aphorisms

Sitting here, casting far and wide, searching my innermost mind’s word-generation centers, translated into scratches upon paper – it seems difficult to believe that I often lack words.

Not usually in mornings, but often after a long day’s interactions in intensity, trying to relate the day to spouse or friends or even to myself…I seem to have no words.

Now trying to recall the sense of being word-bereft, I sit here fairly confident, a large orange pen in hand, dictionaries and thesauruses in the next room waiting just in case I need a word.

I am full to brimming with the ordinary, the range of words searching not for words, but for just the right word, the perfect word, that word which says it all.

At other times, though, too intense, too many scenes and persons and interpretations, understandings – feelings flash in and out of mind’s eyes and ears, not stopping to say more than a brief, “Hello,” I cannot seem to find hardly any words at all.

Lacking words, I could not write…and do not try at those times when, lacking words, I have not much to say, nor any way to try.

A set of other characters emerge in hard times, in down times. Some adjust, and do, and wait. Some fight: old battles in new wars. Others over-see; and some reform.

Reform! Re-form? To truly re-form: my mind’s pre-occupation, requires a sense and knowledge and good will and strength and timing… and… and…What is to re-form: to take some image of what there is and how it worked – once – and alter the structure in order to preserve the image? And, to hope that it will work, once more. Will it work – to re-form?  Is that image of the structure which once worked, does that image really depict the form which is to be altered, or was it some story which was good enough to account… as long as it was working?

To re-form is to avoid re-thinking, to place faith in that past when things went right. To re-form is to take the same knights and centurions – now grown old – to grant them some discipleship, some belief still in their own powers, and to send them out on new day’s dawning to assert that it is a new day. Are they convinced? And, we?

Now, years later, she confessed that she had thought, for a long time, that John Berryman was some sort of fake. The great thinker-poet, who used to orate and make pronouncements beyond the reality she felt to be possible, who was actual, turned her off.

He was, she thought, all talk, mostly pretension. He, trying to grapple with life and death and death within life, was trying with all his might to state what he felt he must, pronouncing what he saw. He didn’t like life always or even all that often. Now, years later, she confessed that she only became convinced that he was serious, to be weightily considered, when he actually took his life.

What testimony to a poet’s life that he must commit suicide to convince her that he was real, after all?

(And if he was not real…?)

Winter sunset’s light’s low angles illuminate the land and buildings from the top down. Light, gone from the ground where darkness has settled, staying low, held down by the coldness of the snow always wanting to turn to ice; light directs us upwards towards the tops of things as if heaven were a search[-ing] light.

I am a life-line for some of the people I know, enjoy, and love. Their lives become grim in a central aspect of what they do, or who they are, yet I remain somehow steady for them: not a therapist to tell them it’s all O.K.; not a teacher or an advisor to tell them what to do; more a constant person who wants to engage them in serious (or light) talk about an idea, do some analyses of situations we think about in common, seek each other’s experience or advice or critical thinking-through together.

Each of us occasionally, find ourselves in difficult times; times from which we will probably emerge, yet see no present light emerging. What seemed momentary now tries to fill all of life’s spaces; all thinking thoughts drift like a mud-slide into these moment’s dire straits. We call each other, find one another in such times, and here I am, fairly reliable, knowing what grimness is and how it may travel in the mind’s eye enveloping more and more of your being. I have done such journeys, you see, and know them all too well; as close to the edges of their dirtyness and down-ness as staying being has permitted me.

Now restricted, I practice them each day, much like practicing the violin. I confirm their being, I can confirm your being. And we move on, I a life-line, pushing your thoughts beyond the sun-eclipsings of doom’s concentrations, into some thought development we share. I seek you, I want your advice out of the larger experience of memory’s brighter days, into tomorrow’s openings.

Come on: there is work to do!

Not-talking, not being with, those who breathed life into us, in whose imagination we reside permanently, is a journey which wrenches, threatening full-time to keep us in childhood memories and meanderings. Justifying why we do not talk, trying to redo memories, as if their correcting in today’s thinking will update the actuality, like plastic surgeons uplifting the faces of age and antiquity.

Not-talking because talk is impossible; because the words which would be loving turn too easily into threats; wishes to please, to hold, to be with, fall outside of immediacy into some abyss…where terror resides, lurking; its cheshire-cat leer preparing to pounce upon any momentary weakness perceived.

Not-talking, now the resolve of life weakened into last words. Talk, not-talk, now altered into the what-would-have-been. Talk, the might-have-been, battling at last to come into today, so we can all breathe the same air, unpolluted by the burdens of not-talking…

The dedication of 1984 to Orwell’s dystopic vision, the commitment to a kind of paranoia of the spirit, to observing all the world’s deliberations from the bleakness of the Ministry of Truth, the prophecy that we would not see 1984 for what it is in totalitarian terms…this dedication must yield.

1985, a new beginning, an awakening. Perhaps the trick is to take the feelings which I called depressed, which moved me to a wariness just outside of skepticism fed by a cynical stoicism acrobatically toughened, and turn them into some sense of can-do; into an energy which drives itself…on, forward…

Nor to deny Orwell, but to rotate and translate his vision into the time of all of time from the perspectives of now, of then, of once-upon-a-time and always will.

The feelings, self-justifying, the bad conscience of our age, need to be grasped for the power they possess to push, and turn to…

What, now is the question I pose, the query I wish almost to dodge in its doing?

1985, it has arrived; almost in spite of itself, a prophecy well-served, a wish to avoid the rebound which 1984 mirrors in its bouncing.

and “move on out”…

…for what I cannot have, sometimes fill me with a sense of incompleteness which almost screams with its intensity.

