In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
-Stephen Crane
There I was at the end of my rope, thinking I would pray for
deliverance, something unique and beneficial for just me. I could
use some help, feeling long on truth and short on providence. We’ve
all hit that low-water mark at some point in our lives, when
providence seems far away and no solution seems probably. I wanted
some kind of divine intervention in my life, something of a surprise,
and I thought, like some say, that I might use my force of will to
precipitate something of a miracle in my life. But I remembered
others who had suffered through unemployment, eviction, car
repossessed by the bank, and other maladies. I thought to myself,
“am I any more deserving?” I could make the case of my unique
qualities, but I know too, those other people had their own unique
qualities. They suffered, and there was no justice or judgment
visible to the naked eye in their sufferings. Never mind what they
did behind closed doors. So I abandoned the case of my own unique
and deserving qualities. In that, there was kind of an embracing of
despair, but not to the extent that I could not appreciate the
sunshine, or enjoy the company of my peers.
It wasn’t that I deserved it, or didn’t deserve it, as I was not
aware of any kind of view of a cosmic balance with my end coming up
on the low side, but that it was just a collision of various things
at around the same time that all coincided in somewhat of a downturn
in my life on many fronts. And think of it that a downturn or
setback in one aspect seems not so significant if everything else is
going on fairly well, or if some of the trees bare fruit, we might
not turn our backs on the orchard entirely, but set aside time maybe
to work with those less productive trees. However, this time, it was
a lot of unproductive trees in my orchard of life, and I was
seemingly at their mercy, powerless, without a quick way to
providence. Therefore, without a nearby solution, I could anticipate
or wish or hope for a further solution, something to carry the day
that was before entirely unanticipated, something like maybe a rich
uncle that I had never heard of, or a bank error in my favor, or
something of that nature.
It was hard times, and a softened person might be just right to pass
through a tough squeeze between the proverbial rock and hard place,
might squeeze to fit just right and get through. A soft person can
fit through, like the proverbial sapling that bends, as opposed to
the mighty tree that breaks in the wind. Tough money, tough love,
sickness of family members, and house repairs: seemingly everything
its own insurmountable situation, but the rub that none were pressing
particularly hard on a given day, not pressing into some undesirable
course of action, but pressing to an extent nonetheless. It was
worry enough, in its totality, without one thing coming forward to
dominate, and enough that one might be robbed of his peace.
I felt it was a necessary acceptance of a hard reality. To be in
denial, or even maniacally happy in the face of tough times is
unreasonable, but here I could bring my reason with me without
feeling too down in the balance. I could be in the middle of
whatever, and all that mattered essentially, in my mind, was my
opinion on the matter; I could self-talk my way into a rage or a
depression, or I could bend in that breeze, and when the torment has
passed, I come back to a straightened, upright form, just like the
little sapling. I had observed the contrary state, where ordinary
things are obsessed and made objects of intense worry and doubt.
People could go through their lives perpetually unhappy, yelling in
traffic, being rude to strangers, and generally growing the fruits of
their own internal worry tree. We could obsess and drive ourselves
around in mad circles over the least of things. Or we could be more
honest and true to reality, true to our own internal state, and true
to our long-term well being. We could retain our reason, and in
that, retain our perspective and our mood. Indeed, if the person
cleaning the floor in your house hates that task, then something is
out of line. Maybe someone else in the house might actually not hate
the task, might even take pride in the job every time after its
finished. There might be someone who can step in when another is
tired, our act when another is unsure. But if it were you cleaning
the floor, and you hated it; conditions would suffer, and if the
floor didn’t suffer, then surely the mindset of the cleaning person
would suffer as time went by.
Just wondering, I was, if something from without would improve my
situation, with no easy fix readily at hand. It was mid-morning in a
little town with exactly one traffic light. I was driving along near
the entrance to the road that lead to my own house, making my way
homewards, and I looked to the sky, but not only then, I felt some of
the worry slide somehow within. In the stark light of the morning,
things felt clear, unfettered, that scales had been removed, all the
unnecessary trapping and little details had melted away, and my table
was not empty, quite, because on it sat only the truth, and no extra
baubles or things to distract. Sometimes and some circumstances, to
supposedly as it is said, “to have nothing”, can be a blessing
because there is nothing borrowing the attention, and all the of the
extraneous is melted away, so that only the truth can be seen.
One could separate out each thing and take it for something not
totally bad, but going bad, getting progressively worse, but not at
the fail-safe point yet. There was cold comfort that the day was
nothing and there was also no solutions at hand for things to come;
its like being forced to waited for a prolonged failure, knowing it
was coming and watching it in slow-elapsing, but being otherwise
powerless to stop it.
So many of us are cursed that way, or making it work one piece at a
time, all busy patching this or that as needed; its probably a fairly
common way to live, and can only be taken one day at a time. The
thing was, we were either waiting for these failures, or distracted
on some errand, there was that and no real in-between unless
something quickly went wrong all at once and had to be dealt with
immediately. Surely it was common, that we either fix it or put
ourselves at the mercy of someone else, and that too a Stoic way,
that to do it oneself caused less worry, no matter how daunting.
