Salvete, qui legant -
How many of us recall being in water up to our necks and trying to find toe-purchase atop slimy, mossy lake stones? That seems an apt metaphor for my mental and moral state just now. Trying to get a grip, as it were.
My life is not that of a gung-ho hot-shot nor even that of a giddy, myopic gas-bag. My firmament in life is a slippery rock of absurdity - being myself too-much-that and not-enough-this, and so on. The world of youthful competition and 24/7 performance-merit passed me by long ago, and it is one part of human nature with which I've never identified, except in fantasy. I've worked in my life - mostly for attorneys and their ilk, piddly stuff, but for people who DO live in the 24/7 giddiness - and seen them from a distance, occasionally felt the breeze of accomplishment myself.
But it's not me; that stuff is not forthcoming. I remain out-of-it, strange, aside, "oddly conventional", and so on. I balance atop the rock, liquid mossy, but that's as much as I can manage, it seems.
So it is from this perpetual perspective of anomy that I face society's daily push-and-shove, and in particular these days the lightning and thunder spectacle of a Presidential election. A decade ago I stopped asking "Why?" and accepted that people have their bestial norms and must act according to them: a need to find enemies, a need to blame others, an inability to understand strangers, and (for oh-so-many) those very plain internal maps to winning, exploitation, and abuse of the "other". This is nature; this is sadness for me, gaiety for them.
There are a few lights in the dreariness: the Symbolic Sun (Invictus so far, if not truly immortal), friends, material fortune (to have a job, income, a home), and especially the boon of simple love, of wife and kids at home.
So I'm still here. Still trying to breathe and balance near the banks of Chaos River.
Valete.
P.S. Yeah, post-commute-blues, feeling sorry for myself. But this did help re-center me, and - as Jackie Gleason used to say - "Awaaay we go!"
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A Ghostly World in Collision with Yours
- Old Mr. Still Struggling with Ceaseless Chaos
- City: Let's call it "Fingiswold"...., California Franciscensis, United States
I only wish I could, like Beowulf, say:
"Hwæt! þu worn fela, | wine min Unferð,
beore druncen | ymb Brecan spræce,
sægdest from his siðe. | Soð ic talige,
þæt ic merestrengo | maran ahte,
earfeþo on yþum, | ðonne ænig oþer man."
"Ah, you've said quite a bit, my dear Unferth,
drunken with your beer, about Breca,
and laid out his triumph! But I say sooth,
that I owned much more sea-strength,
suffering the waves, than any other man!"
Yet I cannot!
Perhaps, like Epictetus, I may say, of the world and its evils,
"What is that to me? Is it within my control or a matter outside of it? If it is not within my control - and the only thing that is within my control IS my Will - then I shall not fret over it at all, but accept it and apply myself to it as best I may."
For the truth is - these evils are normal, they are natural, they are not (in the end) evil at all, just - consequent; and matters of indifference.
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