Wounded

Since the book has been published I no longer own it, except for the self within myself. Bloggers are now assessing , labeling , acquiring it within their idiosyncratic perceptions; and what they have written makes sense here and there, but it is all rather ineffable. It is as if I, the artist, no longer can claim his provenance. What I have written is only an approximation of what I felt because my very language and  skills are often in insurrection against what I intend. As I read and reread the book, I see where I had choices to make in terms of making this or that sentence clearer, of condensing the sentence to make it more terse, or of having a more felicitous way of expressing the thought or feeling.  An odd and temporary kind of ruefulness but one that makes one wag one’s head rather than become despairing or depressed. I can only do so much and do it so well or not.

I feel at moments a little distressed when, in one instance, the book and I are fused and I am assessed as being cynical. I have often heard this throughout my life and perhaps there is a measure of that in myself; if so, I can see the roots of that, but I also feel that part of this cynicism, if you will, is grounded in reality, and that (and here I hope this is not a rationalization) what I have to say or write which reads “cynically,” may in reality be what is, rather than a splash of my own characterological faults. An old quotation that I walk about with is: “Cynicism is the last refuge of an idealist.” I believe that is so. The cynic wishes that it were better, and since he often cannot change it to better, he falls back on sniping with his embitterment or venom.

Apparently a protective device from further hurt and disappointment — much like the fox and the grapes, I subscribe to that, feeling that I have done so in the past and in the present. However, no man and no woman can be easily summed up into a word, the “art” form of media and this culture. When I am called a cynic, part of me gently withers, as if to say that it is so and it is not so and how come you cannot see what I see.  Aren’t I more than my cynicism?  I feel I have been wounded since a child and it is a childlike self that says that. The feeling is very ancient in me.

A very close friend who had read the book, or I hope most of it, for he is on in years and ailing, tried to sum up my effort in a therapeutic way, as a kind of “defensive suffering.” He viewed it through his eyes and for that he cannot be faulted. But I bridled, for I dislike being summed up, assessed, or therapeutically “analyzed.” He did not do that, but in his own loving way it was his “picture” of who I am, his “truth.” Perhaps I should put everything in this little essay in quotation marks, as if to say it is all suspect. As I know, as I have written, we don’t know ourselves at all, much less others, for the blind cannot see the blind. We are forces controlled beyond the unconscious of Freud; for now evolutionary psychology has shown us that genes rule our roost and most of what we do as individuals and as cultures are driven by genes trying to survive or replicate better aspects of themselves — and what is maddeningly to grasp is that the genes themselves are just evolution doing its number, like an orbiting planet.

I just finished reading The Moral Animal  by Robert Wright which is a discussion of Darwinism  in present day science and how more advanced it has become. I walked away from the book, which I found disturbing and difficult to read (resistance?) because it confirms a natural and deterministic fact. In short, we are sacks of fats, fluids, bone and tissue, completely, totally gene driven.  We are collections of genes and that which is the whipped cream and cherry on top, our consciousness, our supposed awareness, our free will and nature, all the philosophical doodads is a monstrous deception we sustain. It is below and nether that we are controlled and truly inhabited by molecular bits and bytes. Humorously, I can see myself becoming even more cynical.

And even more humorous is the complete irrelevancy of God and myth. I see that as just living mold on the human mind. I have no more to say, ran out of gas.