There is a show about Eels on PBS when I get home from the bar.  The eels slip and slide and wriggle around each other when you put them, say, in a bucket, or in a confined stream.  Out in nature, they have a basic, and remarkable, sense of direction.  Born in the sea, the Sargasso, they head toward shore and then upstream in rivers and creeks here in the Mid Atlantic, up through New York and Maine and the Great Lakes.

I have a brief vision as I wake of the human experience too being one of wriggling, running into, moving round, slipping and sliding, randomly bumping into other human beings as we go about our survival-in-society thing.  And like the eel, whose natural setting of beautiful cold streams and even the native ways of catching them are a tribute to their lives, we have a sense of direction.  Some might well construe that direction as not just 'north,' say, or 'get married, have kids, stay employed, become grandparents,' but a kind of spiritual direction, one that all must eventually take.

There are the sketches, fleshed out, of this direction stuff, about the meaning of how we might occupy our own individual time upon the earth.  People make art to move in that direction of understanding, conscious of their own awareness of seeking meaning.  People who have 'lived some,' been through some stuff, they too, are closer, closer to an awareness, to an understanding about 'the monkey mind' and the Ego's self illusions, closer to understanding Buddha, or Christian meaning and symbol, or simply to fulfilled meditation.

Are the more question-prone, the deeper thinkers, more prone to seeking out the healthy within themselves, more apt to come across the sicknesses and vanities of life?  Will they be better inclined to understand the sufferings that come along with life, and admit eventually to the need for being a bit easier on your own life and the self you may have made of the life that came your way.

The eels wriggle, and swim on, intent on their directions upstream and downstream according to the phases of life, aware of going the same way as their fellows, of being the same as their fellows.





When I, you know, got out of college, I didn't feel quite finished with it, which is how it goes for a lot of people.  I hemmed and hawed, dragged my toes through the dusty ground, stared at my reflection, alternatively took up high ideals, read a few more books (I hope), and basically had no idea how to catch that train that takes one on to a profession.  The great majority of my peers seemed to have absolutely no problem whatsoever with getting on their respective trains, and transformed immediately into bankers, med school, business school, law school, prep school teachers, editors, academic types, lots of things, whereas I just stood there wondering what to do, a bit at a loss.  I went home.  I hung around for awhile, and finally, the next Spring, I literally got on a train, in Utica, bound for Washington, DC.  No idea what I was going to do.  Some fondness for speeches, history's ghosts, as many hicks do.  In my mind, I was going to be a writer, which is a dumb idea, trust me, as one will only perpetually recreate the same sense of trying to figure out what one will do with himself without making much headway.  I went to work as a barman in a restaurant, and slowly this kind of took over that 'profession' thing, that 'who you are' on paper and resumé.  "A decent guy," I can patiently put up with a lot.  I'm too shy to be much of a journalist.  Always wanted to, theoretically, stand in a classroom and teach, but never made it happen, as if waiting for an invitation, based on what I already sensed I knew, on a few shifting interests gathered from here and there into some crude philosophical school.  We do what Jesus tells us to do, sit humbly at the lowest place at the table, that our host will kindly bring us up front to a place of honor that the humble deserve.  And slowly we find out that the people who think highly of themselves take the good seats, talk with sophistication, having few inhibitions, dress well, and stay in those precious seats, regarding themselves as being very well behaved and of the best manners, while the humble suckers like me, while having basic deep sense of manners, never get invited in to the inner circle, being regarded as poorly behaved, lazy, uncouth, too radical, strange or odd a dinner guest for conversations.  The egoists like their places and their successes, and a great inclusive program to rehabilitate those that society seems to have discarded is far from their minds.

