HarveySarles.com

Some aspect of my being seems to force me to identify my self with all the less fortunate, the downtrodden, the down and outers. It’s not pity. I feel no more sorry for them than I do for myself. I experience ten minutes of dripping pity once in a while, but I cannot sustain the feelings of weakness which pity arouses in me. I have no right to feel sorry for, to pity…

To feel pity is to have bought a particular vision of their being victims of a world’s madness; to be mourned…while still alive.

To feel pity is to have abandoned compassion, to have steeled my self against the possibility of being the object of pity, by thinking my self into some more exalted position – but still on an axis where pity reigns. Yet I see my self as all those others: maimed, hurt, dying; spurned for what they are or who they are not. I end up feeling bad that I am not one of them, whoever that might be.

Compassion? Perhaps. Maybe a pity gone wrong, I can tell my self that I am no longer alive. Or a sense of humanity, a sense of identity with all that is life, whatever tomorrow will bring. The future will… (Nietzsche’s: Antichrist)

Sitting here: writing, listening to the music of the organ, thinking, believing that I think life’s important thoughts. Teaching: a telling from the erstwhile possessor of knowing what there is of knowledge, to some set of eager students whose self-pleasing is to please or placate me. Reading: all of history’s greatest thinkers who have survived in writing, studying style, criticizing from this today all of the ideas of the all of time. Observing: seeing what others have seen and seeing through what I have been taught to see. All of these: I tell my self how wonderful is knowing, and knowing that I know.

My arrogance untested, my sense of power sails to heights beyond.  Nothing can stop me now! It is as if I have condensed all of life’s experiences into reading what I please and what pleases me…observing my self observing.

Too easy. Self-serving.  Aggrandizing. Suspicious.

That which I do not read is that which I cannot understand: that which I do read is that which I already know.

Wary: of becoming my own self’s teacher, now full circle, life a mere celebration of power’s exaltation.

It came swiftly and with a harshness I have grown to expect. “Don’t you believe in change, in making things better?,” I was asked with a rhetorical twist of lemon so sour it curled upon itself with three dots trailing, dripping some mix of blood and venom.

“Why do you take us to the edges of the issues, purifying them beyond belief and being, beyond any possible doing?,” I was asked. “Do you espouse the way the world is?,” two of them joined in the accusation which a joining of minds heightened to a pitch which humans can barely hear but twitches at the skin’s ends vibrating with a sharpness which cuts.

I replied that I tried to make them think beyond experience, deeper than they had imagined; that if they didn’t want to study with a teacher, why not go their own way and not attack the idea of teaching and of the teacher. Why did they think that when I tried to overdraw a situation, to describe it that they will look at it critically to see if I saw what is there, that they can begin to see beyond their current beliefs, that I do not think that what is, is what should be.

“Qualify what you see and what you say, that we know what you really believe,” I was told.  I replied that my being there, my instancing myself, was the best I could do to exemplify who I am, what I say and do.

To provoke their questions, in or out of passion or anger, was to promote their seeking, their being students of their own worlds. Against teachers, against teaching, they wanted me to tell them just what I thought.  I, reflecting upon how Nietzsche was misunderstood in spite of qualifying, stood my ground as a teacher who would try to get them to think, to study, to inquire…

Some yearning to be beyond the whatever is; an abandonment of my being, of body, of life, to be outside to be the ideal of my own imagination; to take my seeing, hearing, feeling, that which I am and do, and wish them to be my imagination’s creation, that I can go beyond being…and still be. Wishing to be…my own God; that that God be me?

Instead, why not push my being, extend the senses of each sense, rather than abandoning  being to some imagination about it?  A musician’s discipline – each and every day – to begin the study again as if it were new, fresh. Start slowly. Try for an extended evenness beyond the suddenness of everyday life. Faster: see faster, hear faster, just beyond yesterday’s doing, just beyond what (I think) I can do. Softer:  less pressure, less tension, less… Hear: now, first, in my hearing imagination, the clearest, loveliest, fullest, most musical of all sounds; to be matched in the doing. Each sound beyond, above yesterday’s, yet within the senses of my senses.

More, because I am now more, my senses extended and extending the limits of being. What were fanciful wishes are extended and recreated in today’s doing. No longer abandoning doing to something extra-sensory, some wistful wishes that the world were something other; but becoming the self that creates more, in its own being.

From Plato to Toilet Training: I attempt to bridge the gap, says J.

From the removal of the mind from the body…which we are, we have misplaced the senses of our being;

Lost: the directions of life as the bowels only, merely excrete, and the  mind is thought to be the true basis of what and who we are.

Those who seek the light also seek the cleanliest of air so they neither see nor smell what problems and possibilities lurk within the actualities of the bowels’ being and moving our lives each day.

