Sunday Selections #775
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*Sunday Selections* was originally brought to us by Kim, of Frogpondsrock, as
an ongoing meme where participants could post previously unused photos
lan...
I haven’t posted a thing for two weeks
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*...and it feels like forever. May has been a very busy month this year in
our family, with birthdays (2), anniversaries (2), graduations (3 at two ...
Mmm Mmm Good
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One of the things that gives me great joy is listening to my sons
exchanging recipes.
As you know I have four children... three boys and a girl. I decide...
End of Warmth
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We had some nice days. But the heat is gone.We'll be in the 60's again
for awhile, with perhaps some drizzle.I love the heat. Takes me maybe a
day to a...
meandering
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Robert and I had a rare weekend off together this past weekend. We
explored Weston, MO where we did some coffee shop flopping (I sewed and
Robert click-...
Pet peeves
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Don’t you just hate it when you have to untangle yarn because there are
extra bits inside
I knew I was in trouble when I saw three ends coming out the mid...
Practicalities
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Sleeping in the back of the car worked out not too badly. I have to say
that manouvring out of it for an overnight pee was a hassle but a person
can't e...
What Happened to Tom?
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I haven't posted for a long time. But I'm inspired by *Confessions of
a Grandma*. Like me, she hasn't been blogging lately. But recently she
brought...
My Sketching Project
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Every Christmas, my family has a fabulous Yankee Swap--all of us, four
kids and four adults, with a pile of wrapped presents to chose from, all
on the...
Giving as Spritual Discipline
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SIW 25.02.2024
Looking at bible verses about giving I read one that I have read and heard
a lot of times before but somehow the emphasis changed
*...
Fall Catch-ip
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As I write this, we are experiencing yet another power outage expected to
last 4 hours, better than 4 days as some of our other outages have. Still
it is...
I'm Back
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LITTLE JOHNNY LITTLE JOHNNY LITTLE JOHNNY LITTLE JOHNNY LITTLE JOHNNY
A teacher said to her class, "Right, I'm going to hold something under the
desk...
Old Moon Quarterly and Krieg
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Old Moon Quarterly, Volume 5, 2023. 137 pages. Edited and arranged by
Julian Barona. Cover by Derek Moore.
This is a collection of heroic fantasy short...
Prodigal Returns
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I'm back!
It's been over three years since my last post - and a hell of a lot has
happened since!
I finished my BA degree, released an album titled "Bac...
Untreated Chronic Pain Is Terrifyingly Agonizing
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I am having the worst pain of my life this week. I know there are many
others suffering, too. It is unbearably debilitating. 🥺
§~§~§~§~§~§~§
“Few thin...
The Final Post
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This is my last post. I haven't blogged much over the past year or so and
I've decided to bring closure to what was once an important part of my
life. Th...
Slow food
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I've had a strange summer. In mid June I fell while getting out of an
elevator, in a rush to get to my hotel room after a loud, noisy, crazy
family party....
Ridgeland Roadhouse
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*From the Don Jackson Collection*
"A small buidling is home to a restaurant in Ridgeland." -- Library caption.
Get your Schlitz here. And your home cooked...
I get a lot more done when Peggy is away because her presence is a distraction. During this absence, I’ve been roofing our new deck
during the day and making crackers and soups at night. When I’m
working in the kitchen, I watch films one after the other. Tonight, I watched
two war documentaries. The first was The Corporal’s Diary, which was
about an American soldier who died in Iraq, and the second was Heroes of Iwo
Jima. In a few minutes,
I’ll go to bed and continue my nightly reading of a newly-released book entitled Survivor:
Auschwitz, the Death March, and My Fight for Freedom, which is surely the
last first-person account of a Nazi death camp that the world will ever see.
