Bene --
Coming back from depression. Again.
It's always a question of "How" for me - some people may well have a facility of pluck or discipline or grit that allows them to throw a stern, guiding hand over their individual selves and steer this way or that, independent of their emotions - and despite having tried feebly over the years to nurture such a facility in my Self - I lack such a power. I only encounter something like it in the depths of depression, something that says, "No, all the rhymes and platitudes of others fail; I have the choice, to try to live or to take myself away." And thereafter I only arise from those depths by accepting my weaknesses and nursing myself with positives - I live, I breathe, I am not among the worst off, I grow old but am still able to get by, I enjoy little but can still enjoy nonetheless. So the first is somewhat on the order of the Existential, but the second is decidedly Epicurean! And then, in my silly & superficial profession, I style myself Stoic: taking as a base that there is ultimately one universe, that some to-us-more-or-less-magical basis informs it, that causation exists and eliminates mere chaos, that the order of things cares not a fig for human lives or frailties, and so on.
Reason, if at the base of things, is something we discover and apply, as best we can. But being human, it is not the Reason of the Cosmos that I cultivate, but that of a human being -- social, individual, and imperfect like all palpable things.
Valete.
Showing posts with label old age. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old age. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Feet Slipping on the Rocks
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!"
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!"
Monday, March 9, 2015
Contrary Old Nature Consuming Me
Salvete, quicumque legātis -
The one thing we know the Universe likes is friction. Collisions, mutations, heat, stress, movement of life, consumption of life by life - it seems to me the broad essential link is movement and conflict, whether it's at the sub-microscopic levels of nuclear particles, or among the rude little multicellular animals in a scummy pool, or between technologically endowed nations or movements throwing terror at each other, or in the collisions of asteroids, or in the super-nuclear super-heating of ineffably massive stars. Even light, as a body, collides and warms.
Speaking of mutation: According to my doctors, I've been visited by a nasty variety of it - squamous cell cancer. I have just turned 60 and now - bang - Nature plays the cancer card. More to come in terms of medical imaging and medical guesswork and treatment. The timing, of course, is less than ideal. A very bad way to begin Lunar New Year.
Once again - just as when I went to pieces in 2006, and then when someone near and dear to us ruined our finances that same year - events are crowding us out. My kids are still trying to find their niches in the new Republican slave economy, trying to become self-sufficient! I'm not expecting, at this point, that I will ever see my grandchildren. My 85-year-old mother (God keep her!) will quite possibly outlast me!
Still, what can you do? Death will come; it will take each down to dissolution. I have no particular fear of death, but I do have a lurking horror of the pain and suffering that may precede it. The final suffering will most likely be horribly intense and lonely, but I shan't dwell on that. That's all in the future, and beyond my control. (After all, I can hardly conjure up my death throes and tell them, "No; not that way! I won't have it!")
What is, after all, our one sure goal in life? Not conscious, not chosen, but entirely assured? Our death. Each man's arc of life ends up there, sooner or later, but assuredly. It's as natural as our facility of movement, our impulses, as universal as germination and birth.
The one thing we know the Universe likes is friction. Collisions, mutations, heat, stress, movement of life, consumption of life by life - it seems to me the broad essential link is movement and conflict, whether it's at the sub-microscopic levels of nuclear particles, or among the rude little multicellular animals in a scummy pool, or between technologically endowed nations or movements throwing terror at each other, or in the collisions of asteroids, or in the super-nuclear super-heating of ineffably massive stars. Even light, as a body, collides and warms.
Speaking of mutation: According to my doctors, I've been visited by a nasty variety of it - squamous cell cancer. I have just turned 60 and now - bang - Nature plays the cancer card. More to come in terms of medical imaging and medical guesswork and treatment. The timing, of course, is less than ideal. A very bad way to begin Lunar New Year.
Once again - just as when I went to pieces in 2006, and then when someone near and dear to us ruined our finances that same year - events are crowding us out. My kids are still trying to find their niches in the new Republican slave economy, trying to become self-sufficient! I'm not expecting, at this point, that I will ever see my grandchildren. My 85-year-old mother (God keep her!) will quite possibly outlast me!
Still, what can you do? Death will come; it will take each down to dissolution. I have no particular fear of death, but I do have a lurking horror of the pain and suffering that may precede it. The final suffering will most likely be horribly intense and lonely, but I shan't dwell on that. That's all in the future, and beyond my control. (After all, I can hardly conjure up my death throes and tell them, "No; not that way! I won't have it!")
What is, after all, our one sure goal in life? Not conscious, not chosen, but entirely assured? Our death. Each man's arc of life ends up there, sooner or later, but assuredly. It's as natural as our facility of movement, our impulses, as universal as germination and birth.
