes - I was forced to confront the harrowing difference between the idea of something and the reality of it, which as always (every six minutes) redoubles my doubt that we possibly could be the sort of Word Made Flesh business Christianity calls Jesus and state-of-the-art physics says we pretty much also amount to: energy transmuting under an unimaginable ferocity of conditions into matter. I had slowly but inexorably moved into what seemed to me the grim though far more persuasive probability that our supposed physical existence was in fact so unlikely as to make it, in fact, impossible. In fact, despite all the obfuscating sleight-of-hand smoke-&-mirror chimeric evidence to the contrary, it had never really happened. What we much more likely were was some other unfathomable being’s substanceless hologram puppet show. 

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The Cake convinced me.

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Because, you see, the effect of one bite of the thick white oily clotted substance atop the wood fiber-flavored dry yellow mass of that “cake” was to disabuse what I had taken for my mouth of the least sense that any task it had been or could be obliged to assign itself since, well, it had been what it at this instant now returned to believing - indeed realized - it still was: an idea, a ‘word’ that, whatever false promise had been lent to it that it might one day dwell among ‘us’ (whatever nonexistent reality ‘us’ was supposed to be) - well, you see, this sentence is impossible to end sensibly: except to say all tasks are meaningless. Even Instagram seems to be in on it. You see the words ‘story’ and ‘feed’ on the screenshot quadrant of the quartet of pics - as if you could choose one or the other. There is no choice. There’s only Story. What could there be to Feed? You see where I have gone and am going with this and by now are no doubt ardently hoping I’d desist from it, and so with the encouragement of that likely wish, I shall.

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But not before issuing the invitation to anyone within a mile radius of where “I” and the “cake” physically appear to reside, anyone, that is, who is courageous enough to do so, to please to partake with me of a new “last supper” – the supper to bid farewell to mistaken notions of what we are – to ingest a small piece of the “cake” and therefore to risk undergoing the revelation I believe it was put before us by the Hologram Puppeteer to induce: that the reason the Idea never exactly matches up with the Reality is because there is no Reality. Only other ideas. All is hocus-pocus. And those who resist the truth?

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Let them eat cake.

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