One week and a day ago, i was in the city where i had grown up, or at least the place i have claimed to have grown up since i left at the age of 15. The reality is much different, for i was really only a resident for some 10-15 years and i am now 63. It is far from where i now live - a place i hopefully continue to grow. When i arrived home here, i mercilessly tried to resume my schedule of work which is the only real sanctuary i’ve known since i discovered the benefits of that discipline; however, indoctrinated might be a better description for my work habits. My parents were hard working depression era babies and it was post WWII ‘merica - everything was possible. I remember being gathered into the multipurpose room at our school where the teachers wheeled the televisions in so the whole school could together witness John Glenn being launched into space. How much has changed since that time. For our instructors, it must have indeed been phenomenal to witness a human being being launched out of our atmosphere, yet i could not have understood it as anything more than a normal event in the havoc of childhood. Before i was out of high school, i can remember sitting with the girl from the next block watching men orbiting the moon; which was more abnormal - the close proximity of a girl you’d wrestled when youngsters, but who could now pin you with a glance, or the fact that human beings were circling the same planetary body you’d howled at when you found out why your parents liked beer. Is that feeling of dislocation the same fiction for time? Does our mental apparatus so capable of fantasy and understanding slip in and out of here and there as easily as it slips out of now and then? When i had returned here to my home, the confusion of my memory about home was so strong that i became physically ill and slept for nearly a day. Our literature is full of stories based on the confusion our minds create when leaving the here and now: Rip Van Winkle was able to elude a miserable phase of his existence and the perils of war simply by wandering away from home and helping a stranger schlep a keg of gin up a hill; Odysseus has great difficulty just getting to home and hearth from war, much less convincing his long suffering wife that it was indeed him and not some usurper - how many men today are dreaming of just such a journey from the here and now of war to the there and then of home?
Sitting here now, i realize John Glenn, and the three moon astronauts certainly must have felt something similar at some point in their respective journeys - a longing for the familiar, the clinging to a memory. Soren Kierkegaard has said “life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forward”, while Sir Stephen Hawking posited “why we are able to look back in time, but not forward?” Anymore, i’m nearly incurious about that for which i cannot obtain an answer, for there is so much about where i sit that is inexplicable. Why for example is war a part of the human plight, and is there a role in the questions i ask for perpetual war? Why are man and woman so similar, and yet unlike as water to land? If self knowledge is the only certainty in human relations? How is it that service to others is the most pure form of love¿ Do i have to leave where i sit to learn what others know, or is writing a form of mind melding, similar to reading? I did not necessarily want to travel to my home town, yet my life has been enriched for the journey; i do not necessarily want to write my insides out, but welcome the possibility that someone else may be aided in their journey by reading what i write. What is that incessant prod we as humans posses to change our location - to leave the earth’s atmosphere or to relocate our homes? Are we in some way mimicking a truth about death we all try to avoid using religion, or non-religion - elaboration or meditation. Is it possible that a profound truth about death is as simple as standing up and moving from one room to the next; putting down one task in order to pick up another, or waking up to go back to sleep? What if nirvana is nothing more than the capacity to expand one’s present awareness to the same limits the atoms and molecules within and without our persons contract and expand to ceaselessly, even after the separation of our consciousness from our corporeal being?
What of consciousness - that nerve wracking capacity to distinguish the skin of another from one’s own, though you be naked in bed together in the throes of passion with the echoes of even a single such experience being heard across decades and thousands of miles? Do such echoes interfere with our capacity to be truly present in the moment; is our awareness constantly clouded from clarity by reverberations from past or even future events? I know very well that my recent illness could have been as simple as wanting to be someplace i am not - that makes no sense. If strong, pure and true feelings arise from the capacity to be as much in the present as one’s senses allow, does dragging any memory into the place one is prevent the ability to perceive one’s true location? What of questions, from the simple act of writing in the present about where i am it occurs to me this essay contains more questions than it likely contains question marks. It is a hot day and the streets are barren, people have fled for the closest shade which at this time of year for the street i live on is lacking for the better part of the day. Do i move because it is warm, or strategize on how to maintain fresh air and how to regulate my body temperature. What of the persons who must work in the heat, if service to others is the highest form of love, to love must i go out in the heat to try and aid those who suffer? My mind has not fully recovered its suppleness from my passing illness and i watch in the present moment what must seem like babble to a reader, do i vacate my stream of consciousness and retrieve the rigid learning of rhetoric and form to appease the wraith of that critic who haunts my creative steps, or do i penetrate the regions of my mind, because that is where i am for the moment? What would animate me to believe some other mode of prose would be more cogent than what i find in front of me, and why would i care?
