Dear diary,
Here’s my favorite thought of the moment. Two burglars break into adjacent apartments simultaneously yet unbeknownst to each other. Each hears a noise coming from the opposite side of the apartments’ shared border, so they each freeze and then tiptoe over to the wall and place their ears against their respective sides to eavesdrop.
Does that picture make sense? If you were watching this as a scene in a film, it would look like a split-screen, with the center line representing the division of the rooms, and each burglar’s head would mirror the other.
Actually I don’t care if you understand the above idea. It’s no longer my favorite thought anyway. Now my favorite thought is that one’s eyes never stop viewing, not even when you blink; for when your eyelids are closed, your eyeballs are still “turned on”, which is to say, they’re still operational, for they’re still ogling, only the illusion is that they’ve “shut off” because the perception that you receive with lids closed is just mostly rich darkness.
It’s the same thing with time. Even when you watch a movie on an old reel-to-reel film projector, & you spin the reels backwards so the mischief seems to proceed in reverse, you’re not really traveling into the past: you’re simply witnessing images ape forth counter-temporally while the spacetime engirding them shuffles sideways.
It would be unfortunate to fall into a ravine and break three of your limbs. It’d be hard to climb up out of the chasm and crawl to find food. Because when you break three of your limbs, your stomach doesn’t stop asking to be fed: it doesn’t care that you only have one intact arm left to lever you forward: no, the stomach just presents you with its threat non-verbally: “Give me nourishment or die of starvation, friend.”
I’m just scribbling inchoate whims to kill time, because my true love left me alone here in our apartment on a Saturday evening. She preferred to attend an amateur play at a high school: it’s a musical, starring one of her clarinet students. I tried to dissuade her from doing this (my true love, not the student), but she would hear no reason. So now I’m passing the night by frowning and blogging.
OK take it easy, I tell myself; don’t fall into the trap of feeling sorry for yourself. Let me try to pretend that being middle-aged in Gloom Land is not altogether blank.
Ahoy! while scavenging for something to sleep-talk about, I found a suggestion saved by my unremembered self in a computer file labeled “Further notes toward the next sparkling entry.” It says: Toggle between Whitman’s sleepers & current insomniacs. I guess I meant to quote verses from the poem whose first line is “I wander all night in my vision,” and then contrast the postmodern version of similar scenes.
The married couple sleep calmly in their bed, he with his palm on the hip of the wife, and she with her palm on the hip of the husband.
I’d say that, nowadays, the married couple toss and turn agitatedly on their ergonomic mattress, half in and half out of sleep, vainly watching and waiting for slumber to come: he with his elbows jutting now here, now there; and she with her palms pulling the covers over her tear-streaked face.
The sisters sleep lovingly side by side in their bed…
The sisters hit each other with their fists while suffering nightmares about real estate.
(This is sliding into the glib. From here on out, I want to center on earnestness.)
The men sleep lovingly side by side…
Fine, the men sleep lovingly.
I stand with drooping eyes by the worstsuffering and
restless,
I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches
from them;
The restless sink in their beds . . . they fitfully sleep.
You see, Whitman already understands where I’m coming from. I’ll leave off from this idea. (In the space between that quote above and this present paragraph, I read the whole rest of the poem, and it’s too . . . it’s resistant to this type of vulgar comment. It is jest-proof.)
So my next note-to-self, from the aforesaid file, which is supposed to help me fill out this here blog post, says “Maybe quote from Human Rights book, re: slavery, debt.” No. I’m not going to do that either. Slavery’s here to stay, people apparently like it, or they don’t know that it’s rampant; either way, there’s no waking them. I give up. Blake tried to wake sleeping Albion… Joyce tried to wake sleeping Finnegan… I don’t even have a name for my country’s slumbering giant… unless he’s Whitman’s swimmer, but that fine figure is dead as St. John’s Lazarus.
There goes our country. (Sorry for the depressing attitude, but I just watched the first few episodes of the 2012 documentary series The Untold History of the United States with my boss today, after work, during our regular Saturday hangout post-meeting party, because he’d never yet attempted to take in the project, whereas I’ve watched it over & over, so I told him YOU HAVE TO SEE THIS and of course his reaction was that the depth of the revelations made him sleepy.)
And, next in my idea file is a quote from Mark Twain: “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.” (Is that really Twain’s? I forgot to properly note down the source information.)
Now, after doing one second of quick-lazy research, the website WikiQuote saith the attribution to Twain cannot be confirmed, and that the sentiment has also been attributed to Emma Goldman: “If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”
I believe in reaching for the stars. At the very least, you may grasp the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.
