THE MACHINERY OF THE UNDISTORTED (EXPERIMENT)

The Thing You Blame

The disturbance was never in what happened

You think the thing that happened did this to you.

It did not. Nothing out there has ever once reached in and put a feeling into you. Not the words. Not the look. Not the silence. Not one thing that has ever happened to you did the thing you are certain it did.

I know how that sounds. Hold on.

The same thing happens on a good day and you shrug it off by lunch. The same thing happens on a bad day and it takes you apart for a week. Same thing. Same words, same person, same weather. If the sting were in the thing, it would come out the same every time, the way a hot stove burns you the same every time you touch it. It does not. So it was never in the stove.

Something on your side is doing all of it. And you have never once caught it, because it does its work faster than you can look, and hands you the finished feeling, and swears the feeling came from out there.

So find it. But I am not going to hand it to you. You would nod and keep it as one more idea and change nothing. You are going to say it yourself first.

You said out there. In what they did. Almost every man says it, and says it fast, and feels no doubt at all saying it.

Look at what is actually there. Not the story of it. The thing itself. The words that were actually said, in the actual order, on the actual face. Go and look. What is in them? A little air, a little sound, a face doing what faces do. The wound is not in there. You brought the wound. You laid it over the little sound and read it back out and called it what they did to you.

He was driving. The phone was face down in the seat for four hours. Nothing was happening on the other end. Nothing at all. And the whole afternoon of him leaving was real, and the drop in the chest was real, and not one grain of it was his. The screen was blank. She poured an afternoon into a blank and read it back out as him. You said he was pulling away, or you said busy, and either way you were sure there was something over there. There was a blank.

This is the whole of it, and it is simpler and worse than you want it to be. There is no wire running from the event into you. The event is out there being nothing much. The feeling is in here being everything. And the thing that ties the two together, that says this happened so I feel this, is a story so old and so fast you take it for the plain truth.

The naming does not stop. It will name the next thing before it finishes landing, and hand you the feeling, and point at the world. But once you have caught it just once, felt around for the wound in the actual thing and found only air, the pointing never quite works again.

Watch for it. The next time the thing that always gets you barely touches you at all, do not walk past it. Stop, in that gap, and see that nothing out there was different. The event did not change. Only the story did not come.