Dear diary,
OK, so I’m accustomed to seeing God as a world-sized mirror that reflects itself, which shattered long ago into all of us (also any fashion of energy), who now reflect ourselves, each other, and everything else. And the worst among us either wish to maintain our state of fragmentation, or to fracture into even slighter isolates; while the best among us strive to merge, if possible, back to our primal coherence, so as to hold that form for as long as we are able, even perhaps to fuse further, unless another atomization proves inevitable, whereon the aim becomes to shatter better.
Over the years, the above has become my firm persuasion. I didn’t even ask for a comprehensible stance, and nobody passed me a tract in attempt to convince me of this view: it just happened naturally. So my question is: Do I prefer to keep sporting this style of belief, or should I change my mind? I’m really on the fence about this, because the above thot-system works well, and if it ain’t broke then why fix it — nevertheless, who doesn’t enjoy a change of costume, especially in a wacky farce like life?
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I don’t get why people have a problem with the notion of crafting an artificial environment that maintains the ideal temperature. If some magical folk were to manufacture a nice green swamp that always keeps exactly the same atmospheric conditions as my writer’s room (the one where we’re trembling right now, in our basement, with the dehumidifier that roars nonstop, where you can hear the hail pellets clinking against the fresh-air intake pipe, as it’s storming outside), I would stay there forever.
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But yesterday we were standing outside, you and I, because a woman had just finished giving us an estimate for the amount that her company would charge us to replace our driveway, and we were both in a state of contemplation, staring down at our lawn, and we noticed that there were tiny frogs in the grass, only about as large as a fingerprint, and one was hugging onto the leaf of a weed, the way that I myself might clutch a sail when windsurfing. I wonder where these little froglets come from, for I never see them hatching out of eggs, and there’s no creek near our yard for them to become tadpoles in. I assume they can’t just spawn from midair, thus their inception and birth must be taking place sometime when my back is turned. Perhaps there are puddles of standing water hidden amid the mud-scape, or an orange bucket in our neighbor’s yard that got left in the rain and is now half-full, so that it breeds amphibians and reptiles, and swarms of mosquitoes. I just hope that I don’t accidentally step on one of these frogs, or trim it with the push-mower.
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Look how I just can’t manage to stay on subject. My intention when I began writing this entry was to nail down my religious beliefs and then brainstorm new ones. But the items in the vicinity caught my attention and got me daydreaming about yesterday’s wildlife. I wish I could write real clear sentences and coherent paragraphs, so that the reader would feel serene and fortified by my words. Here’s a quote from a story in an issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal...
“I’m so happy for my blessings,” the young housewife said. “Wonderful husband, handsome sons with dispositions to match, a big comfortable house... I’m thankful for my good health, my faith in God, and such material possessions as two cars, two TV’s and two fireplaces.”
That’s the way that I wish that I could write. And that’s the stuff that I want to write about. Husbands and wives in the suburbs. Clean, new houses; and each family has exactly two children, to match the items listed above. I like this super-sanitized mood. It’s got a “perfect ad” feel. But I can’t maintain such an even keel for long... I end up drifting like a windsurfer. Instead of a perfect ad, my writing is more like an ad for a car with the car removed, and all the slogans and brand name cut away (except maybe one stupid phrase right in the middle — yeah, that sounds about right), with some uglier ad showing thru its blotted places like an unplanned backdrop.
And yet I wonder why you’d want two fireplaces — is that really just to speed up local warming? But why don’t you just get one of those auto-blissful swamps that I mentioned above? Or move to a place where there is no winter, like the film-noir villas at the end of my mind.
See what I mean? Everything that I do is soused in whimsy. I ran into a passage from the famous literary critic Dr. Samuel Johnson — it was quoted in Harold Bloom’s latest book Possessed by Memory — in it, Johnson was opining about the poetry of his friend William Collins, but I think the words apply less to him and more to ME:
To what I have formerly said of his writings may be added, that his diction was often harsh, unskillfully labored, and injudiciously selected. He affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival; and he puts his words out of the common order, seeming to think, with some later candidates for fame, that not to write prose is certainly to write poetry. His lines commonly are of slow motion, clogged and impeded with clusters of consonants. As men are often esteemed who cannot be loved, so Bryan Ray’s writing may sometimes extort praise when it gives little pleasure.
Mind ye, that’s NOT “exhort” but “extort”. (While the former means “to urge strongly”, the latter means “to obtain by force or threats”.) And I took the liberty of inserting the phrase “Bryan Ray’s writing” into the place where Johnson says “the poetry of Collins”, because I am only the reincarnation of William Collins, whereas my birth name is Bryan. (You should check out one or two of my bad books.)
But obviously if I deemed the above criticism to be truly insulting, I would not steal it for myself like so. I think what I’m trying to do is show that even the finest judges aren’t infallible.
What’s funny is that Dr. Johnson was almost invariably correct; but, because of his nearly perfect record, all anyone wants to do is gawk at each rare instant where he makes a mistake. For instance, if you scour thru my own entries here and collect all of the Johnson quotes that I’ve ransacked, you might even get the idea that the guy was incompetent! What a shame that the future will know nothing of humankind but what I’ve saved in these pages.