Also my mother stopped by on Friday morning. She said she wanted to ask me some questions about my sermon from nine days ago, because its subject matter disturbed her. That entry dealt with a book that I enjoyed, called Heroes: mass murder and suicide. So my mom came over and said things like “Just the thought alone of suicide makes me panic.” And so I told her that she should rest easy, for the book is more enlightening than alarming, as it reveals the reasons WHY people go bonkers on their fellow beings before engaging in self-slaughter; and now that we’ve clearly diagnosed the problem we can begin to devise a solution. This is the best possible news. Also I admitted that it made me slightly giddy to learn that our capitalistic system is the prime instigator of this horrible trend: I can’t help feeling relieved at the thought that the competitive pressure & the cutthroat atmosphere & the scheming & corruption & cronyism & all the rotten behaviors that are incentivized by this system must soon go bye-bye. (To fire those whose catchphrase is “You’re fired.” Fight firing with firing. Volunteer as a firer-fighter.) And my mom answered, “Oh, now I feel better! I was worried that you yourself might be suicidal.” And I said, “A thousand times no.”
& I might not be exactly right about this, but let me tell you another idea that I had. You know the Great Depression in the U.S.A.? And then there was the crash of 2008? Well I’ve seen pictures of the people who lived thru that earlier Great Depression and they look hungry and dirty etc. But many of us who weathered the ’08 crash, tho inwardly distraught, yet remain washed and fed.
Jesus said: Woe unto you, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within you are full of extortion and excess. (Matthew 23:25)
And the Lord said: Now do ye make clean the outside of the cup; but your inward part is full of ravening and wickedness. (Luke 11:39)
Yet, why do the sufferers of the Great Depression appear so much more physically pained than those of us who enjoyed the ’08 crash? How is this, if the two crashes were equally disastrous? (For thus saith the encyclopedia: “The financial crisis of 2008 is considered by many economists to have been the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s.”) I think the answer is that the people of the ’30s lacked credit cards. For consider: if they had had the ability to go into debt, they would’ve at least remained fed & clothed & bathed. So all that external grime filth & distress that we see in photos from the Great Depression was, in the ’08 rerun, simply translated into DEBT, massive personal stress-breeding mountains of liability, leaving us with indentured servitude: a legal obligation to the very financial institutions that ruined everything.
So, like I said, I’m probably wrong about that, but that’s my intuition at this hour.
P.S.
Within the human kingdom, one group will often insult another group by calling them monkeys. For instance, many members of the U.S. military, during the time of the Second World War, in order to alienate their Japanese opponents, labeled them “yellow monkeys”. And then there’s this idea of Darwinism, the theory of biological evolution. One could cite what Charles Darwin actually wrote – but, for the moment, I’d rather focus on what people understood him to have written: I myself know personally many self-styled Christians who proclaim “I don’t believe in evolution because it’s absurd to say that humans came from monkeys.” Now, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I love absurdity; so, IF this speaker’s correct and the theory’s absurd, then I’m already leaning in favor of evolution. But, even more than I love the absurd, I despise the conceit that holds certain so-called races as inferior to other so-called races. But if we ALL “came from monkeys” then isn’t the state of possessing primate ancestors perfectly respectable? What’s there to be ashamed of? Consider the notion of human infancy. What if we were to say, “Look how stupid babies are: they can’t feed or dress themselves, and they don’t even speak English properly – but I myself am a sophisticated intellectual, mature and self-reliant: it is therefore absurd to assume that I was ever a baby.” – Just because you’re not presently stupid doesn’t mean you never were stupid.
But I regret this place where I’ve ended up chasing my thought, because here I find myself subtly equating monkeys with stupidity and thereby adding to the ugliness. Now I will quote a passage from D.H. Lawrence’s travel writings – I don’t know if this will lift us out of this gorge or dig us deeper; but I’m fascinated by Lawrence’s thought, and I think it’s worth wrestling with. It is an understatement to say that Lawrence traveled frequently; the context of this passage is that he had been living among a people he calls Mexican Indians. I think it adds to the above (mis)ruminations.
After this, Lawrence continues to expound – from time, he moves on to distance, money, honesty, and work; all with regard to the “white monkey” – the entirety of the text is so interesting that it’s hard to excerpt; I wanna copy the whole thing, but I can’t: there’s not enough screen here to hold all the words (if you know how to steal a physical book, it’s the third section from Mornings in Mexico, titled “The Mozo”).
Oh, the tedious, exacting white monkeys, with their yesterdays and todays and tomorrows! Tomorrow is always another day, and yesterday is part of the encircling never. Why think outside the moment? And inside the moment one does not think. So why pretend to think?
Now just think: these thoughts also sprang from one of those very white monkeys; and I, even I, am yet another monkey pretending to think outside of this. But I myself enjoy thinking, tho I prefer playful thought, and I suspect that my thought-style (or lack thereof), however monkey-like, at least could not be called “exacting white”. By this, I’m not intending to disown that color, which looks so killer on us whales—I’m just saying that I’m not exactly exacting. And yes I realize that I just belabored this in the most exacting fashion.
P.P.S.
Below is a photo of some self-notes that have nothing to do with the present entry but I think might have been mentioned in a couple recent entries; so, if anything sparks your fancy here, just click and scroll thru my latest blogs until you feel acutely annoyed.
P.P.P.S.
And here’s a stupid rap that I made when I was younger.
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