Thinking at a Bar
At a bar sipping a wheat beer, I had time to consider something I wrote down twenty years ago. Words in the old note book seemed more truthful, more penetrating than when discovered long ago. I was younger, a different man then. Now, I hope I’m wiser, and more focused upon my one life.
To be rational is not the same as to be reasonable. A perfect rationality might not even be incompatible with psychosis; it might, in fact, even lead to the latter.
I aspire to become a reasonable human being. I mean a individual that has room in his mind and heart for others, for their differences –religious, social, culinary, aesthetic, and moral. Its dangerous to be hard assed, brittle of mind. After all earth is home to all of us. Fate, that inexorable chain of cause and effect finds you and I here. We must discover how to get along, make common cause if we can. I am reminded of a friend who has a superb command of logic, and of syllogistic reasoning. I regret that I cannot bear to read his writing. With every attempt comes existential pain, the feeling of a cold sharp edge, as if I am being stabbed. A mind all logic is like a knife all blade…said Tagore.
It will not do to say that every age has been like this, that man has always felt threatened and yet managed to survive. The point is precisely that every age is different; each time has been unique, both in what it promised and in what it threatened; and sometimes the catastrophe has occurred.
Do we not all take refuge in the thought that “in the future” things will settle down and “return to normal?” What could I possibly be thinking? Does that make any sense at all, even as a simple thought? Is my “normal” a stress-free daily life, a time when “society” took care of all of us? –a time of bucolic small towns, with Aunt Bee in the kitchen, and Sheriff Andy and his deputy kindly allowing the town drunk to sleep-it-off in the small but clean jail cell? The more I reflect upon this manner of thinking the more crazy it seems.
I can think of several facts that reasonably provoke alarm.
- Severe weather events, (drought, flood, etc) occurring within our borders, likely coincident with the heat load of the atmosphere. Heat drives systems. A high school student in chemistry class learns that much.
- A emotionally violent, erratic individual has been elected to the presidency.
- Financialization of the whole economy is another way of describing the wealth shift. This is producing social inequality. It’s easier to buy coffee with a credit card than to pay cash.
The quotations all come from Irrational Man by William Barrett