I often think about how ancient Egypt must’ve felt to those who lived back then, versus how it feels when you learn of it from the Bible. The story of Moses leading his people out of slavery, in the book of Exodus, leaves the reader with a negative view of Egypt. In that case, those who were downtrodden wrote the history; which seems to contradict the old adage “History is written by the winners.” And yet, on second thot, the Hebrews didn’t pen their story when they were slaves: they waited till they themselves became World Champions, when Solomon was King, and the nation of Israel was thriving. It would be a few years before it fell again and shattered into chaos.
But if the Hebrews had chosen to publish the story of Exodus back when they were still slaves in Egypt, not only would it be considered seditious and treasonous, but no one would read it with fidelity. All books require an amount of care, even love, to be read aright: one must suspend one’s disbelief. So if the adventures of Moses had been made into a feature-length scroll, even properly marketed and given adequate distribution, so long as the project was released during the eon it deals with, the critics of that age would condemn the scripture as a failed fiction, and its author would be laughed to scorn: he’d be berated for putting his words out of the common order; and the text would be ridiculed for containing too many consonants (recall that the Hebrew script was devoid of vowels).
My point is that we should try to find genius in everything. Whatever it is, attempt to like it. Cuz we don’t wanna end up glibly dismissing an artwork that the future judges holy. Especially avoid condemning anything for being odd or abnormal: for that’s just the type of stuff that might prove brilliant.
Yet, as everyone’s entitled to her own opinion, so every age is entitled to its fashions and fads; and what seemed in bad taste for Johnson’s time seems in the best taste to ours — I’m thinking of John Milton’s “Lycidas”, which many consider to be the best mid-length poem (and I agree with this assessment), whereas Johnson lambasted it — and the generations to come might reverse our judgments: they might go back to agreeing with Johnson, or they might disagree with both Johnson AND us 21st-century tricksters.
And there are cases where different ages will agree about the value of a work while utterly disagreeing about the reasons for doing so. Johnson may call Paradise Lost a success because he loves its God and hates its Devil, thus he enjoys the way the former beats the latter; whereas we of the present proclaim the same book a success yet with an opposite attitude: we love its Devil and hate its God, because we read the poem as being subtly satirical — even if this was unintentional or problematic, we’re still amused. Same thing with Genesis: Johnson probably loved its LORD and assumed the story is portraying Him with reverence; but we damozels of the future know that the scripture’s author was presenting this LORD in the least flattering light, with sophisticated irony, for the sake of dry humor; and, in the same vein, most of the patriarchs are shown to be foolish, and the women always win. (I mean the female characters easily best the male ones intellectually and just plain humanly, in those tales: they always charm the reader, while the males, albeit monotonously in command, rarely fail to make one wince. Similarly, Shakespeare favors femininity, especially in the aggregate of his plays’ marriages. Credit to Bloom for these ideas, by the way: I’m only restating what I think I’ve gleaned from his teachings over the years.)
To be clear, tho: regarding women and men, I don’t think that one is better than the other — I see them as both the same raw type of being, ultimately: it only makes sense to speak of HUMANKIND, not of two or more separate sexes, let alone races: for sex and race are infinitely variable; they are (in)convenient fictions. So the reason that I side most often with feminism is that I live in the shadow of patriarchy. Were I to find myself in a time of matriarchal tyranny, I’d join the boys’ club. I believe in opposing clocktime’s pendulum: so, whichever way it’s lodged, I push against it. I’m not sure if this means I wish to center it, so that time ultimately ceases (yes, again, for time to end, since “end” is a time-term, would mean inaugurating super-time, which is the encompassing Eternity; so don’t think I don’t know what I’m talking about: for I AM stupid), or if I believe in keeping the pendulum swinging, for maybe the flux is what I love — the fire of life.
But that’s an interesting question: What do I find more desirable, flux or stasis? THAT’s the true dichotomy of our ultra pendulum.
So, since I’m attracted to both chaos and order, I can’t choose one over the other; however, in this last case, at least I know that I side with the act of centering (or inflicting a super-stasis on stasis), because I’d like to escape from the pain that results from constant change, not least of all the final change DEATH, while also avoiding the boredom of stability, or Universal Freeze, which always heralds the subsequent Big Bang.
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I hate how this ended, so I want to end instead with a quote from The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan:
A baked potato is not as big as the world, and vacuuming the living room floor — with or without makeup — is not work that takes enough thought or energy to challenge any woman’s full capacity.
P.S.
If you don’t like the above quote, here’s another one from further down on the page in the selfsame book — maybe we could combine the two, separated by an ellipsis...
This is the real mystery: why did so many American women with the ability and education to discover and create, go back home again, to look for “something more” in housework and rearing children? For in the same span of time in which the spirited New Woman was replaced by the Happy Housewife, the boundaries of our world have widened, the pace of global change has quickened, and the very nature of human reality is increasingly free from biological and material necessity.
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