Tuesday, May 5, 2015

in the 'scribblings' category:

As I recovered from the week, taking a long slow walk through the woods and down by the stream and then back along Massachusetts Avenue, later on, the final bare bedrock truth seemed to dawn over me, the truth of suffering being the foremost universal reality of the human condition.

Knowing that, we no longer make our foolish attempts to escape or ease this fundamental fact of life.

I came down with the sense of the lie I'd been leading...  Was I not almost banging the drum of escapist pleasure, I wondered.   There was real human stuff that needed airing at the pub, but I was not making anyone any better.


And now at 3 AM I'm having a glass of wine, in moderation, realizing that it does not end suffering.  In fact, it probably adds to it, as any escapist pleasure does.  It leaves me unimpressed, as taste, as medicine, as calming properties go.


I have the feeling of shirking responsibilities as I wake.   The bar has been my way of serving humanity, and now I realize how immoral my duties have been in the scope of things.

Is it that we fall out of some wish to suffer the pains of the rest of humanity?  Do we cast pearls before swine when we do not protect our energies, letting them out to any taker?  I recall a very painful past episode, wanting to go to a party at reunion, traveling from DC to Boston, and then out to Amherst.  And on the way to the party, not wearing glasses or contact lenses, I ran directly into a bunch of rowdies, jocks celebrating.  Come on, have a drink with us.  And the cost for that drink, for the shooter handed to me has been quite steep, quite horrible, haunting.   I left myself open, I guess.  I acted in a way I was not, a lie to myself, hard to forgive for all it cost me in morale and the other possibilities inhabited in the peace I wanted to form with a particular person.  "Leave her alone," her friend yelled at me, and I shrank and departed, only to get worse, and then the next day was ashamed, too much to explain nor ask for forgiveness.  I felt boxed in.  I was use to discouragement and unhappiness, which was what I knew, and I did not fight.

Christ seems big into suffering, and he does so on behalf of humanity.  Could he have taught without his own suffering?

The creative act of writing is indeed properly a kind of navel staring, for which it is maligned.  What is wrong with being attuned to the basic energies in the body?  Why do we look outside for story, when the story is what happens internally.  Indeed, the chakra responsible for sexual relationships is the same as for creativity.

One writes for the big things, the big understandings, the things that will help with life.

Strange that the ones we would fall for, quietly, chastely, in so-called love with, attached to our own emotions regarding them, are the ones who bring us most directly to suffering of the deep personal inescapable sort.

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