When
I was younger, I sometimes experienced regret that I had never gone to war because I saw it as a rite of passage like no other, and because it enables men to bond closely with
other men. Yet, I went to great lengths
to avoid the only war I had a chance at. I’m not sure whether I did this
because I thought that only suckers voluntarily went to Vietnam, or because I had no stomach for any war. I suspect the former because,
unlike World War II, which made at least a little sense to me, and during which
those who didn’t fight were viewed with suspicion, I never felt the least inner
desire or societal pressure to go to Vietnam, although I felt a lot of pressure
from the draft board, which was forever eliminating my latest exemption in what
seemed like a cat and mouse game with me being the mouse. When it seemed as if the cat finally had me cornered, my doctor wrote to the draft board saying that I had passed
several kidney stones, so I was reclassified from 1A (kiss
your ass goodbye) to 4F (we wouldn’t draft a worthless fucker
like you no matter what) for a year, and by the time that year ended,
the war was winding down. I was surprised to learn that I had suffered from
kidney stones, but I wasn’t about to argue.
Tonight,
as I cried my way through Heroes of Iwo Jima, I glanced over at Brewsky and was
startled to discover that he was watching me with an expression of consternation unlike any I had ever seen in him, and I knew it was because he didn’t
understand my tears. I very much wanted to tell him what was going on for me, but
how does one describe feelings about war to a cat? Not very well, I shouldn’t
think. When the war films were over, I watched another documentary, The Cruise,
which was about a NYC tour bus guide. This guy had depth, honesty, creativity,
sensitivity, eloquence, and a unique world-view, which is to say that he was
everything I would like to be when I’m around people but am not. Of course, it’s a lot
harder to be all those things given that I mostly avoid people. Like this morning, I
got to feeling lonely, what with Peggy being gone, so, it being Sunday, I
thought about either visiting the new Unitarian Church or calling someone about
getting together, but I decided against either because they seemed like too
much work. That decision being out of the way, my friend Cliff called to ask if
he could come over, but I didn't answer the phone. About an hour later, I
called him back, and we took a walk. It was good, but there’s such a wide gap
between myself and others that I sometimes think about seeing people in the
same way I think about taking medicine. I know it’s good for me, but it’s
not altogether pleasant, although it can sometimes be very pleasant indeed,
which is another parallel between people and drugs.
I
saw life as predictable and everlasting because time moved so slowly that I
couldn’t imagine myself growing up. Days were alike except for weekends and
holidays, which seemed so far apart that I once tried to hurry Christmas by
pulling leaves from September trees. I knew that real change would someday come, but the time seemed so far away
that thinking about it was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. I lacked the words to say so, but I regarded change as theoretical rather
than actual in the same sense that the earth someday being obliterated now seems
theoretical rather than actual, although it will certainly happen.
My
concept of life as more or less a status quo affair lingered into my fifties
because, while many changes had by then happened around me, I stayed constant
within myself. Then, my health changed in ways that left me with pain and
limitations, and once a person can’t trust himself to stay right, and other people can’t make him right, life becomes more
serious. Now, when I look back upon all the people and events that I once knew
and experienced—and are gone forever even though it once seemed that they would
continue forever—I become panicky and nauseous because I know that the people
and events that are currently a part of my life will also cease to exist, and that
the time before it happens no longer seems like looking through the wrong end
of a telescope but through the right end of a microscope.
I
have an 87-year-old friend who says to me every time I see him: “Growing old
isn’t for sissies.” He says this with a solemn voice and baleful eye as if it’s
his own original and profound discovery even though he’s been saying it for years,
as have millions of other people. He says it this way because it is his own discovery and it is original and profound, although the
bromidic words with which he expresses himself can’t begin to impart his
private realization that life can and will go horribly wrong no matter what we do, and that, all too soon, everything will be lost. All the work, all the
years in school, all the relationships, and a million little things, will soon disappear
in the same way that light disappears when the bulb blows.
