Thursday, June 27, 2013

You write, to put it one way, because you've been lied to.  The girl who protested too much, the professor who had too much of his own modern academic agenda to see your work clearly, the jobs you end up taking...  They lie because they've figured it out, how to fit in, and you seem to have not figured it out.  And every creature, at every level of existence, knows a lie, knows when it, he, she, has been lied to.  The eye simply sees it.

Another work week ends.  The first day off.  You finally get up and have your cup of tea.  The truth is you haven't written all week.  You feel like you no longer even know what to write, where to begin.  That you write is some sort of strange out-of-place fact that doesn't fit in anywhere, and so it too seems like a lie, merely a small attempt to catch the dreams you had the night before, or to address the feelings in  your psyche, the changed landscape of reality as it is when you know the higher.  Why this bar tending?  Shouldn't you be a teacher, based on the kind of 'research' that you do, which is the act of writing itself?  But in the post-English major specialist world we are in now, that doesn't seem to qualify as academic work.

Shakespeare and Donne, though, and probably other members of the old canon, they too were academics in their own right, with what they studied, with the things they showed, with what they taught and how they taught it.  Would their temperaments be too gloomy for the sort of face-saving work that academia is now, always assuming a positive cheer, the claim of perfection, equality, justice, no longer standing in the human condition, no longer broad, detail-oriented in an almost smug way. Would it seem now like they had nothing to say, nothing that would fit in, but rather better be banned lest it incite, as in Hamlet, a madness, an antic disposition and a lot of other stuff that can't be fit in to the modern office and all its neat and speedy connectedness of empty stuff.

They wrote from their own poor humble laboratories of human nature, knowing themselves to be ephemeral by the scale they comprehended, equipped only with native insight and intelligence, not too far different from how the Buddha came up with his pieces of wisdom.  They could be shocking.

Gone is the ability to create, to be imaginative, to be as the child (in the Christian sense.)  Show me a self-promoter and I'll show you a liar not worth listening to, one who's completely missed the point, one who might sound nice even.  "Life's a struggle," we say, "why not be ambitious," dismissing their behavior.  The lies come out from time to time, but blame is turned on the individual, and not the system that goo-ed and gaga-ed over their preposterous recipes, at their feeding the masses what it seemed, at the time, to be hungry for (as it seems with Paula Deen, but not to blame her, as I am assured she is a great chef in her own right.)

Teaching, really, is basic stuff.  Just an opening of the eye that sees.  The real lessons might be of little help, and maybe even a hindrance, for as far as getting ahead.  But you learn values anyway, and maybe that's the point no one any longer cares to see.

"Oh, come on.  Don't be so serious.  It's a world of well-compensated liars and manipulators."  And yes, I told my own lies this week in order to garner a paycheck, pushing wine I suppose.

Maybe I slept poorly, or it's the extra shifts.

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