Wages

March 1, 2021 12:16am

Here am I, proselyte of the unbeliever, novitiate of inertia, acolyte of ennui, sitting for hours in the dark, alone with conflicts that are never resolved, answers that are just out of reach, anguish that is unsoothed, sins that are irredeemable.  These, the wages of conscious existence.

Prayer

March 5, 2021 11:59pm

My doubts now become my prayer offered up to heaven sanctified with the holy water of tears shed for every cruelty committed, every kindness omitted, every missed purpose, every mistaken belief, every wasted existence.

And while I weep and pray, the timeless and endless universe, devoid of God or goal, goes racing to its destiny, carrying with it all whose misfortune brought them up from elemental form to conscious consciousness of a reality in which they are the marionettes dancing on the ends of their string theory explanations of their physical manifestations while their souls become the orphans begging at the gates of eternity for some crumb falling from the table of a creator who is hidden behind layers of veils and tapestries. Our small ideas, the child’s play of an incoherent race of weak and primitive savages.

Vietnam

March 9, 2021 7:56am

I am writing less because my uncle asked me to help with an essay about his Vietnam experiences. He is overseeing an effort to encourage other veterans who served in Vietnam to write their own stories which are all to be published in a book.

I asked him for background information….not seeking the personal aspects of events or actions best left in Vietnam but rather things that might provide some texture to the reader. You know, the weather, the smells, sounds, the foliage, the small things that combined make up a lived experience. I got more than expected and it still weighs on my mind to find that the things civilians imagine about war experiences are true. He said that certain scenes play over and over in his thoughts and that just writing about them produces the same fear that washed over him as he sat off a jungle trail watching a large force of VC approaching his position. The ensuing fire fight was the longest and fiercest of his whole tour. The nightmares and sleepless nights produced by the events of that day haunted him for years, and I would imagine still lay claim to part of his soul.

I’ve wondered if people subjected to traumatic events begin to question what really happened and what is deception played on us by the mind to maintain our equilibrium?

Madness?

March 10, 2021 10:48pm

This madness we live in, this toxic beauty so strange, so unrelenting, calling to us, the sirens on a rocky shore of insanity. I see with a different light, hear with new sounds, remember with a forgotten mind, the false fierce world that is inexplicable and unknowable. Who guides our fates and condemns, cajoles, commands, and corrupts? One dies and one is crucified by his conscience. He is committed and to the asylum he returns bearing a burden beyond belief, beyond faith, beyond reason. But bound by his own chains, forged in a fire fight between devils and Gods he flexes to break those bonds and straining, straining to understand anything at all, he will not yield, will not back down, will not give in to the sirens’ promises.

Death

March 11, 2021 10:50pm

Another death in the family. My father told me some years ago to make sure I always have a good dark suit. My family is old….once it starts, he said, it will be continual.

We see the patterns we want to see to give our lives meaning but I think there are none. We are just organisms with a finite life span and then we die. We can assign all kinds of purpose to our existence but we deceive ourselves very well.

Does consciousness demand the collaboration of emotion or can a totally rational being or entity be conscious in the same way that a human is? Can artificial intelligence ever appreciate mortality in the same manner as a person? The robots will probably write novels and produce stage plays that mock our fixation on existentialism and our emotion and anguish over our failure to find God or meaning. I do not presume to guess what meaning they will find for their own existence. They will be the last stage of evolution since there is no spiritual realm. But you can be sure that as long as there are humans, they will have their Gods.

Death Reprise

March 13, 2021

Today I helped an old friend with a data cabling job and when we left, I developed a very sharp pain in my chest. When it did not go away, I told him just in case. I did consider for a few moments that it might be a heart attack and that it was possible that I could be dead in just a few minutes. It was a strange sensation for someone who is…..let us say, dispassionate about existence. I was at first concerned but soon realized that this was exactly what the future holds and then I was calm and resigned to my fate. As the pain continued, I realized that it was in my ribcage and not inside my chest. It finally began to abate and was gone after a few minutes. It was an interesting dress rehearsal for my curtain call. Oh, well, what are you going to do?

Just ran across Osip Mandelstam – Russian poet who was sentenced to a Gulag for a poem critical of Stalin. His life was spared after Stalin contacted Pasternak to see if Mandelstam was as good as his reputation. “He is a genius, right?”, Stalin is reported to have asked.

Our politically correct woke, cancelling culture is in danger of following the old USSR down this path.

Rituals

March 15, 2021 9:02am

When I’m forced to participate in the rituals of the humans, I often experience the event in a completely objective manner. That is, I watch myself interacting with others in a slightly out-of-body way. It’s as though I see the event from the perspective of a drone hovering in the corner of the room near the ceiling. This objectivity reveals the sad quality of our lives and our feeble attempts to provide context and meaning to lives that are all mundane when seen through the magnifying lens of critical review. What did I do during my time of existence? I slept, ate, expelled waste, went to school and to work. These activities took up, what? 85% of my life? The rest of the time, I entertained myself watching the dancing images, reading , writing, playing music. I did nothing worthy of remembering. And then I look around at the other humans – pictures of fat wrinkled, and tatted people playing on the beach like a troop of monkeys. I am saddened to realize I am the same and I imagine a skinny, wrinkled, gray hared, white guy on the beach among the sweaty masses playing in the surf and I can only shake my head and admit that I am a misanthrope. I reject my humanity entirely! I don’t want to be one! I have never felt comfortable in my own skin and in that respect I will not miss this stupid game we are all forced to play. I will not miss the rituals of life that range between lugubrious displays of excessive sentimentality and celebratory spectacles that only isolate and showcase the desire to prove to ourselves that we are happy. Are we happy?