Now I know, that to be treated with respect you have to act the part.  Dress for success.  This is true.  But the years go by and I just kept writing.  Not even with any plot in mind, no particular story to tell, but just trying to get at something that, perhaps, we all can share or understand.  Is there benefit to that? Is the basic story one has to share kind of like a Twelve Step Program, a placing oneself before the grace of God, admission of great sin, apologies to all we've hurt through our behavior, a turning away from the egotistical pleasure seeking that only brings us woe and horror anyway, as writers have portrayed before, Jack Kerouac's Big Sur coming immediately to mind.  Indeed it might well be.  Lincoln had the courage and ambition not to end up another backwater whisky drinker, that largely propelling him forward to be the moral voice of a crucial time and generation.  The horror of feeling responsible for the Civil War would have well imparted in weaker types a strong desire for drink, but it seems he knew that wouldn't have helped the matter anyway, so why bother.  "... As courage gives us to see the right..."  Lincoln was a radical thinker in that he saw doing the right thing as having a great power to it.  And being a bartender, I often wonder about where I stand, morally.  Wine, okay, they drink it in the Bible, but it's a slippery slope, you have to admit.  If it was up to me, I would just write, and not have much to do with it, and that, maybe, is a bad attitude.

The novel I wrote, years ago, I admit to a dear old friend that it is sometimes hard for me to even look at it.  That's probably some egotistical part of me, not willing to accept it for what it is with all its faults and the difficulties of making a reading of it.  The better part of me should accept it, and at least say, 'well, it's just human to be that way and do such things.'  Maybe even embrace it.  Strangely, you find that other people, the dear old friend, understand as much.  Love yourself.  That is all.  It would be a lack of courage not to.

All of it, like for the eel, is done less consciously, from a deeper understanding often beyond logical thought and strategic planning, more just a revelation of inner nature sustained on until it acquires some meaning when viewed from outside it.





So intriguing, complex, interesting were European societies of the 16th and 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries that of course, European artists had to paint their scenes, playwrights catch their theater, novelists create a form to record mental life.  Tolstoy wrote War and Peace.  There was Dutch and Flemish painting, Rembrandt's portraits, scenes of Venice, court music, all to capture the great array and novelty.  But behind the pageant, the same eternal stuff going on, basic, served by religious art just as well...




When you work as a barman in a city of professionals, you can feel a bit down on yourself.  Who knows why exactly.  When I feel that getting to me, I am less prone to see the point in writing down the random-seeming thoughts and observations from city life.  And when writing less, of course I'll get feeling more down about my job.  It gets easier to get distracted.  You feel like you don't own your own thoughts, or have less right to them.  You lose track of the larger deeper purpose.  It happens from time to time.  It's not the end of the world.  You just need a day off.

Walking home from the woods I pass by the statue of the Irish Patriot, Robert Emmet set in the shade of a small grove of two cherry trees and one larch.  Once when I was coming back on an evening bike ride, I heard the rush of a branch falling from the larch.  I stopped.  A wiry elder Japanese man with spikes, belt and a handsaw came promptly down the trunk from halfway up.  He explained himself.  He wanted to open up some space so the statue could be seen from Massachusetts Avenue.  I looked up at the tree and nodded.  He had cut the limbs off very neatly at the trunk, as an arborist should, to protect the tree from infection.  I wondered for a moment whether he had overdone it, as I am an admirer of the tree, but I could see his point.  He was very earnest about his mission, his duty, his English a little stiff, but a man of conscience obviously.  There was a bit of stealth to his project, at such a time of day, the hurried way which he explained himself as fully as he could to a passerby, obviously not a cop.  And I went on my way without telling him to desist.  That was a few years ago, and as I pass, I see his point, and wish him well, though how the hell he ever thought he should take it upon himself to prune a public tree I can only be impressed with.  That an Irishman might not mind a bit of tree cover, well, something to take up with a spry Japanese male in his early sixties adept at tree work next time I see him.

We're all able to cook up such stories of gloom and pessimism in our heads, the special ability of the human being to make himself crazy from within.  On top of that life as we know it is is presented as a matter of choosing between being a busy ambitious striver or a lazy good for nothing slacker.  But what is reality, taking the world as a whole?

PBS environmental shows, one on Aldo Leopold save the night, and remind me of the need to be in nature, something hard to do in a city.