Wednesday, November 20, 2013

The profound difference is in understanding that in life as we know it, it's all about making things happen.  Somehow that does not occur to all of us, at least as we set out in life, before we become wiser.  Whatever happens in life, in the world, in this dimension, is made to happen and carried out by mortal beings.  It is not in holding on to the ideal and thinking about it all, but in doing.  This, not all of us understand, immediately, or by falling into bad habit.

This accounts for the victories of life, the relationships of work and love and life, and it accounts for the strange things too, like the crime of an idiot killing a president just because he could, because the individual was alone, no one paying attention, the happenstance of effective mortal equipment, as such equipment necessarily abounds, for good or ill.

The things that happen are the things that happen.  Those things are what we make happen.


I got to work on time.  The busboy, and the waiter were late.  Both left long before I did.  And I had stayed there late too the night before, changing out the menus.  That's how it's been this week.  Myself being the driving force, at least in the crucial set-up and the end.  And so I've been there 'til two, 'til almost three in the morning, even as people were gone by midnight.


There are morals and decency in life, but it is as much a matter of confidently grabbing whatever you can, taking advantage of whatever you can.  The louder wins over the subtler.

Which all makes you wonder, then, about the philosophical, the intelligent cultured renaissance life.  It makes you wonder, about the species, about its fate, about a lot of things.  Far away from Buddha's ficus religiosa, it is the selfish who grab things and hold on to them and then pile more on top.


We are taught to believe in ourselves as made in heavenly image, in God's likeness, a fine creature amongst all the fine creatures living on the earth.  We are endowed with moral sense.  We understand fine things.  We build, we construct, we create.  And in our naiveté we might believe that what we create will be done well, close to some perfection.  We might think the nuclear reactor will be perfect and working and functional.  But then we realize.  What we do we make with human hands.

I suppose this is why some of us are writers, as if to remind ourselves what a perfect world might be, or how this one is not at all perfect, or about how it really ends up functioning with all the chips falling where they may.  And you're a brave person to do that, I suppose.


I know from practice that this week, unless I get in there and do it myself or be the driving force, things are not going to happen with ease tonight in a certain restaurant.  The bartender, the spark plug, the flood gate, the preventer of chaos.  And if he can do this with calm and good manners and graciousness in this imperfect world, more power to him.

Though I guess it serves him right for letting much slip away.

Lincoln had two pairs of spectacles, i.e., reading glasses in his pockets the night he went to the theater.

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