What you Deserved
August 1, 2019 10:11pm
We cleaned house and mowed the grass today. I transplanted six or seven squash plants yesterday. I am hopeful that we can make up for the pitiful performance of the first crop which produced almost nothing because of all the early rain. Often, there are mysteries in the garden regarding why some crops thrive and others fail. I think it has to do with cold and wet conditions at a specific time of development but since we cannot predict the weather, it’s a yearly crap shoot….you plant and hope for the best.
Went to the Danny Mac’s jam tonight and talked to a guy named Rick who confessed that he had no idea how to play the melodies to all the old-time music they play down there. He had me fooled for a while but since I sat next to him tonight, I realized that he was being honest…..he is just playing random scales in the key – so we are in the same boat. He is very good at a lot of Neal Young stuff though.
Did you get what you deserved? Life is just what it is. We say that it’s cruel or unfair. Tony’s g-granddaughter didn’t deserve to die at 11 months of age never experiencing a great deal of happiness with her congenital defects. He told of her smile after coming out of anesthesia recently. Brave and loving little girl who did not stand a chance. I can’t just let this go. It destroys my soul to think of her and all the other innocents that must suffer for reasons that do not exist- because there are none. The universe doesn’t care if we call it cruel….it just continues and we die. God can’t or won’t intervene; our prayers radiate into the void where they weaken until they are imperceptible, and others come crashing into them and all are broken on the rock of infinity. So, did you get what YOU deserved? No? Well, take heart, it doesn’t matter! Nothing you did, felt, or thought matters; it will all disappear with you. Goodbye to all your mistaken beliefs of self-hood. You thought you had a “higher consciousness” – thought you understood more than others, had a greater sense of awareness! Yikes! What a pompous ass you are! Did you get what you deserved? Much more – you deserved NOTHING. But fate was gentle – good even, to you, an undeserving organism who did not die at 11 months of age for reasons known only to God and an uncaring universe.
The ontological argument and St. Anselm: “That than which no greater can be conceived.”
If we are in the matrix being controlled by a 13-year-old alien, who created him? Is he also in a game? Look into these opposing mirrors and conclude the same as Anselm in his 1078 AD “Proslogion.”
The teleological argument based on the design of the universe.
Merton
August 2, 2019 11:34
“A life that is without problems may literally be more hopeless than one that always verges on despair. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most. It is his own existence, his own being, that is at once the subject and the source of his pain, and his very existence and consciousness is his greatest torture.” – Thomas Merton
The Hissing of Summer Lawns
August 16, 2019 7:31pm
The air shimmers with heat and the grass is crackling underfoot. Overhead, a vivid blue sky every day with Apollo racing from horizon to horizon – a little faster.
I am digging out the footer for the cottage. It was dug two years ago with an excavator, but time flew, and I never got the concrete poured. Now I try again – assuming I have about 8 weeks of dry weather. After Nov 1, the ground at the back entrance will be too wet to get a concrete truck in there. So, I spend my days digging out the dirt that has filled in the footer during the past two years and enlarging it. The ground is so soft from the water that has collected in this footer that I think I need to make it even wider and deeper to compensate. This work is seemingly endless and I have hurt my back twice recently.
Cicadas hum in the background to the same tune as the hissing of summer lawns (props to Joanie Mitchell – I have the 1975 vinyl album and see that it’s priced at up to $99 on Ebay!!!!!) Anyway, I dig on and question why I do this and, actually, why I do anything at all and I have no answer. Like Gerald Critch in “Women in Love”, I live because I am living.
Mowing with the Peasants
August 18, 2019 10:09am
We drove to Lexington and attended the Woodlawn art fair with our daughter and son-in-law. We inspected some shops in the area and I bought Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science” at Black Horse Books.
Nietzsche discusses the thoughts of the intellectual “nobility” compared to those of the “commoners.” I am daily filled with dread over my lack of understanding and my inability to break through to some land of light and clarity. I think, like Nietzsche, that others are absorbed with the same existential questions, but I have no idea how much time, if any, that others spend in this pursuit. It’s not something that comes up in everyday conversation.
Friends who have the capacity seem to shy away from this confrontation with our deepest reality. Even X, who is faced with mortality in a more vivid fashion than those of us who still have the luxury of ignorance, prefers to avoid, for the most part, thinking about the ultimate questions we all face. His one concession: an interest in spirituality that his illness forced upon him. If not for the disease, he might never have gotten around to “God.”
And what is the point? I was digging more on the footer, thinking of Levin mowing with the Russian peasants in the heat. Another day of extreme heat for me to spend in a hole tossing shovels-full of dirt out on to the growing pile around me while thinking of Russian peasants spending their lives for what? Survival. They did not change the course of history, they just put bread on the table and were eternally thankful when they could get a drink of clear and cold spring water and maybe a cool breeze to raise a goose bump for a brief moment in the otherwise oppressive heat of their hayfield.
So, I share the same simple respites from the heat and the work. Then go back to my digging in the sunbaked earth where I am Shiva to the colonies of ants and the occasional earthworm who fall victim to my pick and shovel. Their lives are not as important as my project. Certainly not a Buddhist outlook but the digging will continue. Perhaps someday another race will come to these shores and feel that we should have picked another place to make our home rather than encroaching on the region of the universe that they “own”; then, the pick and shovel will fall upon us too!