What should I do? Look forward, I think not. Forward is the end. I think back and what that entails is recollection and reminiscence. memories and the sisters regret and ruefulness. The present is in disarray, for the dust has not settled, just the eye of the storm crossing self-geography. I associate to a dim memory in sixth grade in which I wrote down the year 2000, for it was 1952. I imagined for a moment what it would be like to be 60, just for a moment. I shot ahead, I shot back to ’52 and I went on. The memory trace stays and what it means is open to all kind of interpretations, choose what you like. I like the thought that I was imagining old age while all the time relishing and reveling that I was 12 — and all those years in between — and could not be 60 if I tried to be. I was exploring the future, making tense work for me, given the allowance of so many years ahead to live and be alive, although by 12 I was pretty much dead to myself. And now I look back to 1952 — Truman, H-bombs, Mccarthy, Brando, the Brooklyn Dodgers and especially Jackie Robinson, with that steatypygous high stance of his, and cherry lime rickeys. It is always striking what we remember, what we force ourselves to remember, what floats in that computer which is our mind that does not often allow for deletions. I think we become human dustballs, gatherers, collectors, aimless as we drift hither, thither, terrain scramblers, sagebrush. Human experience as accretion.
It is very bright in my office now. The Nevada day is starkly brilliant so that in some odd way I find it hard to focus or to write and my mind wanders, the above paragraph is such an association and so I will follow it as I laze and meander down by the riverbanks of who I am, where water touches soft mud and the reeds. As I look back I remember a program last night on Reagan. One of his biographers said that he had no friends and his son confirmed that, for whatever reasons, although the first decade of his life was difficult, an alcoholic father and failed businessman and a religious evangelical for a mother. Reagan is not the issue here; what I identified with was that he had no friends, acquaintances, yes, but no childood “Chum,” as the therapists would term it. I can think of only two friends, long since gone out of my orbit, who I had a relationship with. So, I know I can do that, or have that, but I went off by myself and essentially became my own friend, for there was no one else there. I befriended me. I am a loner and it has its satisfactions and its costs. I can confide in me, I can confide in Jane, and sometimes, perhaps, I wonder if I need another for a well-rounded opinion or assessment, but I choose not to have that. I am “sociable,” not an isolate, but I am of two minds about having a close friend and not having one. I am much more interested, given my character, to examine why this has come about than to run out and become an American and load my Facebook page with “friends.” Oh well, the short answer is that I do not trust, for that would bespeak vulnerability and that has been latently scary for me all my life.
I believe we never reach that imaginary state in which we are “grown up,” for that never occurs — and how boring that would be! –even until the evening before we die. Assuredly, we are never in conrol of anything, even our bodily functions press us into action. Humorously, homo sapien acts and behaves as if values and systems and religious beliefs (Omigod!) give us “security” and purpose. So skewed and mistaken as a mindset. We are all in a spin, in a twirl and tizzy and somehow manage to keep the species extant. In short, all the psychoanalytic thinking, self-reflection, self-knowledge, guru-izing and musing will not satisfy me as to why I end up without a close friend. Whose life is it? I can say decidedly — someone has to do that in this blog — I had no hand in all this except the hand that rules all of us, the unconscious mind, that thing we run from and even if we met up with it could not handle its drives (pun intended).
Controlled by the invisible hands of evolution and gravitation, throw in the unconscious as the other known force that kicks the shit out of us. The unconscious rules. As I come down to it, as the pencil is whittled more and more, I reflect over the different selves I have lived, perhaps experienced and, of course, there are scant answers for the questions intrigue me much more. I am just taken with the idea that I will become vaporized, an exhalation of decades and then a snuffing out. This yardstick we are given in years genetically, the measure of thousands of experiences, the learnings accrued, the insights kept and savored amount to a hill of beans. Why be upset? Nothing can be done about it. But I sense, as you do, a kind of profligacy on the part of nature; however, how else will evolution mutate, eternally forever?
Allow me to struggle here about what I intend, behind or under the words, I present to you. After all this sound and fury which often signifies nothing, in moments of self-reflection, for that, to me, is our greatest gift as as species — the possibility of the awakening of intelligence, as Krishnamurti said it, what is to be made of all this life and living, these relationships, the cacophony of the culture and global world about us?
I think I find respite, only that, no more, in acknowledging the present moment more and more as if I could drop dead at any time which is what I would whisper into the ear of any acute young person starting out on his earthly trek. No cliches here about the present as evinced in therapies and philosophies, the croakings of Dr, Phil, Chopra and Dyer, the three Stooges. At 70 I am looking at the now, at the moment, and I have a whole ball of wax which is my past, often given to me, often unlived, often unaware of until I reached this time. I associate to the old story about Alexander the Great when he came upon the Gordian knot. Told by the Indian mystics that India would belong to the conqueror who could unravel the knot, Alexander descended from his horse, Bucephalus, withdrew his sword and cleaved through the knot to the amazement of onlookers. Of course, this is, to my mind, the distinction between the western and eastern worlds, doers versus thinkers; both have their merits.
So I look at my Wellsesian snowglobe, turn it upside down, and as the snowflakes in solution float down I try to see what fixture is at the center of it all, no not a sled, but what characterological self is there that absorbs all the flakes, wondrous symbols of death. I am with myself, trying to discern at this time in my life; I find it a bit rewarding and sad but infinitely more challenging than a round of golf. In that globe is why I have no close friend, why I have made the mistakes of my life, why I was or was not a good father — or husband, why I failed in my own eyes, for culture’s condemnation or not does not concern me at all. In that snowglobe is revealed for me for all time how essentially immaterial are the tantrums of Sarah Palin, who has no snowglobe except her own reflection in Todd’s harpoon tip.
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