…for what I do not have, are different. These seem like envy or jealousy for a life which could have gone some other ways, but didn’t.

…creep into my being, a set of feelings which move in their location, sometimes settle-in and set my thinking in the direction of what keeps those yearnings alive and burning. Yearnings are stories I tell myself to heighten and deepen some internal bodily changes which, in their turn, deepen and heighten.

Where do they derive? From youth’s visions of what might be, or might have been? From some sense of moving beyond whose call must be heeded, no matter what? From some sense of fulfillment of a life whose work and worth have been underrated? From a boredom whose life continues to grow beyond my life, no matter what? From a romanticism native to America’s children who were taught the myths of “forever after,” and the “prince-cess on the Great White Horse” who would rescue and deliver me?

What would halt these yearnings’ burnings? Maybe only death. What could control them that they are not so ready to explode, blurring each moment into a wish for magic and miracles?

Yet…yearnings keep life moving, and provide living its own due.

A smirk: a kind of smile whose rising lips tell another story.

A smirk: a sort of sardonic pose which stands outside itself – a double-smile which smiles at itself, smiling.

To smirk: to see the seriousness within a smile which tells itself a story that is so serious, that it must smile at itself, lightening the interpretation and understanding of the story.

Who may smirk? Who has smirking “rights?”

The person who smirks sees a situation through and sees through a situation so one finds a place from which to observe observation.

A smirk: an “Ah-Ha!” expressed as a “Ha-Ha!”

Smirking rights: who has such rights has gone through the paces and trainings and finishings which certify a being, many times over.

Smirking rights: who has seen, “I tell you so,” turn upon itself – “I told you so!”

Smirking rights stand behind, beyond, afterwards, the wisdoms and trepidations of hindsight, watching in advance the process begin again.

Standing, sitting, smile turned to smirk, justifying itself in some sense of internal candidness: the smirk seen as smile knows itself as smirk.

The second night of the weekend was less serious, somehow. A wedding to unite two lives was celebrated in a new, suburban church. Like most other weddings these days, the ceremony was perfunctory: something to be done, to be gotten through, so life could proceed, and the party could begin.

It was a celebration, the people were earnest, but it lacked a seriousness that was electric the previous night.

The first night was an attempt at translation. The Japanese Noh tradition: an actor had come to tell a story cast in ancient days in Japan, had come into modern America, into the modern Midwest.

The Buddhistic sense that life is a cherished illusion, heavy, pregnant with some odd sense that life is us and within us, played upon a stage to be watched by passive lives who, while watching, live suspended in the sense of not-so-sure that we are here.

Life, flowing like the Tai Chi we had been studying, never suspended, but like the rhythms of heart’s beating bump-bump, it told a story of a heroism that life forces against the death which is our destiny.

Flowing, but with a care and expertise of every moment’s yearning, to play upon the eye’s viewing and body’s understanding.

Two celebrations of life, two nights running, yet the second promised a futurity less filled with the love of life that life appreciates.

The universe of available knowledge become too vast for the comprehension of the most knowing. It began to fill books of its own description: an outline of knowledge, descriptions of courses of study, the disappearance of the knowers replaced the books which informed – placed into the memories of magnetic devices, gathered into some sense of an entity which was the curriculum. Read the rest of this entry »

This past year, a Sabbatical: a year away from the ordinary of the past twenty years of teaching and bureaucratic ballyhoo, has been a study in patience.

To conceive of a task which is much larger than usual, too grandiose for conceiving in the ordinary; to prepare, to think out how to do it so it could actually come to be and to be done, requires much patience.

A task, a goal, a doing, a getting done; to begin, to prepare, to gather the task in mind in such a way that it can be broken down into the parts that can be done today before the part which must be done tomorrow; or next.  And the question of the order of the parts is never all that clear or obvious, as they may become aspects of a larger plan. Read the rest of this entry »

This life, this experience, this day…not enough, somehow. Looking, searching, yearning, is there not more? Why…not? Where is there more; beyond? Other lives, others’ lives, magical beyond proportion, it seems these days that this is not sufficient. I wish, I wish…Some spirit of the Universe, come and lead me, take me to the beyond, beyond being; beyond my being. Do I not…deserve; have I not carried the burden of my life to the furthest edges? Is there not more? Lead me! Take me! Detail? Texture? Density? You say to me that I hear the muted conversations with the self of selves which stretches time and condenses experience? Pay attention, rearrange the bounds of being and the boundaries of the categories which I tell my self are the edges of my being that I wish to go beyond; I tell myself so that they will melt when I arrive. Transcendence?

Tomorrow…is now here. I sit looking down upon the river of life which flows from the end of the land into the oceans of life, of other being. I float upon waters where the gravity of pushing down is borne lightly by the buoyancy of liquid’s deep. Transcend yesterday; tomorrow is now here. The yearning of what was toward what will be, is where I sit looking back, looking out. Where am I that I have arrived?

Sitting here, safe from winter’s ravaging, I feel inspired. The nape of my neck, stimulated, tickles my mind; telling me to think bigger: about more than whatever is. Traveling now, words pour out on paper as that inspired feeling invades my hand and fingers, moving into the pen which is my mind’s extension. I want to be inspired. Am I…inspired?

My thoughts, wandering, re-search that feeling of inspiration, concentrating on what is important to say. Are the feelings sufficient? Do they guide this pen? Do they arrange the contrast of blue-black upon white into the realm of the nearly profound?

Reading now what I have just written, I battle to regain the upper hand upon my self. The nape of my neck stretching, seeking; do what you do! Inspire me, stimulate me, drive me to say what you feel, what I must. Ah-h-h, so good!

To see the white of page slowly filling, abandons the editorial self. No longer must I read what I have written, it completes itself. Do I say anything? Is anything said through me?

