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I am perplexed why I keep on writing.

I associate to Krishnamurti who was asked by a disciple, if you will, why he continued his teaching after so many decades, given that most people had heard his message and did not change. He answered that a rose has to give off its essence. I like that. I write because I write, no more, no less.

It may be that there is nothing else for me, or for me to do as I look about the world.  I am not materiallyrewarded. I have no fans or fame to speak of. I see something of my intent in the great final words by Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. “It is  a far, far better thing I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known, ” an eloquent mixture of ennui, resignation and self-evaluation. And then off with his head!

I wonder as I look at my fellow creatures what it is that they do to sustain themselves in this world of the fascist Taliban, the BP spill, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, the psychotic Michele Bachmann, the Jew hatred of the world at large — the same old eternal shit giving; the inability to depict cartoons of Mohammed, the stupidity of the Kaaba and the Vatican, priests ejaculating all over the place, a denying Pope, a President who dost think too much; Fox News (you should pardon the expression), a school that expels a child for wearing a cap with toy pistols on it, the morons of Scientology and Mormonism, and the true believers who follow, the damage being done to the environment, the Japanese who, kamikazi-like, still slaughter whales; the corporations that rule this world, the digitalization of almost everything — genomes, books, the workplace and the slavish esteem  which we give gadgets rather than individuals, for all this is endless in a rather corruptive environment. I had someone say to me that hope and faith will get us through;  besides restraining myself from throwing up,  I felt like saying that ghouls, vampires, ghosts, miracles, Catholic relics, probably in some demented way make more sense than the idiocies of conditioned religious thinking. We are a doomed species — please hurry up with extinction.

We are all handicapped — pick your disability. From the barbecueing American dad with his bumper stickered SUV and his need for a “man cave,” to the aimless and drab lives of American housewives, to the ideologues — Anne Coulter, Laura Ingraham — she with the inch high and wide gold cross on her conditioned neck, to the inane and fat cat sensibility of a Jay Leno and the snide David Letterman; Wolf Blitzer boring us out of our minds as he drones out the news and Chris Wallace, he with the incised smirk in his face, to geriatric gym rats who try to stay alive longer but have nothing between their ears to make it meaningful, to Joan Rivers, slathered in plastic surgery, a living marionette, to the sycophantic writers who kiss ass to get published, to the writers who write fluff and attend dozens of critique courses in order to get their vanity published, to the fat little kids who don’t know what play is as they are absorbed into the digitalization of their world, to the parents who have no idea how to parent for they are bereft of an inner life and their own children simply extension cords of ignorance plugged into their collective assholes.

I am still curious how we defend not only against death from day one — “Mommy, are you going to die?” but how we manage our daily lives in order to give it meaning of some kind — football, soccer, the sport stations which are terminally boring,the players who are essentially moronic; the celebrities of stage and screen; the sleaze of the Madonnas and Lady GaGa and their ilk; the Roman games we abide in on a daily basis. The media who thrives on the decomposing bodies of the body politic, scavengers all. The reptilian politicians are a minor travesty given that we as a country are fast going down the tubes. So here I am scribbling stories to defend against the lunacies of my time, the culture I am immersed in.

Curious, is it not? that on one level the Tea Partyers represent a kind of psychological resistance to the state of affairs in our country and are oblivious to that except for the political aspect of it.  Unfortunately,  historically true,  a good rebellion is usually twisted and perverted — I give you Robespierre, Lenin and Trotsky. The discrepancy between what is and what could be is vast and often our rebellion about it comes out skewed.  I associate to The Great Awakening in the 19th Century in which religious leaders tapped into the ferment bubbling beneath the surface, but it  got screwed up, essentially because it is religious in nature; belief systems savagely destroy anything alive and fresh.

The one telling piece of advice to give an attentive child moving into young adulthood is to encourage him or her to be in constant insurrection (!) against society and everything that may serve to conform and condition  in that culture, including his or her parents. In fact, the task of parenthood, for me, is to help the child be free of his parents in a loving way if at all possible. Ultimately it may lead to isolation of a kind but I weigh that against the capacity to be free or to quote Kazantzakis’s, “I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.” Life is an existential crisis and the sooner we understand that the sooner we may determine whatever meaning we can make of it, although I do not vest too much in meaning. There is no external meaning, for we make it, and we place it out there. I’ll take the crisp and cold solitude on the mountaintop, knowing I am indeterminate rather than the plush pomp of certainty in the lowlands of every culture and the Huxleyan Soma we imbibe each day.

I favor discontent, intellectual unruliness, disgruntlement rather than the KY gel we live in. The soporific platitudes we derive from religion and politics, from the general daily interactions we have with other human beings make me stand back and evaluate. It is essential, for me, not to become part of this society although I am stuck up to my ears in terms of its daily demands. I know I have chosen to write or to become a writer for it is in that task that I define who I am and make clear to myself what the matrix is. The artist,  poet and  writer must be in rebellion for his or her own sanity is at stake. History is an avalanche of human nonsense presenting itself as “progress,” whatever.

One never becomes completely free but sometimes it is excitingly emancipating to wipe one’s feet free of human shit.