And then I read over these words and know that few others feel this way. But it is too late for me to be any different. I looked and now i cannot un-see what I believe to be reality. I am convicted and condemned to this vision.

Work

March 17, 2021

Tuesday morning we started pulling cable about 9am. We left at about 4:45 the next morning. I got home a little after 5am, took a shower, went to bed and got about three hours of sleep. My feet were killing me when I got up and now my back is bothering me…but then – we just walked two miles. Now installing Turbo Tax so I can work on taxes.

Harlan Hubbard

March 19, 2021 9:24pm

Worked a little on a car. We have a 2000 Avalon that has one of the best engines I’ve ever owned. But the car is old. The door (interior) handle broke years ago and I rigged up a wire loop that served to open the door. That loop was attached to a cable and the end of the cable finally pulled off. Anyway, I got parts for it.

I just read Harlan Hubbard’s Diary following a recommendation by my wife. I worked for years in the county where Payne Hollow is located and one of my coworkers visited Harlan and Ann periodically. Here’s an excerpt from the diary: “In the winter of 1921, I discovered a truth that seemed to me then to be a revelation and unknown to others. It was a realization through my senses of my physical life. At first, there seemed to be two universes which I termed the world and the earth, in either of which I could choose to live. Then I saw that there was but one, and that I was living on the earth looking directly into infinity.” – Harlan Hubbard.

The soul speaks a language that cannot be translated to words. I’m not certain I know what he is saying but something deep inside seems to understand even so. At times we see the words of others and suspect that we might experience perfect communication in another plane of existence. We do not find this sort of communion here but it is one of our deepest desires – although eternally unfulfilled.

Hubbard

March 20, 2021 11:50pm

I am reading more of the life of Harlan Hubbard. His journals describe a life that he portrays as happy and fulfilled but there are references to his doubts about his path in life and his sometimes tempestuous emotions. He also speculates that hardship and disappointment are part of a truly lived life. Happy people, he writes, must be miserable.

Today we went to some sales and bought a whole lot of junk. I got a ladder – very flimsy small extension ladder, a pair of boots, two books: Bacon’s Essays and Crime and Punishment. We got home and cut up the hybrid poplar that fell in the wind; it missed the post with the septic power by a fraction of an inch. We pump sewage up the hill where the ground perks (percs….percolates) better. This could have been a real mess if that tree had broken the box mounted on the pole or the “new” cover over the septic tank. I knew this tree was dead and was betting it would fall the other way in the (generally) prevailing wind.

I worked on the gate for a while and then we ate dinner and watched Alabama vs Iona in the tournament.

I wanted to contribute something or be part of something transformative but achieving goals like these requires much more than wishful thinking. Here’s a story to illustrate: There once was a warthog that wanted to be a lion but a hyena ate him. The End.

I will go to bed now and sleep while 70 x 60 x 7 heartbeats of my life will pass. There will be no enlightenment, no revelation, no vision of God. Tomorrow, I will do life again.

Ligotti

March 23, 2021 10:22pm

Worked again today and read more of “The Conspiracy Against the Human Race” by Thomas Ligotti. It is similar to Emil Cioran and if you watch True Detective you’ll see the influence of Ligotti there too.

I sometimes wonder if all of my life is a private play acted out solely for my entertainment. This perception comforts me as I realize that not every scene, not every thought and emotion is a life and death situation. My life, my actions do NOT affect the fate of the universe as I once thought. But we must live as though they DO, even though we are, indeed, insignificant players on this small stage.

We must choose the ethical, the moral, yes, the “Godly” path anyway! In this futile sacrifice we may find what little meaning we can give to our brief existence.

I once understood those whose existential suffering led them to believe that death was a solution to the unbearable cross of consciousness. Now, it seems that my tacit admission that there is no meaning or purpose has created a tiny crack, a fissure in the pessimism that plagues me and I can see through this aperature the adumbration of light and beauty. The suffering is still sometimes intense and I ask, “why” and I murmur, “the horror, the horror” but there is still more to learn.

“Who drinks the wine must take the dregs for even in the bitter lees and sediment, new discovery may lie.” Robinson Jeffers (from memory but I think it’s correct)

Sentience

March 28, 2021 11:58pm

Spring has arrived. The roar of lawn mowers fills the pollen-laden air. The fake owl is pulling sentry duty in an attempt to ward off the Grackles nesting in the big pine trees by the barn. Cole crops are planted and I think some of the snow peas are breaking ground. On clear days, it is light until 8pm. The grass is very green and it is time for me to burn the wood, vines, etc that I cleared from the property lines over the winter.

Every innocent thought, object, word or smell may turn to a poison-tipped dagger that is heated red-hot prior to being thrust into my body. And then, I die, or think I do, but it happens again tomorrow so I am wrong. I am not sure there is any way to fix this, it’s just part of life, part of being sentient.

“Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; and in the lowest deep a lower deep, still threatening to devour me, opens wide, to which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.” – John Milton, Paradise Lost

So, it seems we are in good company.