Where are you, inspiration? Where do you lurk, popping out when I summon you, upon occasion? Writing!? I can write. Words upon words; sentences, paragraphs (the page is filling fast).

But what is there to say, which I have not said before? Am I merely arranging or organizing words? Am I still, was I ever, truly inspired? Do I need to think that I am inspired?

Does the dialogue between what is and might be, help cause me to jump to heights not tried? Yes? Yes. I attempt to reconcentrate the feelings, which are used to refocus the thoughts, translated into writing.

Have I written enough, too much? Does it say anything which seems truly inspired?

Worn. Exhausted. Exhilarated still. Inspired to be inspired.

Occasionally, questions about the meaning of life pop up like toast in my life’s living, and I am forced to face myself with questions of the life worth living, the death worth dying. The whole thing, the business of life – my life – what would it choose to have been, what epitaph would it write for itself?

Here lie I: I the great, the humble, the contrite, the brave, the more than, the not quite…I. Thinking of what I have admired, a force heavy with my lost youth tells me to go out with a large bang. Some reason, some quest requited, some pay back to the gift that is my life. I push away in these moments the thoughts that life has been burdensome, difficult. I seem to want a life-experienced requiem, an ode to my own life.

Perhaps I look forward with awe to some long or short-suffering exit, and seek a way of self-justifying; a way of externalizing, blaming; a way of being sure and positive, that I can tell my self I have been worthy of life. A cause for which to die, a cause for which to have lived, some sense of right and righteousness, a life which was, in sum, deeply moral whether any force outside of life blessed it…or not. A sense for surety in a world in which, I suspect, the concept is not discoverable, much less discernible.

Just in case, I want to be ready when I hear the call; I want to be able, still, to hear the call to martyrdom: for history, for justice, for life.

There is a battle amongst those involved in the trades and markets of the downtowns and uptowns and places where the barters of life are arranged: “I am an idealist,” a number can be heard saying, “but have adjusted successfully to the exigencies and realities of life.” “Ha,” I think. “And I am a realist who tries with whatever sinews and fibers are left, to hold out a daily idealism with which to inform my life.”

The utopists, the what-if people who preach the wonder-fulness of the never-will-be and look past the whatever is, they make me feel…mundane…common. They tell me how the best of all lives would be. And I, grubbing for the roots of today, of the hows of how I got here, want to believe I am no more spoiled than I am; that I can recover, and move beyond who I am today.

Those self-proclaimed idealists, those pains in my reality, want to own idealism, want to look past today to a future which they proclaim as theirs, as if today is not happening, as if all the todays are not the future. And I, left gasping, want to know who will make this fantasy come to be, and why it is not time to begin: right here, right now!

The news this time is that, as Orwell depicted, the thinkers of the right have learned about the power of the idea of history, especially in its rewriting. It is, deeply in our psyches, the idea of how we got here which informs our thinking about each present moment. More importantly, it is the idea of how we got here which virtually makes the reality of experience continuous. Thus the notion of revision of history, its rewriting and recasting, has a powerful effect on how we consider where we are…that we are. The notion of history is of course, rewritten or recast often in various senses.

We effectively lose time in some aspects of our lives, concentrate on particular facts to the detriment of others, forget in some ways and cannot in certain others. But we rely on the belief that it did happen and is theoretically recapturable with the right witness or upon deep reflection or study. When the belief in history is lost, when we are not certain that we were, then the present becomes very negotiable, and charisma or some “fall into belief” becomes powerfully persuasive.

We use history, rather the belief in history, to tell ourselves where we are, who we are and are not, and what meaning is. The “right” whatever else may be, is conservative, is particularly invested in history psychologically, because the conservative mind decides early in life what it is, essentially, and compares each next day with that vision of who one is. When the conservative mind learns revisionism, what measure is there to judge, to measure, to decide?

A celebration, a wedding, a joining of the lives of two people, culminates the planning of a year’s concentration. A party: two person’s lives join together into some notion of futurity which is the faith of their ongoingness.

Preparation, the imagination of friends and families somehow getting to the same place at the same time. A kind of public fantasy, the twenty years of youth growing up, growing to be and to become another person, an intellect, a thinker and doer; now, two thinkers, two doers, deciding to be together in the whatever that is a marriage. Still their parents’ children, still children to their parents. Yet a who, a what, a something in its own times and place.

Bread, a feast, wine, dance, the beauty of bridehood fixed upon our memories into tomorrow’s hopes and each new day’s is and was, would and will be.

When will the questions stop, when will I be satisfied with who I am, and why?

Myself? Others? Who am I trying to please? Friends? Mentors from my pasts? Important personages wandering in my thoughts? Who am I trying to please that these questions murmur in my mind’s meanderings, popping out whenever I try to justify myself?

Suppose that I am virtuous, a person who performs what he preaches; a person who preaches a morality of no little substance; neither great paragon nor whatever she is not. Suppose…

Adrift, somehow, somewhere, beyond the history whose knowing shows how I got here; that there are many other ways I might have gone. My self, an accident of some history, some fate; some fate, some destiny with any sense or purpose…or more a mere happening?

What difference, I ask. Seeking perfection, perhaps, but finding it was lost…Trying to be profound in a mundane world, struggling to be honest with my self, leaves virtue having to take care of itself. Perhaps I will discover virtue in the living and doing? Be kind, be good, be strong, treat others as oneself…!

Perhaps…

Right now I feel that my feet are like the Rock of Gibraltar, solid grounded. At the same time, in the same moment, I am loose and flaky as if the rock were thinly-layered shales, moving in any and all directions with the ease of a soft summer evening.

