love and work . . .

. . . work and love; that’s all there is.” - Sigmund Freud - so sayeth the man who called woman “the dark continent,” and whose cocaine habit may have had more to do with psychology than either his id or his ego. Yet how does one quarrel with such a notion, even his alter ego Carl Jung described something similar - “As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being,” and if you have never lit a fire in freezing weather, you may never fully appreciate love and work . . . or you may appreciate each more, idk. I use to know everything, then I fell in love - that’s the last thing I remember clearly. That’s what makes love so fascinating, everything is so vivid, breathing, brushing your teeth - even shopping. Why else do you think there could be so many men standing outside any store on the planet picking their noses not causing a ruckus - it is because the men are in love, while the women are spending money the men earn working. Cocaine or no cocaine, Sigmund Freud was right. I may have married for love every time; but like Socrates said, “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; if you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher, ” so what of me - a happy philosopher. 3 times married, each wife leaving for a different reason; still not clear why, but I’m working on it.

I keep falling in love, or more correctly - I keep loving, however much more my once animal magnetism is now more magnet than -ism. G_d, in her infinite mercy has blessed my decrepitude with more work than love, where when young I had more love than work - “plus les choses changent, plus elles restent les mêmes.” I never dreamed the future would be quite so sudden, perhaps because I’ve yet to love; have known lust; shared delusions; even shared enthusiasm? I can’t say if I’ve ever been “in” the kind of love where one’s giving is all that matters; whether as hard as I’ve worked at being worthy of love, or being worthy of not being left, or whatever it is which men use to convince themselves they are choosing “she who would be Queen,” and not some pale echo of a movie or storyline? I’m not sure if there is a place in my heart where it mattered whether I’d been loved in return. Have I in fact ever been to that sacred land of “everloving” as I like to sign my letters to ma? If so, wouldn’t I still be serving; still buying flowers for “ma miel” or bringing my check home? And what of pain; wouldn’t that be purely fictional, a momentary distraction; minor irritation - hardly worthy of a Heathcliff? Maybe I’ve never really learned how to work at love, even the non-work of Zen love; that for all my efforts to be, what Oscar Wilde described as “earnest,” have all been some cobbled-together front made up of snippets of Valentine's day indoctrination from commercials - nothing of substance; nothing on the scale of a visceral imagination able to conjure the “face which launched a 1,000 ships.” (google Homer Helen of Troy)

Not to be Euro-centric, just because I am, but of my earliest literary memories was kinship with the gimp Hephaestus of Greek mythology, never mind the curios sea-change to my psyche from deep, now receding, pain of sciatica - denial of grief? a sympathetic psychological solidarity with the broken hip of a now deceased parent? What is truly fascinating is the capacity for Greek Mythology to anticipate existential oddities of a particular life from the viewpoint of the physically challenged. Consider the following - a gimp 1) fashioned the first woman, Pandora and a box for her which contained all the world’s evils; 2) a box subsequently opened by the gimp’s wife, Aphrodite, loosing evil into the world, 3) who after which was snared with her lover Mars trapped by a net the gimp designed, for he was also principal artisan for Zeus himself. The gimp got the gimp either from an injury suffered when Zeus throw him to earth enraged because the gimp had sided with his mother Hera over some godlike struggle, while in other versions the gimp was cast out by Hera because she was mortified to have given birth to a god with a hideous birth defect .  . whoever g_d turns out to be, she has a wicked sense of humor. From my youth, I can still picture one snarky doctor remarking in some physical exam, “oh one of your legs is shorter than the other;” all I asked was “why are my eyes crossed?” When you’re twenty, a short leg is meaningless; after running a marathon in your fifties - such information takes on new meaning. Many inconsequential observations take on new meaning with age; that I’ve been cuckolded by 3 separate wives has for example, nothing to do with Mars or Aphrodite - it is from my own stupid choices made while becoming a “happy philosopher.”

A poor choice by the gimp is given as the reason Zeus threw Hephaestus from heaven having sided against the Zeus - “the ruling class;” or it could have been pure luck to have a flaw for which he could be cast out of heaven, who wants to live with a bunch of gods anyhow. I’m pretty sure he was cast out of heaven for being, as Johnny Cash described in song - “an unruly child,” certainly not for some congenital birth defect. I prefer to see calamity as part of the happy philosopher training - Super High Intensity Training (SHIT), though I never imagined so much job training, and I’ve had some high intensity training; I remember one Memorial Day being set up with a contraption in a yard with weeds as tall as myself, a big yard. The way this contraption worked was to push down on the handle while pushing forward which leveraged the lawn mower a good couple of feet higher like the maw of some serpent gulping down weeds with each bite - it was a long, long day. Yet here I sit with a Dick Tracy-like +/-5v digital signal stapled to my wrist telling me the “oceans will be dead in 40 years; accept austerity because the world is running out of money, the color of your skin and your zip code determine how much jail time you get and . . . the next ‘great extinction’ is about to commence;” Even at my age, I'd prefer a decade or two more of that Memorial Day 40 years ago, rather than witness the end of my species without adequate love or strength to thwart Zeus from killing our planet - or whoever the fuck he, she or they might do . .  .

Today is ma’s birthday; I love her, and don’t know whether I’ll be able to find an international phone to call and say as much - yet, just as it is my responsibility to know love from what she has shared with me about this complex - but thoroughly fundamental emotion, so too she has only her own heart with which to know my wishes. Sometimes - most times; all the time, no matter what is said or done about, to or for another we have only our own interior to inform us what is truth. As with work, talk is cheap and I can go on, and on about what I’ve done, or mean to do - all that will be left is what has been done without explanation or adherents. This is no different for our species and how we live in our world - we can be members of 1,000s of different groups and be recognized as leaders or as one of Mr. Dylan’s “Early Roman Kings,” what will remain is whether our planet responds to the love we each apply by how we live. If we are asleep or uncaring, that is likely how we shall perish, yet the opposite is as equally true - if we sustain the pain of healing, and live with love in our hearts for all, including the ciphers amongst us who have caused so much devastation for such a small momentary thrill as to ride in a rocket or limousine from private jet to private gate without once having to look into the face of hunger or anguish - dying with love in one’s heart is a vastly more worthwhile objective, however hard the work.