I am an equal opportunity disliker. I am underwhelmed by the species of which I am a part. Unimpressive, to say it mildly. I keep on learning not to have expectations — of any kind — of friends and family and the larger organisms that populate in masses all the continents. Many of us can’t see, in this country, the appalling administration that has ruled us; many of us can’t see the littleness, the brittleness, the nasty characterological make-up of the twit from Texas. We can’t see that we have put the Gilded Age behind us, to use the jargon, and have entered a new Roman age of satiety and excess beyond all glut. We can’t see that elites, particularly corporate ones, in effect, see after this nation for their own ends. Read the New York Times for a week and in its several sections you will be appalled as it reveals in calm prose the excesses of the very rich as if it were normal, although normal for them. When we read about excess in other times, we wag our heads and we can see, for it is static and discernible, but when you are amidst the sordid detritus of this culture you are blind.
Slightly misanthropic that I am — think of Gulliver’s Travels, The Misanthrope, Timon of Athens — I generally weigh what I see against the beauty of existence — the daylight I am now seeing in the office window, to wit. Well, existence always wins, but not by a large margin. We often can’t see motives, conscious or unconscious; we can’t see meanings, intended or unintended. We often can’t see ourselves clearly enough so as to determine what actions or directions we should take in life. I often experience some individuals as living lint, just clinging to daily life, unknown to themselves, unaware. When I clean out a dryer’s filter I think of masses of such people.
When I write about the Holocaust or those personalities who are “deviant and damaged’ to quote the introduction from Down to a Sunless Sea, I find it “easier” to empathize with them because I have no expectations, nor am I much surprised about what people will do. The Holocaust is about the Nazis and genocide, especially the Jews, but it is also very much about the species, and it is for this reason we do not pick at the scab on the species’ knee. We are afraid to look at who we are. You will rarely if ever have a secondary teacher explore the nature of man in a high school class — he or she has to be a moral genius to even attempt it. So we lacquer the students with the usual material, and if you think of Anne Frank right here, I hope you throw up. She is the Splenda used to pull punches about the Holocaust.
If you accept the basic premise I offer here, and not at all original with me, that we are an easily conditioned creature, then a new path is opened to you. It is to decondition yourself. Mind you, if you find a way or a book or another good person, to help you with that, you will open yourself to seeing. And if you see then “knowledge is death.” To decondition oneself is to be in jeopardy. Can you handle that? The great writers, philosophers, all the rest see clearly, struggle to decondition themselves.
It just tastes swell to be free of stagnation, conventional “wisdoms” and all the rest of a cholesterol-thickened culture. Although I have many conditioned selves, those selves that are free are in an insurrection against the others. Only a free person can bravely write bravely. I can go on but let me stop here.
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