This condition acts itself out in my world, both doing and watching. I have more nerve than before: nerve to try new things, to take new risks, the nerve to be willing…

It is partly that I want to learn, to study what is happening in these times of the revival of religion – especially in the rising concepts of death over life.

It is as if the thinking and fears and hopes of the aged and infirm have gained ownership over life, as it has increasingly, in their own lives. It is as if women – who are the future – have lost the vitality to inspire the future.

I want to know, to understand the ideas of forever, and what then happens to each day. Where and when are the future, when impending death looms so large? Why do the ideas, prophets, and texts of the past overtake the present? Is it a search for certitude, protection from fears, a dispute over reality?

This takes my being in new places, pushing upon the powers that appear to be, to see where they yield, when they are soft or very hard, how they exist and oppose, and against what forces – perceived and real.

I want to help to recreate the idea of meaning, and of life: of living a meaningful life. Right now the urges and surges of nerve want to take on these explorations. Will I, how…can I explore such grand images?

Begin…now!

Everybody said there was a shortage of leaders, and therefore of leadership. Everybody said there was a shortage of leadership, and therefore of leaders. I tried, at various times, to be a leader. They listened politely, then became quiet; a sole member-leader of my own ventures, there was no one who wanted me to be their leader…or was it leadership they didn’t want?

While they were saying all these things, they were saying also that the world is in trouble, that things cannot change. A mother said that the young people are cynical, have only a fragile hold upon their lives, upon futurity; they are wailing and flailing at the facts of today.

“Do something”, I said; “or I’ll do something.” “No,” she said. “There is nothing which can be done. There are no leaders; there is no leadership.”

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.

Free to, free from, free for…it all seemed simple, even obvious, but no more. The varieties of what is free, and to what pre-positions it is linked, now seem as mysterious as life itself. Now it is more a question of partials: where to locate freedom, how freeing is the yielding of some aspects of life to some exteriority; imprisonment of body, of mentality, to the logics and thought systems which frame our questions and make us wonder about the boundaries of the illusory.

The rise of strong religion, the self-satisfying temptation to go-it-alone without government, the celebration of fame and money, all signal that we are in times where we-the-people are diminished. Looking for meaning, we tend to grab for easy answers.

To give ourselves over to a belief is to be free because the belief is not totally an investment. And what is left over is free in a way that those who resist belief must keep invested in varieties of resistance.

To have a single logical system for all and sundry occasions is freeing because it takes little energy after a while, and the mind is free to wander on side trips while our logical self is carrying out its program.

To become imprisoned is to yield one’s body to a sphere which is so limited, so determined that little choice, few possibilities are imaginable. The imagination is freed to take whatever paths it may invent.

The paradox: the total freedom of total choice is often its own prison as its chosen path does not always eliminate the others.

The prison of “The Present Age” of bureaucratic efficiency, is boredom: the world practically runs itself. There is nothing to do, and change is resisted. From Kierkegaard, we observe that the only real action is promoted by resisting change.

The most debilitating attack on freedom comes within the context of great freedom where the present is something lesser than we had hoped. Here, we are prisoners of our own disappointments, hoping for something better, while in every instant, we yield hope.

At such points we become vulnerable to the prisons brought upon us by others while we, seeking relief, pray for meaning to be given us…to be thrust upon us…

Sooner or later I have to tell the conductors of the orchestras in which I play to tell me very loudly, and very firmly what they want me to hear; what they want me to do. I will do what they ask, usually without embarrassment.

I am not hard of hearing, but difficult to penetrate. “Why”? I ask my self. Egocentric? Unwilling, uncaring? Perhaps my own meanderings fill every nook and cranny of my interpretive self, and I leave no openings for more.

Perhaps I hear inner voices loudly claiming, clamoring, competing, unwilling to move over, to make room. Perhaps I am blocking, and merely want to keep noise’s excess managed.

“Tell me loudly and I will hear!”

What once seemed obvious now seems less sure.

Sitting upon the edges of knowledge, I see a kind of core to what is common. I also see that common core pulsating like our sun at its circumference; leaping up in odd places and in odd moments. When the common core falls, whatever pushed and pulsed is then recast. The core of common sense, a centralized location of what we all have in common, is as dense as before, still as common, yet…I can tell my self that what is different is me; older, my memory extended by each day’s forgettings and clippings, rearranged to fit today.

Do I see, each day, what is commonly common?
Does my view change each day, as the seasons?
Do I write to extend the is, of what is common?

Solid, stolid they appear. A certain kind of self-assuredness. They seem to be persons who know, promoters of things that are good; well-meaning, liberal. But, with them, I seem to lose energy. Self-doubts enter in, as I find my self doing a self-telling that these particular persons seem not all that bright. But here I am, heavily into self-doubt, finding myself accusing them of what I am experiencing. What is going on? Within this melange of self-doubt, the accusations directed as well toward the others, I become captive to a concentration of ideas and thoughts which aren’t even very interesting.

My own life, full of doubts, full of overcoming, I seek well-motivated criticism. But, here amongst these energy sappers, I have fallen into some trap of banal self-justification; the kind in which I find myself defending the worst in my self by seeking the worst in them. Exhausted, ashamed to rediscover a me I had thought was behind, overcome. Perplexed.

Then, last week, a gathering of the perplexed: in which we discovered that another was dealing with these self-same energy thieves, and reported…exhausted, ashamed…the same internal experiences. And ruling-out coincidence, we decided to justify self and to externalize blame against these masters of the art of self-doubt. The problem is revealed and remains, that we are susceptible to others’ depiction of our selves, in some ways that seem self-destructive.

There are some people I meet who seem, immediately, to be and have been soul-mates. We go to the depths of each other’s characters, knowing the way as if it had been written in the tablets of time.

