Thursday, April 2, 2015

But who would want to wake up and want to write, but for something cathartic about it, to come to psychological peaceful terms with the things that gnawed at you in the night.  What sort of excuses could you come up with to explain your behavior?  Why were you such a jerk to that girl?  How, in what terms, could you possible apologize?

There is something rotten in Denmark, which is the stiffness of it, the lifelessness.  Hamlet is dimly remembering a distant past of humanity, before possessions and property, before such heavy terms and titles were placed over everything.  Yes, the court is quite an organization, but it's all based on show, and if not show, aggression.  Puppets.  Hamlet is very much a Christian figure.  Render unto Caesar that which is appropriate to him, usurper of real humanity.

You write to try to figure something out.  Why were you so removed from yourself, from your own interests?  Why could you not save yourself and create a relationship with the one you wanted?

Who wants to think of such things, or write about them?  Society bores you.  Great.  So you write a play depicting what you sense and see, after a long career as a playwright.  You don't really want to participate in society somehow.  You like the players, people on the fringe, taverns, the communal spirit of the theater.  The play is the thing, to catch the conscience of the king indeed.  Of all the institutions.  Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  A blip of cosmic dust over soon enough, passing on.  All the acts, pretending something.

Not the happiest stuff to think about.  There is love and friendship.  But the fear is of turning into another institution.

But we are all so vulnerable.  Men in particular.  They can easily fall apart.  They can be left turning to art and music, as if their lives depended on it.  Unable to find happiness anywhere else, but by drilling into artistic bedrock, chipping away at a block of marble with some vague sense of form.

I want to forget about her.  I also want to be forgiven, I suppose, understood.  A bit of redemption.

Because I don't know what I'm doing with my life.  And she would have been a reason to live and have a life and a job, and a place to come home to, so that then you could know what to do with a day.  Without that you really don't know what you're doing.  Not the slightest sense in your consciousness of what you're supposed to be doing, but for a flash now and then, a kind of empathetic understanding of the creature, or maybe a wish to be an anthropologist, or move to New York and be a musician with whatever meager talents...

Drilling on through unyielding bedrock, and almost wishing you had a place to go like the bar, or a great hike somewhere.

The great unseen almost obscene vulnerability of a human being, male or female, an honest relationship based on a balance, on the improbable meeting of two lonely minds with a sense of trying to do something.

I use my memory of her as a jumping off point, mysterious ground to launch a new understanding of the creature and the society he keeps.  I would have nothing without that, probably, though, no, that's not true because of my own family.  The more you love someone the more vulnerable you are, and maybe the more vulnerable you are the more you act like you're a tough guy like Bogart's Rick.

Who is real, in the end, but someone like Jesus, who, in a way, has nothing to do, nothing to do as far as a job or a place in society, no home, just the deep wise thoughts that come, a lonely figure, who asks now and then if anyone gets it.  As if part of what he was saying was that he didn't want to talk about such things either, just live a normal life;  but as a sort of psychologist or psychic medicine person who knows the pain we all go through, he's obliged to prepare the herbs of reality.  For which drugs serve only as a natural metaphor, a meme, a word for, a kind of model, not the least for revealing that things are not as they appear to be (nor are they otherwise.)  Sex, writing, highs, walks in nature, listening to a friend's music, eating thy daily bread, they are all of the same inner peace.  The things we crave, as we ourselves crave being like Jesus and Buddha.

That's where Shakespeare is, at least in Hamlet, with his 'foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.'  Or Ahab in Melville, 'strike through the mask.'  A glimpse of what else might be, or is that too, madness?  Enough to make you want to jump up and run off into the woods.  And a thing you must hide, really, when walking down the street.

You do want love, a relationship, but there's not a damn thing conventional about a real one, anymore than mortal minds could have thought up sex and its beautiful instruments but of course through some poetic ideal picture, in which case we do create sexual love whatever it means, a tantric one you would gather...  An intuitive understanding that needed no words, a picture of the highest things possible.

Of course you feel lost without your father.  Of course you do.  Hamlet.  Jesus speaking of his own source of wisdom, which does not come from himself, but through him from the father.

I guess you have to ask people to not think of you conventionally, that you, nor really anyone, is cut out for the conventional.  How do you explain that?

You would probably need disciples in such a situation, disciples, and wine, to keep you from going mad..

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