Recent interactions on a family basis have caused me to reflect. I thought I knew that person and I thought I knew me and what I have realized, if that is the word, is that neither that person nor I really know one another. I am not surprised at all. We go along, I go along, in our human dufflebags thinking that we are coherent, purposeful and with intention and we proceed in our daily affairs on gross assumptions and gross suppositions that we understand, that we are understood and that we have a handle on who we are and who that other person is until we are told something that rattles the cobwebs we have spun. In this way I experienced an insight into the Other which I sensed all along but kept on a subliminal basis — and that someone else was close kin. Teiresias had a rough time with Oedipus. I am a little sad if not depressed by what I heard. Disappointed is the better word. Clarence Darrow said that the first half of our lives is soured by our parents and that the second half is soured by our children. So true.
Here I am on the downward spiral toward extinction and I must work on myself and work on the other if I can ever get across my disappointment. We are so blind to one another. In part this only serves to fuel my feelings about the species which is a world-wide dementia; we alzheimer one another — missed responses to missed questions, emptiness to substance and substance bouncing off voids. I laugh at media-clowns like Dyer and Dr. Phil and Deepak Chopra who argue, in part, that we are in “control” of our lives which is horseshit, plain and simple. I am lucky if I can get through the idea doing simple things like buying a newspaper. Anything more complex is thorny, is it not, reader?
Questions like these are rarely asked: why do you do that when I am talking about me? why do you bring everything back to you when I talk about my losses? why is it that you act as a non-participant observer in our relationship, like a German in the fields watching trains rolling by with Jews on the way to Auschwitz? Why are you so unwilling to stand by me? How close do I have to be as a father or mother to get your commitment to me as a child? why are you so oblivious to yourself, for this makes you oblivious to me? and why do I pull my punches with you, fearful that if I tell you of my pain you will go away in a huff? I thought we were connected and I guess I deluded myself, once more, that we were. We are in effect disconnected. Is it solely my job to inform you that the tracks have broken off? you cannot see while I see. This is the conundrum. How do you help the “blind” to see especially if you are the aggrieved one? It apparently is double-duty, is it not, my close one?
I believe in my case only that I write to create solace for myself, to mend my wounds with the cobwebs of paragraphs and well-wrought sentences and completed stories and novels. I take my soul’s paw and remove the thorns and apply poultice to the inflamed sore. I do that because ultimately self-sufficiency rescues who I am although I’d rather have the other tend to me compassionately. I write to self-succor myself and that is nowhere as vital and alive as having the other apply tenderness, care and love. The cards have been dealt in my life and I play my hand as it is. And I will fold ultimately.
“Hell is other people,” Sartre wrote in No Exit. So true. What greater hell can there be than to be alienated not only from one self but others. Early on in my young adulthood I read the Existentialists. I found it appealing, brave, courageous and stoical. I liked the idea that we define outselves. Fads come and go but I believe Existentialism had it right about our very existence. It is cold out there, cosmically cold; it is lonely out there, very lonely; and we only have choices to make, often tragic ones. The story goes that in a Latin American banana republic a dissident was arrested and brought to the top of a mopuntain to be executed. Binding his hands behind him, the scaffold erected, the Commandante was not done with his prisoner. He brought his teen-age daughter and wife before him and as he began to disrobe and rape them before the man’s eyes, the prisoner turned around and leaped to his death. In this instance suicide was an act of courage as Camus has explained so well. He took power from the Commandante; he chose to die rather than to see such horrors. I wish I had that kind of courage, but since I have not been tested in such a manner, I try to be courageous incrementally, for the goal is an admirable one in my eyes. I choose. I must choose. I cannot leave that in the other’s hands. It is I who must stand firm, to confront, to take on, to point out. Not easy at all. I will do it.
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