We move into the premises and promises and premonitions, each barrier sliding aside as the right questions are posed, the answers received positively, each generating a next.

We argue gently, for we disagree and are not each other. And that is O.K., because there are many life journeys, and the world is of a size that no one can go upon them all.

These soul-mates move, immediately, past what I look like to them into the depths of feeling and of thinking, into who I am, really. But I am fearsome, and many who would know me, cannot; and I do not know what to say or think about that.

I am often protective because I have known that many others have neither the means nor the willingness to begin to know me as I know my self. During several years of lessened confidence, I often reacted self-protectively; handled the reactions of others to my semblance, by an inner recitation of Machiavelli’s dictum: “It is better to be feared than to be loved.”

But even so, I am quite fortunate. I fit into several mostly positive stereotypes at this point in life. I look like what I should look like, for many others. They are inclined already toward me: too old to be physically dangerous, old enough to be taken seriously…for others to want to…know me, trust me.

My youthful earnest and self-righteous anger has mellowed and has been cast out from my appearance. Others – do not find many soul-mates because they do not look right…to them.

Already by the time we begin, the barriers erect themselves; the possibilities of hurt and anguish, overweighing the potential of understanding , of being…understood: pride, integrity?

Connecting. Yes, lovely. But not always…possible…or actual.

The academic counterpart of the query: if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? If… why aren’t you at Harvard or Cambridge? That is, if… why are you here? Transpose! The obverse: you are here, thus you are not there, thus you are not so smart; not good enough to… A decline into a distrust of self, the definition of quality sliding into the same distrust. The quality of judgment, gone. Are there others who can help us? We need help! We beseech. “Hello! Will you come here and help us! We are not good enough to judge well. Will you help us? Why are we calling you? Because you are smart and rich… and you are not here. Will you come here and help us? No? You fear that you will become like us, once you are here? No, that is not true. You are there, you are worthy. You ask how we can judge that calling you is good judgment, if we have no good judgment?” A good question! A good question?

The concept of a family is nowhere as obvious as it once seemed. Simple:  parents, siblings, a place to live, where we used to live; where those who still live, live still.

New families, next times, the simplicities gone into sickness and pain and death, and the history of what was once the present, is now simply history, memory. The sisters and brothers and you and me, we all have memories: same, different, passing by each other; reconnect sometimes, mysteriously, into friendships surpassing relationships.  Sometimes these disintegrate into the renewal of the pain of the memories which could not be borne, cannot be borne: talk to my lawyer! Others, siblings, new families, new places which have, by now, grown their own memories, renew often, often enough, who we are that we once were family.  “Let me in!” -  we implore.

And they do, with arms open, and hearts which are pledged to remain open. And we do, trying to make sense, trying to understand, to renew the meaning of meaning, the meaning of being, of a family.

The bile backs up its ducts pouring out into the streams of anger and misplaced love. Seeking for an object, seeking a love of self which has been abandoned, the vanity jealousy throws this surge of feeling out into the world’s view, landing upon…

Who I am, at war with who I am-not; the am-not, another person, different from the me I’m supposed to be, yet still me. Push, kick, hurt, kill. And why? But, why? Is it a question of rights, of deserving?

Do I not have enough, what I was promised, what I tell my self I was told? Like the snake or spider or thing of wrong shape, impinging; is it simple, the hate? Kick, stomp, squash, squish, reach out from the fright like falling off into ledge’s abyss?

Having to be part of a situation, unpleasant with little hope for improvement, I feel caught. Caught, partly because it is of my own making; caught, partly because I think of my self as more powerful than I am in this situation; caught, partly because the situation takes energy from my attempts to extricate my self from it; caught, partly because I cannot decide what I contribute to a bad situation and I have no place to take my guilt.

When I was away from here a few years ago, I found my self in a similar situation: it was hateful, spiteful, tense, with little sense of direction but spinning its wheels continuously. But it wasn’t my fault, and I could look at it with no sense of culpability.

I asked myself why it was that way: hateful, spiteful – so familiar to me, but not my doing? How did its participants feel? Poor management had for years driven each person into one’s own little wedge of work, pulling in the boundaries behind to cover and to protect. By now it was difficult to say what there was since everyone dealt with and through the protective devices.

What I think I learned: that each person, seeking a personal measure of fame and importance had created a shell around themselves which was at once transparent and impenetrable. Not her fault, not his fault, not my fault, I was caught.

Now I know more: its causes, its impossibilities; and feel less guilty. What to do, how to get out, how to protect my self without becoming totally like them? Caught!

Knowing, seeing what there is, knowing how it works, in just the right proportions, with the exactitude to make it happen. In order to do, in order to be, there is a…a level of detail, a set of techniques, without which nothing much will occur. The trouble, the complication, the difficulty, is in knowing; in accomplishing technique without dwelling full-time in the how-to’s. Detail can expand to fill the mind’s dwelling just as it contracts to ever-diminishing portions. At one time, knowledge; at another, a comfort to tell my self that I know what I think I know.

The world likes detail because it is trustworthy, and it wants me seduced into being an aspect of its particles. Detail, technique, is praiseworthy, virtuosity. But, at some point in growing, enough is enough and it is there to be used, utilized to do. It is difficult to know always what there is to do, or to trust my self once I have left the realm of detail to enter into…into what?  Detail and the contexts of knowing what there is: at battle.

One of Nietzsche’s challenges, thrown to the few in his posterity who would be his readers and soul-fellows: to be a “bad conscience” for the age (the war we wage against our own instincts as “man’s suffering of himself,” and sees in this struggle the suggestion that one “is not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise.” (“Genealogy of Morals”)

Searching, still; still searching for some sense of mission in this life, I wonder whether this would fit – me? – this age?

