Last night it rained hard, and i kept myself awake nearly the entire night for concern about an open window in my just-rented new lodging. It is a considerable distance from where i slept, and i without transport except the public kind imagined the very worst sort of things including water running in sheets down the wall into the sitting room of my new landlord - and, yes, my umbrella was amongst those things left in my new lodging; so today was spent getting drenched on my mission to rectify an oversight. Last night was more like Pema Chodron’s quote “you are the sky, everything else is just the weather”, or Mark Twain’s observation, “ I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” If only delusion were so inconvenient as this. The capacity for fictive faith is so deeply ingrained in our species it has been identified as one of the “3 chains of suffering in Buddhist cosmology - greed, hatred and delusion." A young woman of high intellect recently asserted to me with certainty “there are no facts;” if that is so, i choose to follow master Bertrand Russell’s admonishment and utilize only the facts when making any decision of a material nature - this in a world where one of the more progressive social networks minds.com includes highly scientific assertions the earth is in fact “flat.” As a creative spirit i assume the prerogative of poetic license and of the facts i’m aware of is Bob Dylan’s quote “I love women, and she loves men,” but then i may be deluded - a fact you will need to determine for yourself.
The human condition is predicated on death, and of birth. Everything of any use to use to us as a species has been developed from this existential reality - people are here, then gone; people who’ve never been here, appear. That is a magnificent fact - how magnificent; will depend entirely on how we approach the next 100 years of our specie’s finite reality. “Reality”, now there’s a word that needs be included in any discussion of delusion - or as they say in my corner of the world “fucking reality.” Part of that reality is the fact my father, not quite on his deathbed, but close enough for government work, made me promise i would never stop writing - that you are reading this now gives legs to that fact - however delusional what i write may be - a fact that cannot be ignored - considered, but not ignored. What then is the heart of delusion? How can we as cogent creatures parse this phantasmagoria of images and assertions where each perspective adds a new wrinkle to the equation - real vs unreal? For a decade i did not smoke or drink - now i do both, +/- months. During that hiatus either of these two “plagues” on the human condition was an anathema to me - i was the zealot’s zealot and we all know there is no zealot like a reformed zealot. How and what has changed that reality?
I began drinking the week i left the nation of Nepal after 3 months of - tutoring within the strictures of the “volunteer economy.” I could say that it was from witnessing the installation of “boutique viewing abodes” for the rich and famous in a nation recently devastated by massive tectonic activity - further oppressed by a more powerful neighbor to the South in the guise of undue influence over a sovereign nation’s constitutional will; i could say it was from being thwarted in love by some of the world’s most beautiful women, or i could say it was a personal choice for which i alone am responsible - the latter assertion being the more plausible and honest. Why to smoke? that is a more thorny question, for as an infant i was hospitalized for two weeks at year one and deprived of family visits - conventional wisdom of the time. So complex is this existential conundrum for me, as an adolescent i gave to my mother a lighter with the sacred oath to smoke no more, “it’s easy to quit smoking, i’ve done it hundreds of times.” - Mark Twain. Now i sit with these self-inflicted afflictions - wheezing and befuddled but content - how can that be reality?
The rain continues and the closest “squeeze” to me is flitting about like some sparrow raptor hybrid - i have warm food - one empty bottle of beer and one nearly empty whiskey bottle at my beck and call - enough tobacco to make through to morning coffee. Is this reality or the unanswerable chain of greed from the 3 aforementioned poisons? When does want become greed? Where does the corpus of our learning intersect wisdom? I could wait for my young friend the sparrow to resolve her absence in my favor; i could break open the spare bottle of beer; i could importune the legions of patient women turning a deaf ear to my physical longings - all of this is reality. So what exactly constitutes delusion? I have an ache in my hip very near an actual break in my father’s frame; i’ve often wondered if the mind and its faculties are so powerful that i engaged my fictive faith in solidarity and condemned myself to a delusional pain in service of something i could not stop - my sire’s suffering? I know this, sitting here breathing that his command, i not stop writing was an act of love on his part - fact. I know that my dame his former wife has forgiven me all my transgressions - fact - reluctant or otherwise; if there is any lack in her forgiveness, it would be from a genuine conviction that I could have done better - lucky me.
How many hope from others that there is an expectation of having a good heart? Have we gotten so far afield that to believe others might be cheering us on is delusional? Is it real to think our value to others is solely from what we can provide them rather than the simple joy of sharing air? I am delusional believing otherwise, and i am okay with that. It would be more delusion on my part to look elsewhere for that which only i can define: how much, when, where and why. It is also delusional for me to believe that desires which are my own are the result of some agency outside my own awareness. No one is more willing to attend each an every desire you possess than yourself - right or wrong. That is a fact which no amount of advertising or situational ethics can obviate. I don’t particularly care if you like what write; what i care about is whether what i have said helps you arrive at a place of clarity which no other person, conviction or faith may circumvent - fact
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clarity: (this ought to be good) - the sonnet
A full bottle to the better i got,
just took less fervor than that joy drunks know ...
where their fun always ends with what is not
i find it helpful to keep something in tow.
What lens sheds light to the core of this world?
i drink, i dream of the one too alone
to find a place within any fold,
searching for fire in which all can be shown.
One bottle empty - my body absent
the mind asserting its fake clarity-
that real thing not found in the firmament
but in the heart of one’s own charity.
seek your counsel - the seat of your own worth
there is no truer sound found on this earth.
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