I wake up often with a sense of things not going very well.  I wake up reminded that I live alone.  I wake up with a sense of finances as a concern and an uncertain future.  I wake up groggy and stiff, and I take my green tea, accept my situation for what it is, a sign of seriousness.

(The Post Style Section has a piece on the Very Rev. Gary Hall, new dean of Washington National Cathedral, who has come to see bars as a healthy place to discuss matters of religion and related views.  He's aware of the shrinking popularity of old school Orthodox Anglican High Episcopalian habits.  He has a term, 'bar theology.')

So, it is, that I work in a barroom, a tavern, a place of travelers, a place of familiar people, a place of talk, even if it hurts, even if it messes with my sleep schedule, and leadeth me to imbibe the fruit of the wine and be gluttonous, even if it leaves me blah.  I do, I am reasonably convinced, help a forum, humble, shifting, unruly, disorganized, scatterbrained, prone to distractions and mutual boredom as it is.

Yes, I would like the bar to have conversations about the difference between fornication, the urgent desire to impregnate and be done with it and move on, and the high transcendental love making that regenerates its participants and brings them to new unheard of levels of good health.  I would like the bar to discuss blind excesses of corporate greed, since, you know, corporations are people now.  I would like to discuss the possibility of CEOs who took modest salaries and had a sense of a company as a team of people, a family to take care of, so that all could contribute in a good and satisfying way.  I would like to discuss education as an exploration of cultural values, culture itself, so that young people could find themselves with a pattern of culture, moreso than education as an adaptation to the technology and economy of present nationalistic empire needs.  I would like to see the human dimension in everything, and this makes me a strange sort of cleric.   Disguised by running down a wine, making sure food gets to a table.

I don't mind mysteries of the theological sort.  One of them is that serious people often have to endure things because of what they are attuned to.  And I know that, as with many people, out of the personal gloom comes a real desire and ease to talk with people in a friendly way.  It can be five minutes to curtain call for this bartender who is saying, 'ugh, I don't want to talk to anyone,' and yet, in they come and there's just the spark, the electricity of communion and mutual compassion behind the ostensible need for a cheese plate and a glass of wine.

And what motivates some people more than saddening injustice, a disequilibrium in moral equipment, like slavery, or the treatment of the poor, or apartheid.  Do-gooder politics, or does such come from a real sense of morality?  The issue might boil down to some need, some desire to change people's consciousness somehow, so that they might join in an understanding.  But it all begins in someone's gloominess.

To pin down the cause, that is the problem.  To find the cause of malaise...  What makes us sad, lonely, discontent, questioning, concerned with society, and yet while also seeing the best in people...  What leaves us wondering where to fit in, and not out of place with other outcasts...  What does one see, what is the inner eye seeing, and why does it gravitate to people enduring a crisis through a stance?  What does this have to do with anything anyway?  Why not go back to the business of a normal Saturday night?  Where to go find a place for doubts and put them away from you?



One of the first things I wrote here recalled how I fell into the restaurant business ("Plane Crash," May 2008.)  I had encountered a problem of ego, a roadblock.  I wanted to be friends with someone, and it seemed, for many reasons, that she really did not want to be friends with me, and taking her to be a wise and sensitive person, this made me unhappy.  I found a way to keep busy, to keep my mind off it, to forget what my ego found important but which was not of living in the moment.  Running around, getting things delivered, talking to people, helping the bartender restock her cooler at the end of the night, I found liberating.  It wouldn't last, but when I worked, it worked.  And this was how my professional life began.

And somehow, as juvenile that anguish was, and even how it still can bug me, and even as such a concern is laughably little against the real pains that people might go through when subject to the whims of the world, I, in a small way, learned something about ego and its illusions.  For some they come by it through awful things followed by a time of digestion.  It seems par for the course for a thoughtful life.  The teacher in Robert Kennedy, for instance, who brought Aeschylus into the modern world, is admirable.


If you've 'read' history, what jumps out to me is a change of consciousness.  This is the story of Lincoln.  He simply showed up on the doorstep of history with a different consciousness.  We cannot trace that consciousness to any particular thing.  There were events, like when he was a youth, catching a silver dollar for his efforts on the Mississippi as a tip from ambitious business types, and a trip down to New Orleans where he encountered a slave auction.  He read Euclid.  He read what you might call Gnostic literature, so that he seems to have felt that he knew something, enough to see right and wrong in an issue where it might be obvious, but also to see that there existed the necessity to act in accordance with the right, even if it meant abolishing a very popular and economically driven wrong.  It was as if he believed in a higher plane of existence.  That, to my reading, is the story of Lincoln, of why he does the things he does, why he carries himself so.  A strange belief in, or maybe allowed by, a higher consciousness.

His grandfather, his namesake, fought "Indians" and was killed on his farm by "Indians."  His own father, quite symbolically, did not believe in books, and symbolically, Lincoln did not go see him as he was dying, even though this seems inordinately cold and cruel.  To him the law must have been like one reads today Eckhardt Tolle, in a way, or becomes a Theosophist, or absorbs Buddhism.  It was attractive for being a high intellectual calling like reading the Bible was, again, an intellectual matter more than membership in church.  It was a literate matter.  And it involved him mind, body and soul as well.

Journalists gathered at for him at Cooper Union during his campaign for the great office.  They were transfixed.  Something entirely new, and yet very old, came through, and it surprised them, caught them off guard.   And there is another very major and historic speech of his of which there is no transcript, no recording, quite as if John F. Kennedy's speech at Los Angeles accepting his parties nomination for the Presidency had so entranced every individual that no one was able to leave a record but from bits of memory here and there.  He must have come at them with something akin to mysticism, a transformation of consciousness, leaving the Tolstoys and the Gandhis to play catch up ball for years to come.  What others in the future would do as a form of protest or disagreement or literary act, he did confidently as he made public policy and delivered a few Presidential lines at Gettysburg.

Who knows when he or she finds a part of the day to draw in tune, in alignment with such things as higher Theosophical worlds were ideas are passed on mystically and the soul passes on, leaving one to inform another, quite beyond any logic but that of physics and mathematics.

It is for the usual hackneyed reasons that a piece on Lincoln on History Channel on YouTube has quickly become like a 5th grader's understanding of the man, even with Ph.Ds given learned opinions, which of course are worth respecting for certain purposes and reasons.  But they don't reveal much, once you've heard the story, unless the historian has a particular charisma to convey between the words something deeper, as an educator really should be able to do, after enough years of practice.  They all have the same trace of outline, and where one might say Mary abused him endlessly another will say, as I chose to believe, that they had a sacred marriage that worked for them, strange as it might have been to an outside observer.

The basics stand for themselves.  A backwoods boy reads books in a deep way on his own, and finds somewhere along the way, through his own loner ways and depressions, a deeper way of thinking about things, as he can share with very few people, even if he can refer to it with confidence in addressing certain popular issues.  Something within that experience gives him confidence, earned through his own personal individual trials that no one else will ever be able to experience.

Take those pat lines, about the story teller people were, in Old Salem, attracted to. Well, there is an element of truth in them, obviously.  But perhaps the reference is to little quips he might come up with as one might have passed him, a general quick wit.  He liked to tell jokes.  That's fine and acceptable, but, maybe they gained in presence because of the quiet background they stood out against.  As if one were to note surprise that a tall grey and sluggish fellow might suddenly twinkle out of his depression in an unexpected way.  The basic juice of history we must drink, but allow it across our lips at our own judgement, at our own taste, and make sense of with our own tongues.