But – I tell my self – neither one without the other: no air, no light, the bowels of life’s chemistry extract the nutrition from what we understand as food and sustenance, leaving what’s left to be deposited, matured, half-rotted and stinking wherever we squat; formed into senses of wholeness that leave us at our pleasure and disposal. What stink, what stench that we ban it from our thinking of our being? So far from the mind’s eye where we now tell us we see and hear and think thoughts, cleansed, smelling good so we may yet taste them and not become ill from our own excretions. The body: what we are, all we are…the mind is some story about the body? (Nietzsche)

What knowledge packed into self-training that I move breath and muscles so they move themselves, extracting nutrition and energy and life’s blood?

What dialogue, what symposium, what theory of being and doing; what view from bowels’ bowels?

The energy of being in general and in each instant…of being.

It is perhaps a question about immediacy: a flow of feelings and body’s vibrational presence. Or a dip into fatigue, to be relieved by solid sleep, and the hope that tomorrow will find new…energy.

Why is this problematic? History: perhaps I was trapped by the idea that life would get somehow easier at some point.

But life seemed to become more difficult, more complicated, and I was not prepared – not mentally, not physically, not…Dreams of a fantastic future entered being, everyday.

Remember those days: depression, debilitation. I told my self I was bored. But the fact is I was waiting for something to happen.

Searching for some message, I was lamenting each moment, hoping that there was some life secret, some path of extraordinariness which would…appear, perhaps suddenly.

I was hoping that my actual life was an allegory for the wonderfulness which I felt I had been promised…

Likely to succeed! How many times did others tell me that?

What was I really seeking? Repose – I doubt it. Flattery – certainly. An easy way to become… raised my hopes.

Mainly the senses of being as being vibrant, were in my mind, supinely wishing.

Now this story seems silly, removed, remote; except that I can still find it too easily, and it finds me, in odd moments.

Now, I work to find new energy. I appreciate the rhythms of days and weeks and years, try to find myself who loves being and doing. The energy of each present means being in and remaining in…each present: new and continuing.

If there is success beyond being and doing, I am certain that it means more work, not less. The reward – a now nebulous notion – is to expend in each moment, more than the necessary. I seek energy, a synergism, such that each moment creates more. …and it often does.

Yesterday a friend told me that I am an elitist; that I drop ideas and abandon old friends as I move on in my life.

I said, no, at first, thinking he meant I was snotty and arrogant, and I feel that I am neither to any particular degree.

But he is correct. Unless there is some pedagogical  reason, some rethinkings, some…something seeming new…

I have had already many conversations, been involved in the myriad plots of novels and of life; I don’t want to rehash them forever.

I am not in love with my own history, nor totally entranced with the words I wrote yesterday.

I want to grapple with new challenges. I want to grasp at life’s chances, each and every day…with very little rest and diversion.

I don’t deny that anyone and everyone else can move along with me.

Most don’t want to, for many reasons: they are not ready to move on, or are afraid of…an uncertain or unclear future, not knowing what there could be; or they are already satisfied; or…

I would rethink with those who want to know, and converse with those who want still to engage in life’s struggles.

But I need to feel that I am serious, to live life seriously; prepared to engage in discussion and argument, and move…on…forward, with a sense of directedness, always demanding.

I try to be the observer of life’s simplicities and complications, and wonder which is which.

I want to think large, globally, to see the patterns quickly, to deepen compassion and understanding without abandoning humanity: the world’s or my own.

My skills, always limited, require honing and practice and care, lest others dissuade my purpose.

Elitist, I am, mostly about my own history. Yes, it is all me, but how to choose which memories to rethink, which to hold in abeyance. How is forward, next, expansive?

Not loving my own youth, it is how I arrived, the path which chose me.

The path of elitism – now some form of code word – travels the edge of the abyss between being worshipped and being understood.  For me, it – my elitism – is either wanting to be understood…or the abyss.

What do the others want, that they decide who I am?

Honestly, I’m all for it. Being honest, however, is not always simple or clear. And there is drift, a slow alteration in habitual living whereby it is not always clear, or simple, where honesty resides.

As I grew up, where I grew up, the distinction upon which I danced ranged between knowledge and success. Where I grew up, success ran quite a bit ahead, and there frequently appeared other routes, alternate roads which ran faster or smoother or more easily toward success’ forms and apparitions. And some appeared more certain. And who could we trust to judge…honestly?

Fame, riches…would knowledge get me there? Would knowledge protect me from such a great desire for fame…riches? I did not want to be a failure; honestly!

Now, they say, there is less honesty, because what it is all about is fame, however earned, and the sometimes parallel tracks of knowledge and success are in some state of disrepair, or buried beneath a growth of summer’s vines and weeds or winter’s snow, packed tightly down.

I find honesty a constant struggle; a struggle often, just to locate honesty. The judge in me which watches my self observing must be kept sharp, sharper than each yesterday if I am to judge my judging each today.

These days, we must study with some teachers who combine a sense of excellence in the performance of physical skills, with a depth of conceptual art, helping and enabling us to seek the energy and strength to grapple with the problem of honesty – which has become a necessity in life, and in our lives.