Personally speaking, I was always surprised when enlisted help
actually came through with a win for me, it was something of
inherited Stoic principle of “negative visualization”,
anticipating the worst scenario in one’s imagination, making a sort
of educated projection of failure at every turn, which could leave
one in a pretty good mood when it went the other way.
Indeed, when predicting failure and then being proven wrong, one can
find oneself all too glad to have been proven wrong; such is the way
of winning in either circumstance. The reality of such projections
and outcomes are far less skewed either way, and though somewhat
even, not a matter such of pure chance. One can study on things.
As far as chance goes, one stymies that by doing a little research,
collecting information, and we do not explicitly impart this to the
whim of the universe. We also don’t believe the universe entirely
indifferent to our plight, necessarily.
In the Stoic realm, we believe in a higher force, a “guiding
principle”, almost as if God were thought itself. But who knows,
we might be God’s thoughts. Aurelius, as a good Roman of the
Imperial era, believed in a cadre of gods with one chief among them,
a father figure that had the bulk of power and control. In modern
times, Allah and Yahweh are everywhere, and Yahweh in the
English-speaking word has the German name “God”, from the word
“Gott”. There is something with a plan at work, something higher
than man, other than man, and as Aurelius believed, that something
dictates rules of nature. And the Stoic believes, without knowing
all of it, that nature functions within rules, because the true Stoic
learns and has at some point read books and, or listened to lengthy
lectures at the Stoa, which was sort of like exclusive Tedtalks of
its own day.
But there I was at the end of my rope…..
I felt at once a whole being, I was driving along, almost out of
gas, almost out of money, a few empty hours ahead of me. I stared
out the truck window at the most beautiful morning sky, and this
before rainclouds came.
Everything was coinciding, the rainy weather, the empty hours, the
downcast turn of mind, and the feeling of one-ness with nature, to
lead me to a reading of Marcus Aurelius. He more than some of the
others, espoused some unique scientific ideals, where the others
talked more on human conduct. Here I aim to probe some of those
things, add to and cast them in a haze of modernity, some 1800 years
after the time of the wise old emperor, the man who reminded himself
of his own finite nature, mortal, weak and fallible.
-a child of despair, sitting in a world of poo, a world of soil, a
world of water, and maybe yet, I could, through some process, emerge
and bloom as a beautiful “son flower”, a man child product of the
world that was not depressed or dejected, not especially jubilant
over mere existence, but not down at all, not to be said to be down,
but in bloom, and for whatever it meant, for good or ill, committed
at least to being; but so to do the panhandlers beside the road, for
a time, commit to being and they are under that same sky, just as
Solomon said, “it rains on the just and the unjust.”
We are still those kinds of people, despite a lot of what we’re
being told, and sometimes we’re encouraged one way or the other,
sometimes rightly or maybe even wrongly lead towards things, but we
still have that finite nature, the little space of life-years, and
all of it, decrepitude: aging, life events, reminding us of our own
limitations. We can be guided or influenced, and in that, we are on
a sort of “side quest” of life, with its own emotional arch, its
own beginning and end, and that too, vanity? Nothingness? Waste of
time? Or is it the substance of life writ large? Is it what makes
life worth any undue pain or unhappiness?
Something to make memories. Something to look back on later in
fondness.
So we contend, with our own little wants and needs and internal
specifications, capacities, and learning, fruits of various practices
and advice from our peer group. We contend and go at life by just
breathing, and to think so many fight so much harder, and for not
that much at all, but to prove they can, and like they say, to
“exercise the muscles” just as one might climb a mountain simply
“because it is there”.
That doing is its own object of pride, and the job well done is a
merit badge, something to be looked back on later. We’ve built our
own little resume as time goes on, with our own experiences, either
good or ill, our own victories and failures. We might come out of it
with a perpetually bad knee, or only a few temporary scrapes.
We need not dejectedly dwell on our limitations, but use them as a
guideline for our daily conduct, a sight line or ruler’s edge, a
straight edge that shapes our own existence. I mean, really, look
around. We’ve seen supposed superhuman individuals in all walks,
in sports, science, entertainment, and all of it is very human,
despite a certain unusual quality, despite rarity. Perhaps the key
is to know how not to make a hard bump against one’s own
limitations, but instead anticipate and plan around limitations. Da
Vinci and Van Gogh had their own limitations, but they also harnessed
their strengths and focused on the work they wanted to do. But Van
Gogh suffered greatly for his beautiful art, sitting in the sun for
hours, in a fevered state of mind, will painting everyday things like
haystacks or farmhouses.
But the point is, it was beautiful art, and Van Gogh, to an extent,
not only believed in his own art, but also suffered to an extent. In
that, maybe he felt called to realize a unique vision, or impelled to
show people something different. In his passion, he was left with
not much else, but at least he seemed to hold true to that vision,
but then, so did Dr Jack Kevorkian, who killed terminally ill
patients. But then I would hate to think I had only one purpose, to
boil myself down to one little task, and everything else, even
shaving in the morning or mowing my grass, somehow fed into that one
task of purpose that hanged over me.
