Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning

I awake in the middle of the night, and my thots are about money and freedom. Boringly normal.

Dear diary,

I wonder what my very first pleasure was. At some moment in my earliest childhood, I must have felt pleasure and then decided: This is what life is all about; this is the purpose of existence; this is the direction I want to move in.

What a nice and simple idea: Wherever the pleasure is, go there and get it.

But, sometime along the line, my attempts at hunting & gathering pleasure must have failed or backfired, or some trickery occurred, which left me instead with PAIN.

That must have been an awful realization: While attempting to trap good, one can end up trapping evil. This led me to review the world in a complicateder way: I began to overemphasize the separateness of my acts, compared to reality’s re-acts: I said to myself “If a move toward pleasure can bring about pain, then a move toward pain might bring about pleasure.” It’s a stupid way of thinking, tho I’ve never grown out of it. It’s superstitious, magical yearning; as if I can dupe the world into pleasing me when it is bent on my destruction.

The interesting thing is that my intention never changes: I always want pleasure. So there’s a trinity of confusions:

• the aim,
• the act,
• the end.

In my earlier, simpler way of thinking, my aim was pleasure, my act was pleasureward, and my end was pain. In my later, still current, mature, adult, corrupted way of scheming, my aim remains pleasure, my act is painward, and my end is still pain.

(What a misguided creature! One almost wishes that one could get inside its mind and help it think better.)

Now you ask me to give a specific example for both pleasureward and painward action. OK, I’ll start with pleasureward:

Say you’re in paradise with God, & you see a plant whose fruit looks good to eat; so you reach out & pluck the fruit & eat it. You suck it out of its skin, and sip it down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala. That’s a pleasureward act.

Now imagine that God banishes you from the garden, saying “Only if you agree to darn my apostle’s multicolored tent will I let you come back into paradise and eat this fruit that you like.” So you darn his tent. You mend all the holes, and even dye its shades back to life. That’s a painward act. It’s no fun slaving for The Man; but you do it, in hopes that thereby you’ll repossess some pleasure.

But, at what point does one say “Enough is enough”? When does one stop deferring rewards and demand one’s just deserts RIGHT HERE & NOW! No longer “Toil today, enjoy eventually” (the postmodern revenge of “buy now, pay later”) – we’ve had enough of pain: let pain go rule somewhere other than the present, for a spell.

Why must heaven always float faintly in the future? Heaven should be this instant, and it should possess particular traits and details that we can reflect on, note down, make faithful sketches of and remark about. One should not need to inquire “Does ripe fruit never fall in paradise?” For one should be able to look and see for oneself that the answer is YES: this fruit cannot be pulled from its branch. It is inedible, on account of its being unpluckable. Except for the plant in the midst of the garden; that’s another story. You can suck the morbid flux from its empty bladders. But only in autumn.

P.S.

A tree cricket sneaked into our apartment somehow, and it keeps shrieking its electric love-song in the dark. I can’t find where it’s hiding: I can only follow the noise till it’s at its loudest; then, when I turn on the light, the racket stops & the coast appears clear. So I extinguish the lamp & step away, but then the song starts again. I assume that this creeper can hear the drone of its fellows darkly, thru the glass of our windows. They’re all cricketing together, up in the trees, where tree crickets belong. Yet every time our invader grows abstracted enough to trill his strain again, I, even I (the manor’s lord) come blasting the sun, which scares the heck outta the lad. That’s my take on the situation. So poor Joseph (I nicknamed him after Kafka’s mouse-singer Josephine) perceives the calls of his comrades in the distance, yet the sound is so faint that he can’t tell whether it’s a true dream or just a reality.