At first I wrote a blog every few days. After awhile I chose to do it on a weekly basis. And here I am feeling the need to write something I am not aware of but feel its pressure upon me. The most recent blog was on Chicago and our stay there with my son, Jordan. And here I am looking out my office window at the Tucson light. I need both worlds, the warmth and rays here as well as the grit of urban life. Thoreau did return to “civilization.” We need time out. Here I am still struggling to make sense out of me and my place here amid the species. I think of the chicken whose head has been cut off and it still runs about the farmyard as if it had purpose in life.
I associate to an old adage: “We grow old too soon and smart too late.” What is to be made of this world, or my personal existence in this world, I philosophize. I try to get a handle on this but it eludes my best efforts efforts. Any life lived leaves shavings, like a whittled stick. Often there is so much waste and misdirection. One cannot, I believe, live a sleek life, Cary Grant as the arc of life, sophisticated and urbane. Tis a messy thing this life. The last 8 years of my sixties have been miserable and how many decades is one given to experience this waste, often not self-imposed, sometimes self-imposed. We make decisions with the best of intentions and they become dessicated, saharas of the self. “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” Thoreau opined. Is this conscious or unconscious desperation? In any case I am not desperate. I am consciously vexed, annoyed and pissed off. And so to fight off despair and the perfume of depression I have realized that I must exert my DNA, for if I don’t it will assert itself and leave me without rudder or a compass rose.
I recall an anecdote given to a class in education by an elderly psychologist who had much wisdom. I later incorporated this story into The i Tetralogy. It goes this way: a fly buzzing about a farm comes across a barrel of milk. Inspecting the milk and diving to sample a molecule of it, the fly gets trapped in the liquid and begins to choke. As his antennae and wings are saturated by the milk, the fly cannot move and take flight. In panic the fly just keeps moving as many parts of its anatomy as it can to avoid being drowned. In this effort he completes one orbit of the milk barrel. He is exhausted, fatigued and at wit’s end. All is struggle to exist. The fly tries to resume flight once more. He fails. He moves this wing, that leg, that antenna and finds himself moving in the milky current and in so doing makes another orbit of the barrel of milk. He doesn’t quit but he is near dying. The fly persists. Gradually, he observes in his panic state that he has made so many life-sustaining orbits about the milk barrel that he senses and he feels that the milk has acquired some substance to it. After one more final orbit, he has enough footing below to leap into space and remarkably he takes flight, for all his struggling and effort had turned the milk into cheese.
Some of us consciously struggle against the current and hope to soar or transcend, or to be viable; others have no awareness of this existence and flail about, leaving life shavings as waste. Personally I’d rather be aware of my travail rather than numb to it. I like my existence as raw meat. And so I muse, I opine, I write for clarity, I write for me, never for you, dear reader, for I am self-ish about this. I die, you die. I die alone. And so do you. The very most we can do for close ones is to hold the door open and to say a compassionate farewell. I’ll take that.
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