On the phenomenal, perhaps it could be said everyone possesses some
phenomenal quality, whether it is ever revealed or not, some unique
talent or skill, whether it is put to use or not, whether it is
developed or not. And we all have something, every one of us,
whether we ever see it, though sometimes at the oddest times, our
talents have a way of finding us, while yet others build something
out of seemingly nothing and make a nothing almost a talent, our they
build a talent on and on over years, like an athlete training
continually, or a painter going through phases.
I could get bogged down in the minutia of self-care and think my
purpose was more to keep myself alive than anything else, forgetting
some larger purpose, which would be something remotely artistic.
Keeping myself alive trumps all, and then, thinking of Van Gogh’s
passion and suffering at painting the countryside, sunburns and maybe
some dehydration on warm days.
Think of what we are shown, what stays in the global conversation,
in a media constantly digesting and agitating.
For instance, the running man or woman who crosses the finish line
first, is but one of many that will cross that finish line, such as
the way with a marathon through a city course, one finishes first,
and we put that person on a pedestal, but so many cross that line in
the space of an hour or two.
One of our curses in society is our tendency to put a handful of
people above everyone else, and we let everyone else submerge
themselves onto a treadmill of a supposedly “dead-end job”,
apartment rents and expensive cars that have all of the newest
features. And to think what we are sold as life goals, and so many
in modernity turning from that, aiming not for a high-paying job, but
aiming for free time to enjoy a life. Meanwhile, I’m endlessly in
my own thoughts which makes in and of itself neither free-time nor
high-paying work, and not really a purpose, but a sort of going on
about any and everything under the sun, everything in my view, and
wondering of some I’ve never seen nor heard of. But they’ve
found free time, perhaps what they call free time, for their own
thoughts, but I suspect its something of binge-watching or something,
mistrusting the common way, and the work environment being what it
is, one can’t blame them for wanting to be home, however.
They sell us so much on phenomenalism in the popular narrative
though, in various circles, of sports, the arts, popular
entertainment, and so on, even cooking gaining a certain common
glamour and entertainment value, and experiences being sold. And of
experiences, in the first year of the Covid-19 Pandemic, 3 million
people took and completed a happiness course offered by Harvard
University through the Coursera online learning platform. One of the
happiness truths that came from the course was that experiences such
as vacations or social outings were more memorable and satisfying in
the long-term than buying things. It begins to hint that, like a
glacier coming over the horizon, that many are disgusted and
dissatisfied with commercialism. The rise of commercial-free pay
streaming television services speaks to that, largely, aside from the
general nuisance of sitting through endless advertisements, speaking
to people tired of commercially-entangled news networks and things
like popular politics.
I was at the end of my rope, that morning, but I wasn’t comparing
myself to anyone, per se. The Stoic Seneca would probably have said
that comparing oneself to someone else is like trying to rank
failures from least to greatest. I didn’t declare myself a failure
because I was not a millionaire. I felt something of my true nature,
my own little pinpoint on the scale of life, my own little place in
the universe, driving along, staring out the windshield at a
beautiful mid-morning sky. Objectively, I was accustomed to being
without many things, and not wine or other things would make me
re-evaluate my self-worth, but rather might make me mistrust myself
if I had enjoyed it. I have to think, indeed, in each our own way,
we deny ourselves a lot of things, while indulging in so many other
things: a victory over Dunkin’ Donuts might be a loss to Breyer’s
Ice Cream, or the old fake proverb about the Ding Dongs and the
Ho-Ho’s.
So there I was looking at a cloud-strewn sky, rain coming sometime,
but not yet, and the pure of the truck engine and the rising heat of
a Dog Day morning. Nature was speaking, itself as real as a
hammer-squashed thumb, and at once also as comfortable as a fuzzy
blanket; and my mind was kind of casually feeling its way, while
maybe even looking for patterns in the clouds and other sundry things
of no consequence. Meanwhile my questions had an answer somewhere in
there that was just waiting to reveal itself like the beautiful
cumulus and cumulo-nimbus clouds in the sky overhead.
It was like the old story of the alcoholic that had a clear moment,
even in a haze of drink, and the alcoholic could see his life and
everything around him clearly, objectively, and without distracting
emotion. One could look from the outside at one’s own life, as it
were a butterfly pinned to cork on an examining tray under hard
light. I say “hard light” rather than “harsh light”, because
the key is truthfulness, a workable interpretation of functional
elements, a clear appraisal of emotional integrity, and not the
“harsh light” which might be taking a uniformly negative
perspective on things. One could know the beginning, project the
ending, analyze costs and timelines, all at once, if one
concentrates.
The clear moment is a valid and valuable novelty in a world of
endless entertainment and advertising pitches, and one is best served
to listen to it without scrambling for a viewing screen or
headphones, but heed the rational word of the universe. But who
knows, maybe the rational word of the universe pervades even the
deluge of entertainment that comes to us all day, every day. And
such is the way, that one can have a clear thought, or clear chain of
thought, but also at once be said to be listening to the universe, or
heeding the universe, as it were, and I had but to see the sky to
feel that compass reset. So much just melted away, and I was just
me, myself, renewed, maybe even with some low level of hope lurking
just below the surface, without my conscious awareness of it.