I have lived too long in too many different places to be fooled by such fiction, and have struggled too long getting to a place where listening to my own questions gives me more pleasure than hearing the answers of others. Another paradox, in a world full of paradoxes: “If you are speaking you are saying what you already know; if you are listening, you may hear something you have never heard before.” - Dalai Lama. This morning i read of a period in C.G. Jung’s life where in the process of pursuing lucid dreaming he experienced a continual state of psychosis - a condition described by impaired thoughts and emotions so severe as to lose contact with external reality. Yet our world today is slaughtering infants for the sake of religion and profit, that behavior is not consistent with what i consider external reality. Who defines external reality¿ I’d like to think it is the artists left who are not deluded by the siren of celebrity and fame; instructors who continue to fight for the strength of their pupil’s capacity for critical reasoning or parents, like the mother of John Lennon who teach their children that happiness is a noble pursuit. Does my hoping for a better world rob me of the capacity to be where i am in the present, or have i reached a hilltop where the echoes of a better world are stronger than the din of misery rising from the valley of strife? Rumi - “Wherever you stand, be the soul of that place.” Confucius - “and remember, wherever you go, there you are.” Is our susceptibility to mobility and its marketing stratagems of planes, trains and automobile more an inability or unwillingness on our parts to plumb the ever changing scenery of our own interiors or immediate surroundings¿ Does anything really change going from one place to another, or is the act of change so overwhelming to our mineral minds that we need props to make it palatable and give excuses for our fatigue and road weariness?
I’m pretty sure that most of my useful lessons in life were as a result of being very present whatever my location; the converse being probably as equally true for missed opportunities and costly accidents from being mentally or emotionally someplace else at the time. Is hope capable of growing anywhere other than where one stands¿ Can love blossom where you aren’t? I don’t know. I do know that the illusion of home as a child was so strong as to rob me of years of contentment while i wandered hither and yon looking for what i believed had been lost. I now believe strongly that home is a state of mind one carries and no amount of brick and mortar or ordained unions from civil or religious authorities will substitute for the warmth and kindness one is able to bring to each and every doorway one visits - railway station, courthouse, or homeless shelter. As equally true, if you are not of a family frame of mind as pertains humanity, no amount of authority, or wealth, guns or small Mediterranean islands will ever provide you the memory you hold dear of some place you’d rather be, for we are all guests of this wondrous planet we call home. It doesn’t matter if you are an anabaptist or shiite faithful, taoist or hindu, your body is going to wear out and your consciousness is going to transition from the skin you now understand to be your own - transition back to that place where you will not be a guest at the mercy of passing whims of loved ones or subject to egregious insults of bitter adversaries. We are all going to die and there is no amount of prayer or death you can visit on the planet that is going to alter that fact. Your bloody faith may serve you now, if all the further you have gotten is to deprive another of what we were all born to do - live well and love purely; however, what if all the mayhem and destruction on our planet is the direct result of prayers and bloody faith from the inhabitants of what we believe to be heaven, and that to reach their heaven, they use mayhem and destruction, just like here?
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there - the sonnet
it’ll never be possible to be there,
for you are here, and it is here you stay.
you may search always for that secret lair
but remain here at the end of the day.
many will name themselves that sacred place,
family, friends - all who want your presence
or enjoy the pleasure of seeing your face.
wherever you go, there won’t be the essence.
you bring essence with you, of what there is.
why search for something that’s always with you?
Is it habit from doing that which does
no more now, then when you thought it a clue?
if there where ever a place not here
i only hope it’s well-stocked with good beer.
jts 05/22/2018
http://josephtstevens.blogspot.com
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
∞
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