At 63 I have not done much in life or accomplished much. Does it really matter that one went to an ivy league school or that one was an alcoholic in the grand scheme of things? Doesn’t a defeated man feel as much if not more pain as a successful man? I wonder. Does it matter at all? No. It does not matter. Does anything matter at all? No.
I read the recent Krakatoa and sensed its latent philosophy, human beings evolve without purpose; what is, is. What will be, will be. All the meaning of the world is determined by our miniscule life spans; other than that we are flotsam. Again, if I understand fire, I will understand more of who I am.
To understand fire is to understand all. Teach me about the shape of a flame; teach me why it burns at the head of a match stick; tell me why it burns the skin, why it gives off heat and light; explain the mysteries of fire in a hearth; why it can scar and cook, grill, burn, and heat; show me all these things without learned exposition, without academic knowledge; let me go beyond mind and feeling to what fire is and maybe, just maybe, I will have a fleeting glance of what life is.
Until that day we just play with what we “know,” ignoramuses that we are. Like my new cellphone, I will learn just enough to get by. Schools, most of education, deal with manufacturing and manipulating shadows. All schooling is concrete and specific and rote-like illusion-making. The kid who can’t read, on some level, is saying that he chooses not to partake of a false world. And of course we set out to crush him, label him, or convert him. He is compelled to participate in a kind of surreal — group favored –reality.
We are educated to become magicians. It is irony of a high order that makes us act upon the world — to doctor, to engineer, to soldier — as if our efforts count. They do count, to maintain our sanity. But we work hard as human beings without realizing we are defending against going mad.
There are moments in pyschotherapy, rare ones, ones I’ve experienced as a therapist, when the unconscious of the therapist and the unconscious of the patient engage one another in the deep nether broth of time without measure, with feelings intense and thoughts incisive, that for a moment, a fire is started –but it loses it all once brought to the surface and “interpreted.”
Leave a Reply