In
late adolescence, I began to think of life as the product of how one looked at
it, which meant that if I looked at it as a game, I could avoid suffering. Yet,
even then I knew what it was to step on a nail, to fall ill with strep throat,
and to bend double from food poisoning, and I would guess that no one ever said
that life was a game while he had a nail sticking out of his foot, or was having
diarrhea in a toilet while throwing-up in a trashcan. There are even books that
promote the view that life is a game, but I very much doubt that any of them
were written in Palestine or Darfur or by people who were in intractable pain. The
irony of life is that the same brevity and powerlessness that make it
meaningless also make it profound. Indeed, when I was able (on my better days) to
view life as a game, I had yet to understand that life is more akin to a gasp that
bursts from the eternal blackness of the void only to be sucked back into it. Once
that thought reached my core, life became a tragedy. As my IOOF ritual put it:
“I
have seen the rose in its beauty spread its leaves to the morning sun. I
returned and it was dying upon the stalk; its grace and form were gone; its
loveliness was vanished away; its leaves were scattered to the ground, and no
one gathered them together again. I have seen man in the pride of his strength.
He walked; he ran; he leaped; he rejoiced in that he was more excellent than
the rose. I returned, and life was departed from him, and the breath from out
of his nostrils.”
All
but one of the nine men who used to stand around a coffin with me as we
performed that ritual are dead. “Death is in the world,” they said; “All who
are born must die,” they said, and so they died, leaving only my 87-year-old
friend and me.
Given
such a reality, I can understand why people turn to religion and spirituality,
and even today, I wish that they could be true. Yet, from adolescence, I viewed their content as so fanciful that I could but cling to them desperately in order to enjoy
even the fleeting illusion of a permanent hold. I asked the darkness around my
bed why, if there really exists an Eternal Beneficence that reaches out to us
as eagerly as we reach out to it, doesn’t that Beneficence reveal itself
equally and undeniably to everyone rather than leave us to interpret the words
of dead men in contradictory ways, all of which promote hatred in the name of a thousand different Gods of Love. Finally, I couldn’t go
on believing in God anymore than I could go on believing in Santa Claus, there
being so few things that make life bearable that the rest must of necessity fall
away. What could possibly make life bearable for an atheist, some might ask. Kindness, integrity, intimacy, art, music, literature, good
health, simple pleasures, adequate resources, writing, reflecting, studying, time in the woods, and, most of all, truth.
Given that there are so few, none can be relinquished without the loss
outweighing the gain, and religion and spirituality required that I relinquish truth as I believe it to be within my deepest self.
The truth of which I speak is that the existence of certain persistent questions regarding
the possibility that our lives possess an ultimate purpose, doesn’t suggest
the existence of answers, but rather a need that there be answers, and so it is
that answers are invented—both by religion and philosophy—not to satisfy a
truth need, but rather a psychological need. Some people are satisfied with
these answers; others appear to have been born with a lack of interest in the
questions; and still others are left with the questions despite the absence of
any hope that there be answers. They are left to feel that religion,
spirituality, and philosophy have all failed to satisfy their needs and, indeed,
that their needs are unsatisfiable short of death. Wittgenstein expressed
philosophy’s failure as follows. Religion and spirituality are unable to
address their own limitations so humorously.
“The
correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing
except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something
that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted
to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give
a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be
satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were
teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.”
In
case his words are obscure, I will tell you what I think they mean. The only
truthful tack that philosophy can take is to say nothing about that of which it
knows nothing. If it does this, its remarks will be limited to natural science, a field unrelated to philosophy. If someone should come into a philosophical
circle and make a remark about the existence of a reality that transcends natural science, philosophy can but dismiss his or her remark by breaking it down
into its constituent parts and pointing out that they suffer from a lack of
clarity and specificity, and are therefore nonsensical. The person who made the
remark will not find this approach satisfying, and won’t even understand what
it has to do with philosophy, yet those who offer it can take comfort in
knowing that they have presented the best that philosophy has to offer.
To
put it another way:
“Even
when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life
remain completely untouched. Of course, there are then no questions left, and
this itself is the answer.” –Ludwig Wittgenstein