"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.
