Plague Journal, Dropping Over The Rim
Thursday morning. Circumstances continue on the trajectory which many did foresee. The aftermath of the election proceeds with vote counting, former Vice President Biden appears to close in on the total electoral college votes necessary to win the Presidency. This counting of votes is not methodical routine, bureaucratic, as in past times. The division between Trump/his supporters and those repulsed by his mercurial tyranny widens, and is reflected literally in the streets. I read this paragraph by a writer for the New Yorker:
“There have been many times, over the past four years, that covering Trump’s Washington felt like a foreign assignment to me, never more so than while driving around the capital these past few days and seeing boarded-up storefronts and streets cordoned off for blocks around the White House, in anticipation of unprecedented post-election violence. I have seen such scenes before, in places like Azerbaijan and Russia. This is Trump’s America. It is not the America I have known.”
— Susan Glasser, The New Yorker
I offer as a treatment to relieve the psychological symptoms of this unrest, of this dis-ease, some words to reflect upon. We are not the first to live in troubled times.
Life is not a safe space. If we spend our life looking for the eye of the hurricane, we live a life that is fruitless. We die without having really lived. No one can know what life is. But we can experience life directly. Only that is given to us human beings. Life is not a safe space. It never was and never will be. Until we see through the game that doesn’t work, we don’t place the real game. Some people never see through it and die without having lived. — Joko Beck, American Zen Teacher
On denial. Nothing can be accomplished by denying that man is essentially a troubled being, except to make more trouble.
— William Barrett, Philosopher
Silence as a way of being. Be silent, and practice the art of silence. Silence is a way of being and is something we do. Reaching a deeper level of silence requires that we abandon the struggle to silence ourselves and begin to listen to the many voices that insist on speaking within us. We must become a listener who has nothing to say.
— James Carse, Professor of History and Literature of Religion, NYU
What our science cannot name. In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop over with them the worlds rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given.
— Anne Dillard, American Poet, Author
And a fine tune for these times….
Sympathy For The Devil
Please allow me to introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith
I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
I stuck around St. Petersburg
When I saw it was a time for a change
Killed the Tzar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank
Held a general’s rank
When the blitzkrieg raged
And the bodies stank
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name, oh yeah
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah
I watched with glee
While your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades
For the gods they made
I shouted out,
“Who killed the Kennedys?”
When after all
It was you and me
Let me please introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
And I lay traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reach Bombay
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, oh yeah, get down, hit it
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, oh yeah
But what’s confusing you
Is just the nature of my game
Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails
Just call me Lucifer
Cause I’m in need of some restraint
So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I’ll lay your soul to waste, um yeah
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name, um yeah
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game, um mean it, get down
Woo, who
Oh yeah, get on down
Oh yeah
Oh yeah!
Tell me baby, what’s my name
Tell me honey, can ya guess my name
Tell me baby, what’s my name
I tell you one time, you’re to blame
Ooo, who
Ooo, who
Ooo, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Oh, yeah
What’s my name
Tell me, baby, what’s my name
Tell me, sweetie, what’s my name
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Ooo, who, who
Oh, yeah
— lyrics by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
2 thoughts on “Plague Journal, Dropping Over The Rim”
“……our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here….” If only this were so. Our species has descended into the rabbit hole of narcissism and my cynical side tells me that there is No Exit, as in Jean-Paul Sartre’s dystopian tale. We can seemingly only bark at each other like rabid dogs on a frozen winter’s night, foaming and yelping, hoping that something will save us. But we can only save ourselves and there appears to be little hope of that scenario.
So many of us ask, “How did we get here?” Pundits from every form of media have postulated about this query and still be only have an array of “maybe this happened.” I prefer to think that where we have come to was inevitable. That we are hardwired for self-destruction and no matter how much we believe we hold our collective fate in our own hands, all of this has been predetermined by nature. I hope I’m wrong, but the indicators are beyond bleak.
We are, by definition, social beings. That is our great opportunity and a terrifying liability. We are helpless as individuals, in need of joint collaboration for our basic needs, for affirmation to meet the mental and psychological needs. Without others we’d never learn language… and everything else. I cannot think of a single aspect of my life that I have not learned from others.
The hard wiring, is a biological foundation, materials upon which and through which the layer upon layer of learning takes place. If circumstances allow, one can learn the attitudes and behavioral skills of a sociopath, or those of a “saint.”
Nothing is inevitable. Some of us have not become conspirators in self-destruction. By dint of good fortune, and supportive circumstance some of us ‘see’ a future for a dignified humanity, conducive to cultivation of the arts, a time in which bounds are agreed upon for the economy, allowable limits for the application of certain technologies.