"To
be sure, I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not
afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my
cypresses."
-Friedrich
Nietzsche
The
line appears, in places, broken or even deteriorating, emerging from
and vanishing into invisibility, but, alas, that life line takes up
again, perseveres, traverses obstacles without measure. As
Pythagoras or Epicurus or Socrates said, and as we sometimes need to
be reminded during times of adversity, "life is persistent":
in other words, if not you and your family, then surely someone,
somewhere.
The
unbroken line might do Ted Talks and hour interviews with Oprah, but
the broken line has the best story, and is the whom about which
people care the most, alternatingly as both a squeaky wheel requiring
excessive attentions and then as an encourager between fits of
struggle, in which one derives a peculiar semblance of meaning—if
only in the lens of a specific moment.
Paraphrasing
Seneca, “I speak to you, not as an expert, but as one who is asea
aboard the same vessel, with you.” A dismal significance it is,
communicated mercifully for any stranger with eyes to see or eyes to
hear, in having investigated tunnels and bridges that have no
destination—and then reporting back, not a lack of progress, but a
warning not to tread the former path for any that would listen.
Condescend
any among them unto deigning to pick the winners? Rather, a crown of
ashes and cup of woe—to choose designates to mark the bare
minimum—the benchmark, selected to remain frozen in time, set in
place, monolithic, majestic, and indeed mountainous.
A
confluence of those very benchmarks/baselines lift their faces
without shame and show the dusky way to triumph.
I
recall a tribe of self-contented “Evangelicals” among the
multitude: one took a glance at myself, constitutional in hand, and
turned me away, refusing me the Gospel. Their advertisements for
their belief system, they refused me; and yet among their deacons, I
was hand-delivered the organization’s playbills to my home,
personally—never declined from a line of talk, a common cause among
the Salvationists(for as the world would have them, “Evangelicals”,
but as I have them, “Salvationists”)--
and
Lord I know, that condemnation is my greatest of merits.
It
was not the institution that I sought, but the way.
It
was not the institution that Seneca sought, but the way.
I
note of the exactitude of those who cordon themselves away, those
profoundly studied on their chosen program of life—their person is
their own terrariums, biospheres, shadow-boxes in which their
mountain is the conquering and the banishing of disillusion and
self-immolation from their own souls.
I
had an appetite for a word or two of how they kept those precepts so
well—despite having seen that an interaction with myself was
perceived threatening to their salvation.
The
dull radiance of a multitude of failures show the way to success.
Don't let others write the book on you; do your proper diligence to
assess your mistakes and endeavor to rise above them.
Your
past mistakes are your only enemies.
If
the westerner were in quiet despair, and the easterner were at a
constant froth at one thing or other, nothing whatsoever is proven or
disproven of a higher purpose—save that God is possibly yet
cheering us on, lest we, in a prism of error and mishandlings, prove
our lack of merit in the hierarchy of the universe, and finally
demonstrate plainly that we have no real point in existing, after
all.
Seneca
as much mistrusted himself and crowds—and through all of his
imputing wisdom and his learnings, the real firstfruit of all his
efforts was an insane emperor that proved to be his societal undoing,
in confiscated belongings and banishment to the far reaches of the
“civilized world”, the helenized world, that is. Was he a
skeptical Socratic, then? Was he only clarifying questions, instead
of pointing out answers?
He was not reaching towards the institution, but the way. After all, there was only to exist or be condemned with the institution, but the way made all of that moot.
I move among them, the crowd, a Henry Jeckyll--amalgamating and distressing solvents and solutions that may prove transcendent in some way:
What is of God.
What is useful.
What is beautiful.
(Aquinas.)
Risking hell to achieve heaven.
Wagering all of heaven to banish hell.
That at my best, and at my worst, scrawling incomprehensible reminders for myself on the walls of my rooms. Crawling on my belly, chewing at my fingernails in consternation, and then at other times, not.
Seneca's pier in the Stoa mumble-mouthed to himself in private writings in
favor of a closing of books. It was as if to put on his Todoist or
Monday or Tasks app, “do not read a book today”, and he scheduled
that to repeat everyday thereafter.
Aristotle
had the same problem as Seneca, in the form of Alexander, with
largely the same result.
(Was
another in the Stoa later that undid that Gordian Knot by declaring
that his leg could be fettered or tethered, but his soul remained at
its liberty. His earthly possessions could be seized for posterity,
but that very what-not that made Epictetus the man he was, was out of
reach of all. “Trig as trig can be, you cannot, whatever you may
devise, disturb me.” It is similar to the Early Church days of
Paul and Silas released from chains in divine intervention, then
apologizing to their gobsmacked jailor.)
It
was a failed New England schoolmaster that noted to his colleagues,
it would be better if people divested themselves of learning and the
time apportioned for study, in favor of merely learning a few simple
chores, mopping, slopping, milking, dusting and stew-craft. His
school went kaput, however seemingly never did his best intentions.
He is not remembered 150 years later for what he did, for it all seemed failure by common standards.
He is remembered for the content of his ideas.
“Life
is persistent.”
Something
so odd in the universe as human life, bears out itself like a
constellation in a profane formation that is too unabashedly
pointless not to be a conspicuous reminder to any that see it that
all is naught. Or so it seems. From consumption to ego-centrism to
the various putting-upons we so freely dole to others—it is an
unbroken, if not always clear, line. And at the trailhead, we might
see a familiar face, and further, they may have word of difficulties
and encumbrances along some of those paths we had considered for
ourselves.
I
was looking over Archie Baum’s Tao translation, in which the word
“Dao”/”Tao” is defined as “nature”, a double-ended
instrument that one grasps somewhere near its middle, and pointedly,
the unbroken line of mankind is at once both usurper and master, as
man himself stands, in his own perspective equidistant between
beginning and ending.
And
there I was, alongside you,
persistent
as an unbroken leg,
this
day in history—
~a
smidgeon of these:
happier.
wiser.
