As I try to unravel my basic self from the Ego, post reading of A New Earth, a brief vacation, a break from the routine, comes along.  The cat seemed well enough,  I'd done my share of Restaurant Week, an hour of sleep, I pack a bag, a train reservation, and off I go.

The Shinnecock tribe of Native American, people of a different geological era, by all accounts peaceful, unlike their warlike cousins of New England and the Iroquois, taught the early settlers some useful things, perhaps in exchange for protection against the other tribes, but perhaps too, out of habit and custom.  Long gone are they, and now the high hedgerows, great mansions, vast lawns, private golf clubs, very fancy automobiles, exclusive boutiques on main drags,  intense New Yorkers, high power high capital types.  The settlers have progressed from the lessons of planting corn and beans and fishing.  It is nice that the Milky Way can still be found looking up from a backyard here.

I brought along Milan Kundera's latest collection of essays, Encounter, a good choice for train, jitney, and beach.  Short, pithy, to be read word for word.  A swim in the ocean.  All of it just what the doctor ordered, to get out of that bad routine of coming home from shifts, having some, too much, wine, staying up too late, getting up late the next day, losing faith that much productive can even be accomplished, the mood had set in, 'what's the point anyway...'

Back from vacation, back to the first round of night shifts, the secret seems to be going down to sit outside at the omnipresent chain coffee shop (that cares conspicuously little about recycling), and having a cup of coffee.  And somehow, this is far more motivating than sitting at home drinking green tea staring at failures of housekeeping and the cat's food dishes, I must admit.  There is the necessary flow of humanity in the background, so that one doesn't feel the loneliness that leads to distractions for idle hands.  (Perhaps this is why Buddha opted to share his enlightenment, just not to feel the isolation we all can feel.)

Turning toward an omnibus reflection, an impression of vacation radio playlists:  childish (almost kindergarden) melody, up-beat pop, verging on shrill, aimed perfectly at satisfying the adolescent emotional part of the brain, computerized voice (maintaining an artificially perfect pitch) singing claim to an insistent message about  'me,' wants, needs, wrongs suffered, "I'm going to stand up for myself now," etc.   Intended almost specifically to drone out any thoughtful conversation, realization, inner self-knowledge of a deeper sort, reflection, quite possibly (one impression.)  That, along with a heavily breaded plate of fried food, the fisherman's platter, and the guts rebel.  (Kundera, right about that too.)  Retreat from the television, find the Milky Way again after eyes adjust to darkness, and then sleep.  I am guilty of the same adolescent sins, believe me, a life too involved with pop songs.  I know.

On vacation, one discovers again a competence toward things, more than the job will grant you.  (Maybe this is simple daylight talking.)  You read Kundera, finding essential reading.  I realize again how I could begin to feel pretty down without that life of the mind, and without that habit of writing that in the worst of hopeless nightshift bar routines I lose ahold of, too many nights left holding the bag alone, letting the Ego tell me I need wine to numb the pain, only making it worse.  The potential of literary genius, one can lose faith in easily enough in the grind of routine.  News bulletin:  it's not that hard to be one, actually.  Just a little 'right mindedness.'

Kundera is right on with his critique of art and writing in our times.  It's become all about fashion, all about marketing, all about what's in style, in popular terms, in the terms of the latest academic foolishness, in terms of the politically acceptable to the narrow restrictive mind of the mainstreamer.  Proliferation of a certain kind of story, one that has to be marketable to at least a segment of society.  (Howard Zinn, with his talk about how corporations go and make the stuff that has for them the greatest profit possibilities, rather than that which is good for the world and responsibly crafted, mismanaging all resources they touch.)  We have become style addicts.  Plain and simple.  Attributable to the constant bombardment of ego, emotion, sentimentality, such that we tend to be discontent with that which is not in style.  And soon, everything, even our concept of educating our children and young folks becomes a service to the ego, teaching to The Test (rather than that process which is inherently educational, beneficial for the growing mind.)  Like cigarettes, the selling of even that which is bad for you, through proper style and exclusivity and egotistical self vision, sexiness, manliness, suaveness, etc.

Kundera writing about Breton in exile in Martinique, discovering the local intellectual literary journal Tropiques...  a chink of light, a recalling of that time in the mid 20th Century, a time of World War, the importance of literary journals, sorting out a way to think that would then help us gain a sanity toward the social and political aspects of our lives...   Which reminds you, that for all his faults Ernest Hemingway deserves some credit for participating in that something civilizing, the discussion of mind activity and mental forms through the literary form.  In Our Time, the early collection of stories, belongs to such a period, and holds a gospel about that which can only be gained through defeat, few great insights made without that passage.

It is, tangibly, far better for the poet to teach rather than the academic schooled in the various modes of various critical styles to be aped.  The polar fields of the moral compass are not bent by security.

You learn, after all, a lot through failure.  Nothing will ever change that for the individual life.  Strange, though, that defeat, in history, has been made quite terrible by egotistical minds of empire and power, as if it were sensed as a great Achilles Heel.  So with dunkings, burnings, beheadings, disembowellings, sieges, rapes, slaughters of innocents, Inquisitions, blitzkriegs, 'final solutions,' etc..  Defeat had to be terrible, it seems, as if the greatest fear to  powers that be was the communal discovery of the gains of the ego's dissolve.  The innocents, out of habit, are not to be tolerated, and so considered the biggest creeps, dangerous idiots.  Off to the gulag with them.  For whatever reason, subconscious fear, a desire not to find the enlightenment that the beautiful process of failure (something worth writing about) brings.