Monday, March 2, 2015
Couple of Quotes
A couple of quotes from browsing today:
This quote is one that we should all bear in mind - especially 'believers' who have not yet gone hardcore. This is what we're seeing (along with a bloody sort of political theatre) with ISIS/ISIL in Iraq:
"... religious violence seldom limits itself to one target and expands to reach the maximum number of available victims."
(from 'The First Victims of the First Crusade', Feb 13, 2015 - by Susan Jacoby (New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-first-victims-of-the-first-crusade.html
On other topics, from Orson Welles:
"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone."
And another:
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
Valete.
This quote is one that we should all bear in mind - especially 'believers' who have not yet gone hardcore. This is what we're seeing (along with a bloody sort of political theatre) with ISIS/ISIL in Iraq:
"... religious violence seldom limits itself to one target and expands to reach the maximum number of available victims."
(from 'The First Victims of the First Crusade', Feb 13, 2015 - by Susan Jacoby (New York Times) http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/the-first-victims-of-the-first-crusade.html
On other topics, from Orson Welles:
"We're born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we're not alone."
And another:
"If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story."
Valete.
Friday, January 23, 2015
Felix est quem ....
Participating in our present age's revival of Stoicism, I have often had occasion to ask myself: How in the world can I, arguably an abject slave of pleasure and indolence, a rattle-headed, timid, and puerile old do-nothing, how can I of all people call myself a Stoic? For many is the time that my own native scrupulousness has argued that I was a hypocrite to do so while I remained so full of petty defects and so short on decisive willpower; and many is the time that I've been tempted to just jump ship and go native, to simply devote myself to whatever overpowering pleasure I can find.
Well, I haven't jumped ship. In fact, you might say that I'm still aboard, swabbing the deck. I haven't given up because I remember (a) that Nature is anything but simple, anything but black and white - that almost nothing is perfect or absolute; (b) that half a man is better than none, and an educated half-a-man may well be better still; and (c) that God has given me a certain problem to work on (i.e., myself), unknown to others, and that therein I have my work cut out for me.
And there's another rationalization that I think has substantial weight to it: (d) that "Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum" (which I read as: "Happy is he whom other people's dangers make cautious"). In other words, why not improve oneself? Moreover, even if I am not living a Cynic's life, homeless on the street, even if am neither Saintly nor Sagely, even if I cannot BE perfect, I can at least participate in the transmission of this most useful philosophy and way of life. Helping others to learn and understand how to live, in the course of living my own transient, microscopic little life, this benefits them, myself, and the world at large.
We are all aliens and strangers, and each comprises a little hidden world of his or her own. If we recuse absolutism and fanaticism and set about living decent lives, in toleration if not in real harmony, then the good of one can rub off on the good of another. In fact, the more that people are decent -- or better yet, virtuous -- the more lives and souls can be spared violence or the guilt of violence. Apply your Stoicism, apply your virtues, and try to live well. It's what we're meant to do.
Well, I haven't jumped ship. In fact, you might say that I'm still aboard, swabbing the deck. I haven't given up because I remember (a) that Nature is anything but simple, anything but black and white - that almost nothing is perfect or absolute; (b) that half a man is better than none, and an educated half-a-man may well be better still; and (c) that God has given me a certain problem to work on (i.e., myself), unknown to others, and that therein I have my work cut out for me.
And there's another rationalization that I think has substantial weight to it: (d) that "Felix quem faciunt aliena pericula cautum" (which I read as: "Happy is he whom other people's dangers make cautious"). In other words, why not improve oneself? Moreover, even if I am not living a Cynic's life, homeless on the street, even if am neither Saintly nor Sagely, even if I cannot BE perfect, I can at least participate in the transmission of this most useful philosophy and way of life. Helping others to learn and understand how to live, in the course of living my own transient, microscopic little life, this benefits them, myself, and the world at large.
We are all aliens and strangers, and each comprises a little hidden world of his or her own. If we recuse absolutism and fanaticism and set about living decent lives, in toleration if not in real harmony, then the good of one can rub off on the good of another. In fact, the more that people are decent -- or better yet, virtuous -- the more lives and souls can be spared violence or the guilt of violence. Apply your Stoicism, apply your virtues, and try to live well. It's what we're meant to do.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Old Age, Fatigue
Iis qui legant - Salvete.
My theory is that when old age starts to shut us down, our simple, common human facets are worn away first, and what's left of our selves clings to our obsessions and fetishes. Smiles fade, patience fades, but the desire to control remains, and in proportion to our loss of strength, perception, ability, we turn to our addictions for comfort, and reliance on them characterizes our decline.
Valete.
My theory is that when old age starts to shut us down, our simple, common human facets are worn away first, and what's left of our selves clings to our obsessions and fetishes. Smiles fade, patience fades, but the desire to control remains, and in proportion to our loss of strength, perception, ability, we turn to our addictions for comfort, and reliance on them characterizes our decline.
Valete.
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