For years, too many years it seems now, I bitched, complained, railed upon the badness of things, the poorness of quality, the unwillingness of people to talk about issues, to discuss, to… I sense it sounded like whining, like a puppy which had lost its mother; a puppy who had strayed away to a place in which it could not place itself. Now, stronger, I want to do whatever needs to be done: to make this age better. If there are problems, where there are problems, it is not enough to make them known, not enough to raise the ire of those who ameliorate this age – those practitioners who keep the world going.

And go on it does.

The trick of power and government in this age: to stay low; quiet? A bad conscience is ineffective in an age where the energy of power is like a banked furnace: a mild glow whose heat, though still great, is diffused. Is there any point, in this age, to be a bad conscience?

Better to read Nietzsche, to study the other ages and places where bad consciences could be heard above the hum and drum of bureaucracy’s banality, to think and walk and talk with those who could and did.

Living in a time when the use of drugs has been pushed by the curers of our illnesses, the question of what is an addiction looms large. Some substance, inhaled, injected, ingested to the roots of being, alters experience, perhaps outlook. Sometimes, often, always – some say – the alteration is bodily, real, the experience more desirable than what is usual and seems normal. Others worry less about the power of the drug, more about its use and application: alone; in company; what sense of tomorrow.

What sense of tomorrow?

But there is more. Habits, of body, of mind, of experience and its counter, also seem addicting beyond wish and desire: gambling, power, a sense of activity and action, of performing…athletic doings, jogging, playing musical instruments, writing…all of these may invade life and demand an increasing part of being. Power, some sense of greatness, of control over the world, over others, seems to grow quickest and deepest, finds its own sustenance within itself, addicting.

These all give fabric to life, shape to lives. They energize thought and action, frame hope and a sense of progress and tomorrow…

and tomorrow? The down-side of addiction: that we may not construe tomorrow, any next day, except within the sense of self which that drug or habit shapes. To do, not to do, no longer can be cleansed of the debris of the addiction. Like pain, which grows as it is opposed and made an enemy, addiction may control, possessing us in outlook, plans, and preparation.

Within addiction, freedom binds itself, no longer problematic.

Sometimes I feel that I am in a psychic jail, paying off the debts of my life’s imperfections. I am cast upon a small rock island, a fruitless raft tossed by ocean’s waves, always pushing, always threatening to throw me onto the shore’s cliffs.
I hope for mercy and penance in return for the deep debts I seem to be in.
In debt to life, the burden of each day occasionally seems too much; I am unable to clarify, to state clearly to my self where I am, how I got here, and whom I owe.
My parents, my teachers, family, friends, colleagues, neighbors…who else?
Who else? My own imaginations of how they imagined I could be, would be, should be, sometimes at odds with how I am. How I am, in my own terms to myself? – sometimes whispering, at other times, screeching.
Do I not live a life equal to that which they hoped I could; do I not let them be the persons that they willed and will; did their own debts and pain-filled penances spill over onto me, onto my future, its hopes and would-be’s and would have been’s?
Would I know what to do, where to go, if ever I could satisfy the debts of soul and spirit and life’s accumulations?
Penance! Penance?

The institution where I work is hard to move. Having reached a size, an age, a ponderous entity-ness, it IS. It is so big that everyone talks and meets and writes summaries of discussions, but no one seems to be able to summon the energy to do anything new. Or, there is so much doing already, daily, daily, doing, doing, that any more would be too much. Perhaps, as Kierkegaard claimed (The Present Age), each official, each self, is so well-geared, so successful at doing what is done already, that there springs up great resistance to any change, to any moving which is not what I already do…and do…and do. It is as if in order to move, I, we, have to damn all our pasts which have led to this present; to disqualify ourselves from our own lives. Once we have arrived in this institution, in this present, it is as if we are outside of our own time, outside of our own lives. It is as if we are not very present, only watching. Moving only to resist movement which would affect our selves, we sit watching.

Somebody realized not too long ago that knowledge has its own marketplace. What sells, what people hear and want to hear, what is the truth, and what are the facts, have no clear tests. What constitutes truth is all mixed up with what sells, and there is no totally obvious truth. What is true, the logicians say, is what is not-false. Truth is like geometry: axiomatic, derivable, provable, applicable. Perspectives, contexts, a different set of assumptions, equally true or not, burst that bubble! What is truth, logicians come to say, is what is falsifiable. Hedging, it seemed, but noting at long last what is circular and proves nothing but what was believed already. This realization has set the stage for much wondering.

Many could not stand the tension of wondering what – anything? – is clearly true. Wanting to believe in the truth of their beliefs, they became their own earlier opponents, and declared the end of truth, the impossibility of knowledge. They (we) have become beggars, hanging about the marketplace of ideas, declaring there are none, still eager to eat the shriveled fruits and tired vegetables of yesterday. Appetites shrunken, satisfied with little, they (we) seek nothing…and find it.

Free from, free to…so free that I often fall into the self-caused tar pits of my imaginings. I seem to vacillate between whatever is total freedom to think, to read, to be – and the fervent wish to know exactly what is going on, and what will be.

This freedom business is not so simple as once I thought. I can do just about what I want; as long as I can figure out what I want. I can plan, I can not-do, I can assent or refuse or dissent or argue. And it is often wonderful, following my nose which is hard upon the scent of knowledge.

But there are others; and freedom often gets in the way. My freedom impinges on yours, my dissent treads upon your assent, our noses cross paths as foreheads bump and teeth clash. It is difficult, even, to remain on similar trajectories for those of us who think we have chosen to be all together in freedom; and out of freedom.

