I’m on the verge, often I’m on the verge of seeing into who I am and then it disappears; it is fleeting, and if I don’t capture it, it is gone. As I look back I was romanticized as a young boy by movies and books. I took them seriously, apparently, without awareness. I was a receptor. We are often without awareness as we stumble into time. I absorbed without reflection, naively, openly, innocently, gestures, images, language that presented a kind of William Morris vision of Medieval Europe, not accurate, not historically honest, but like the King Arthur legends, moving, touching, inspiring, altruistic and brave-hearted. Harold Lamb’s Robin Hood grabbed my heart and disneyfied it. The death of Robin touched me so deeply that I can describe it in detail (see earlier blog) to anyone who is willing to listen. Such is the power of the word, or the image.
So identified was I with Robin Hood that his was the first “death” I ever experienced. (Remind me to place a stone on Kevin Costner’s grave, so deadly a performance.) And the way in which he died, the manner in which he mastered his dying, still moves me deeply. It is touching. The writer who writes passionately throws out a large net, for we all want to be moved, to go beyond ourselves so that we care for another — at least in imagination. I would hope that I could end my life with a beau geste, for it reveals how much of my life has been romantically shaped by art beyond my knowledge.
I have the sneaking suspicion that as a child, one recently self-revealed to me in my sixth decade, that I was a sensitive and intelligent boy, easily moved by feelings, powerful ones as well; that I was much the observer, passive, internalizing, inexpress. I was self-contained, inert, reactive as a young boy, conditional influences beat above my head like raptors hovering for the kill. I was made into a kind of person by the very incidental actions of parents, kin and strangers. I was jostled, angled, nicked, shoved and accidently shaped into a kind of soul, all unknowingly.
It takes decades to decondition one’s self, and then it is only partial. Whatever one can attain through awareness is a kind of joy, psychological and emotional, for seeing through conditioning reawakes the self, allows it visitation rights. I do see through the beaded curtain, all the while the beaded cacophony rings about my ears as I part the strands to see through. I will go to my grave, partly aware, and I am gratreful for that. Other parts of me are so conditioned that I am unaware, what a curious problem: to accept, to know one is blind in life — but yet, where? Perhaps a perverse serendipity wiil allow me to discover this personal myopia.
I pause here and break up my thoughts on purpose. Listen, you out there, can you imagine what it is for me to be free of a god, to be free of the shroud of religion? I am so free that I am a danger to others, as is always the case. Back to narrative.
This is a theme behind the first Matrix film: how do you convince others that they are misled, blind, without any control in their lives? Perhaps you don’t bother to do so; perhaps you first reclaim your own life.
The fires in the Catalinas glow like coals at night. One can smell charring. Smoke issues from cracks, ravines, and orifices in the mountains. It is all very primal and volcanic, much like me. The volcano, Krakatoa, in each of us is only the physical sympton of an internal world shaped by subterranean forces beyond our conscious ken. We are made, we are forged in a primal broth.
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