Friday, October 5, 2012

An inventory of missed thoughts.

In Platonov's story Amongst Animals and Plants, a whole lifetime of the experience of communing with nature and walking in forests distilled in a few fine passages.  It seems one rarely has a chance to write about nature in such a way given how stories must be told.  In those passages, the depths of all stories, which is why we are drawn to them.

I get through the work week.  Mom's train is running late.  I stop for a salad at Simple Green.  There is, of course, an attractive young woman a few tables away, but somehow I feel down, traumatized, an irrational fear of a sharp harsh reaction to innocent friendliness.  Which sounds too stupid to mention.  After a certain number of years bar tending, being an oddball, out of synch with the normal I feel, I don't know, ineligible, that it would take a unique person and unique circumstances to make a relationship possible, given my job, my hours...  It's a pained realization to stare at.  And all that friendliness, that has some outlet engaging with people at work at the bar, sitting unused, by myself while the town is lively with Thursday night.

The best of thinking happens--and this is a Buddhist notion--in the spaces of awareness that are free of the ongoing commentary and ceaseless flow of thoughts, in the spaces in between.  And this applies to political thinking too, along with literary thinking.  I wish Kirkus book reviewers thought so, but, they must take their jobs as critics to have the explicit and defined thoughts which have already been thought so that they may be applied, preexisting terms handed down over a work, judging it, when doing so entirely misses the point.

And here is this Romney, channeling the Ronald Reagan playbook of looking affable, optimistic, determined, full of answers, critical, playing the blame game, and doing the old trick of telling people what they want to hear so that they respond in their infantile way.  Then going on to act as if he is The Conscience of the Entire Universe, shooting straight from his belief systems, as if lighted by a glorious inner Cheney.  He's campaigning.

And the President continues to be a nice guy.  Though one wonders what a second Clinton administration, one more realistic about the nitty gritty of politics, shorn of idealism, would have looked like.

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