And we all have different histories, different senses of how free is free, and how to think out this moment’s freedom in each next moment. Instead, we get into dead ends whose sign was not obvious until we had entered too deeply, and in some frantic thrashings try to extricate ourselves without considering costs. Still invoking the word, we first mutter, eventually scream for the freedom whose definition always needed the next moment’s guarding…

The best of times; the worst of times. Right now?

The human condition, almost freed from the necessity to work interminably for the few crumbs to maintain itself, cannot harness that freedom. Our theories of what is leisure, what is work, what is life and death, developed out of time when the human cry was for relief. And now we have relief; (and) know not what to do with it.

So afraid of death that we look for a messianic moment, we diminish life to a sorry story. So afraid of the dynamics of dealing with imbalance and bad possibilities, that we choose the worst we can imagine, not being able to sustain the imagination of what is good or best.

How do we imagine what is good or best? Attacks upon our ability to think, attacks upon knowledge, upon meaning when there is so much knowing available that it expands beyond itself before it barely touches the air.

Where are the so-good-story tellers that our good stories may occur in life? Or have we agreed that it is the anti-virtues, the greed, the hunger for power and money that dominates in some senses inexorably? Have we agreed that we are weak, that we cannot strive? The best of times, the best of minds were, but not are; not right now!

Time to grow ourselves. Time to seek the character within ourselves which will expand to envision a meaningful life. Time to live our expanding visions!

Why discuss the old issues, the perennial questions? If we have no great new insights, no strongly critical views, why ask the why’s and wherefores?

Why? Because our memories are short. We lose – and have lost -questions and how they were handled; and this is important to know if only to see our own seeing, in the present.

Why? Because earlier minds included some of the best and wisest, the ones with whom we would like to walk together in the world and have them, their thinking, share the ideas of today.

Why? Because the places we are now, how we got here was often determined shaped or formed by some of these persons. Knowing what they said and asked and why, will help to inform today’s discussions: noting what is similar, what different; what old, what new.

Why? Because we lose sight, occasionally, of what fundamental issues are, as the current marketplaces of our own lives and experiences may elevate particular issues and obscure others. They may offer hope or drive us to varieties of pessimism, skepticism, cynicism, or nihilism. These we must deal with, fight, combat, and envision other futures.

Why? We much attempt to understand and gain insight into who we are in any moment. In any age, as we mature individually we must strive to attain the wisdom whose primary issue and mission is the quest for what is wisdom.

Why discuss the old issues…? Because each new generation must be taught to see that we are part of the continuity, progresses, hopes, problems, tendencies both to love and to destroy, that have enabled our own lives and wonderment.

Why discuss? – to give us the opportunity to express our voices in the domains of life, now upon an earth whose size makes it urgent that we join together in becoming students of life and of the world.

Why? So we are not sucked-in to destroy out of ignorance or thoughtlessness…or in the name of any apparent purpose.

Why discuss? To explore others…and ourselves.

Here I stand, being, explaining who and that I am, and pleading my case: I am, I need, I want, I will, I will-not, I must; I seek.

The who I talk to, the you, the them…here we all are pleading, each his own case, each her own way, to the judges of days and times. The who I talk to, you, you hear me, hoping I will hear you; and I do, or I do not.

How much do I hear if my own ground is infirm, if I cannot find my judges’ vision? How much – if I need and want, need and want, need and want? Pleading my own case, now shouting, now whining and wheedling, I am homo politicus, and I am nothing beyond what I want and need, want and need.

How much can I hear if my own case, neither firm nor infirm, sits upon a bargain of my being with yours? Gathered together in some small plot of mutual existence, we are tied in some awesomely complicated fashion, into haggling, bargaining for…for myself, for your self; barely separable with boundaries of cottonwool and diffuse airs. Do I plead better when I state your case; or my own?

How to become the judges of our own vision’s progress, the upward looking critic of my judging, a judging of myself that you may judge yourself well, that you can judge me well, that we can be better and stronger in tomorrow’s resolve…and today’s doing.

I hate being taken: being taken for the jerk I occasionally am; taken for a dope, a dupe. I used to get angry, try to wreak revenge, seek retribution, until I heard my beloved say so clearly that I couldn’t avoid hearing: that the only blame that hurts, that really smarts, is the aura of self-destruct and her-destruct; that vengeance hits the air and gets reflected back into one’s self as if the world were a deliberate mirror. I could lie, rant and rave, and threaten, and curse curses, but I would do nothing!
The other day, I read a review written by a dupe. For twenty years or more he had been taken, willingly, I’ll bet. And the winds of time blew time’s ghost from pillar to the post of…a new crowd; a new insight, a next in-crowd, this cynic’s pleasure-displeasure at watching last year’s stars trying to maintain their arc in public view, when the winds change. Now, duped; now, a confessional; now, a new theory from his new camp. What’s new? A new metaphor. You don’t like the old one – try a new one! Before it was the computer as a metaphor for the brain; now it’s the brain as a metaphor for the mind: next it’ll be…
Dupe! Dope! “Should I write a letter? I wrote a letter.” Do I criticize him, his conversion, his recanting, his re-telling his re-thinking? No. I use his plight to attempt to understand my own. I used to be too young, too eager, too much in a hurry. Now, my own dupe, I have too much to confess to my self’s hearing, to worry him about his…

“Let’s define this clearly,” rings and rings in my inner senses as a teacher…but it seems all…wrong.

Say what “it” is: its parts, the whole, relationships; beginnings and the end!

Some sense, resonating still from Plato and ancient times, that clarity in definition is clarity in thinking is clarity into the truth of the world.

I, always a pedant assigning grades to everyone, want to forestall the definitions that seem to set every problem; clearly, certainly – as if we can always state what “it” is.

The world seems more complicated than mere naming or saying or thinking this is always so very clear. My students tempt me, dare me perhaps to say what “it” is. So I ask them broader questions like where we are, who are they, what time in history is this: questions which become unclear the moment they try to define them; defy more than define.

Background, context, is it even clear who their teacher is? Name, yes! Professor, the (as)signer of their syllabus. But, I as their teacher? A study in being…together. Any sense of towardness; toward their futures? Don’t definitions tend to enhance the past at the cost of the importance of the future (and the present)?

So much early effort, arriving at some apparent consensus, too early: before they know one another, too early in thinking, too gullible, too easily attached to remembering the premature definitions. Then…proceeding to bypass understanding through the filter of that definition. Or reject the definition, and adopt what seems to be its opposite. No more talk; except to talk. No more discussion; only mere discussion; surface. No depth, nor any sense that there is much deeper to go, or what paths we might embark on, or the various contexts in which any thing or idea arises.

“But, but,” I sputtered, still sputtering in its rethinking like Jacque Tati’s auto, foundering upon a chosen road, until it sputters off upon some other map of its own resolve. “But, we already agree on a host of things: we are here together, we all got here, we are here sitting with some rules of conduct and mutual treatment of where we are and how we got here and the why’s of our lives. Let’s find out who we are before we

cut life out of our definitions!”

Too easy, too liable to cut-off the paths of thinking which open minds to opening ideas to other minds, to…No, no definitions. Wonder, awe, surprise – out of these we will talk together. Teacher, students, who are we? Argue, debate, scream if we must. Clarity not in definitions, but a pursuit, a striving to be distilled from all the resonances of all the talk; near the end, upon rethinking, toward knowing, toward resolving, toward tomorrow, toward more meaning in our lives.

Definitions: more an end than a beginning.

I “told” a friend that he was in serious trouble: “on an edge,” I said. I had tried to “help” him before, to get him to take care of himself, to get some help from a knowledgeable source, to pay some serious attention; all to no avail. Perhaps it all had the opposite result. I had become a kind of conscience for him, I had thought, but really, it seems, for me. Earlier, some years ago, another friend got into trouble with drugs and alcohol, but I didn’t know that in a clear way, and went along with his gradual erosion, taking his word, his interpretation, as if it were factual…knowing better. I said nothing because I had not asked the hard questions, which were not so plainly obvious but not so obscure. I was not his conscience, did not say or ask, and watched him fall into an unsatisfactory death. It lies, still, upon my mind, uneasily like a queasy stomach. So this time, with this fellow whose gluttony is past control and just beyond belief, I tried to say in some penetrating way what I thought. Having said it all before, having talked the sickness unto death, I decided to change tactics, to reverse grounds, to not talk, to become some ultimate conscience, by setting our friendship in the limbo of silence. Now, a little later, having broken that silence, having apologized, having declared that I did what I did out of love, not out of malice, having forgiven both of us to whatever extent that is possible, I wonder where virtue resides between the persons who embody our lives.

When I am tempted to say to my self that it is not so clear what truth is, where truth resides, do I lie; to my self? When I have learned to copy, to read others’ notes and answers, and to appropriate them, and to forget whence they came…When I have accomplished the art of telling others what some part of me wants them to hear, and another part says that is not so…When I can tell others whatever I want them to hear, neither a twitch nor a blink…Do I lie to my self?
The problem is not merely in the promise of punishment, of retribution, of payment for wrongs, but in the deeper wonderments about truth and especially of justice.
If I tell the truth to those who will not hear it…If I tell what some do not want told…If I am not clear about the fine mix of morality and truth…Do I lie? To my self?
Is the problem in finding those parts of my self which still can listen to today?
Is the problem in my self which has found out how to deal better with the smaller self-guilts of lies, than the larger guilts of broken and unfulfilled promises to my life?

Why do I…Because I was chosen, directed, selected by the Fates.

How else to account for the stubborn pride with which I do what I do, and do not what I will not?

How else to account for the hurt and sadness and neglect and……which my work can sustain as it involutes upon itself?

And then it justifies itself – to me – all over again. Why? Ask the Fates!

But right now, it feels very good and requires less justifying – to me.
Guilt, conscience, afraid not to come up to the promise that the others claimed for me?

Or did I take upon my self a certain task? Whatever. Yes…and Yes.

It never seemed very clear, except that I wished to play upon the edges of knowledge, and chose the route that appeared just when I was looking.

Or did I want to appear smart? Profound? This term had no meaning for me, then; maybe begins to, now. But…the Fates!

What a justifying, what a tale to tell my self. A way to tell my self I am humble, a practitioner of the trade I seek to determine, and as arrogant as that humility can sustain.

Not pride; not vanity. I just want it to be right; to see through the masks of fear and terror, past the ugly and the beautiful. Now disciplined, toughened, justified by the sure knowledge that the Fates have sought me as I search for them.

And you? Where are your Fates?

Living in a northern clime where summer’s colors disappear and dissipate into the splendid clarity of stark white and whatever is its darkness opposite for several months every year, is pleasing, even self-justifying to the austere in me. The cool of being is replenished and fed by seeing out into a world which is so clean, clear and offtimes simple.

It remains unclear in all my most conscious efforts to probe my inner selves, what drives this sometimes search for the authentic: whether it is deeply me, or a necessity for which to search; for which to conduct a search. It is not only obvious and easy to relate to, but the austere in me cries out to be heard, to declare: “that’s me!”

What? A search for some sense of purity? of simplicity? of something lost, a thing for which to yearn lest life’s turns turn only upon themselves and the ground on which I rest crumbles to sand and dust?

I look toward the austere, toward the austere in my self, for that strength I need and for the will I will to be.