Sunday Selections #781
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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
la...
The Gills Landing Colony Saga
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I'd like to say I'm done with that large colony that the city of Lebanon
doesn't want anyone to feed anymore, after the cats have been fed there for
years...
Go To Work
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My final job before I retired was as a laser operator. I worked in a
factory that makes industrial shocks.
We made shocks for carnival-type rides in amu...
Progress report
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One sleeve done. One to go
The way this weather is going I’m sure it will get some wear before the
heat of summer finally arrives
The ants are moving...
2024 ELECTION THOT
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2024 ELECTION THOTFood for thought ..... Patiently waiting for the
wheels of justice to roll forward for January 6th accountability about
which I've pre...
Glimmers
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*Glimmers are tiny micro-moments of joy —fleeting, everyday moments that
elicit a rush of happiness, gratitude, calm, peace, safety, or goodwill.
Some ex...
It’s too hot to write a long post
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* The average person (me, for example) has no (okay, little) grasp of just
how large or small a number really is. Case in point, I read the other day
t...
Moving Forward
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Thanks to The Green Hills Literary Lantern for publishing my poem, Moving
Forward.
The title of the poem and timing of it being published does not esca...
A Terrific Day at Sea
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My good friends gifted JB and me a pontoon day at sea, hugging
Provincetown's incredible bay, enhanced by a bright blue sky, camarons
sunning o...
The New Sunbelt
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I retired to Pennsylvania because we had some family in the area, the
cost of living is less than our old home in metropolitan New York, the
winters...
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Sword and Planet League Index:
1. First post. Generic Sept 16, 2023
2. Sword & Planet (S&P) fiction, ERB’s Barsoom series: Sept 16
3. Swordsmen in 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...
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
The
Cascade Ranges (sometimes referred to as Eastern and Western, and sometimes as Old and New)
have thousands of rock formations that consist of magma which hardened
underground and was exposed when the surrounding rock eroded
away. Like nearly all of them, Symbol Rock (pictured) sits quietly to itself, for that
which would be the centerpiece of a park in most places is commonplace in
Oregon. Indeed, Symbol Rock and dozens—if not scores—of similar formations
can be found within fifty miles of here, although few people know of them because few people venture into the wilderness.
As
was true elsewhere in America, most of Oregon’s indigenous peoples died of
European diseases without having ever seen a European, the diseases being
introduced by a relatively few pre-settlement explorers, traders, and
missionaries. This makes it impossible to know what the original Americans
thought of most intrusions, but they generally regarded impressive natural
features as possessing healing powers, and they created anthropomorphic myths
to explain the origins of such features. I believe that natural features (along
with art, music, friendship, literature, placeboes, and various other things)
can indeed heal people, but I have no thought that tales of warring spirits or
trickster coyotes are relevant to explaining their existence. For this, we must turn to
science.
Many
western Oregonians would disagree because the region is attractive to those who
take a mystical view. Many of them view both science and mythology as nothing more than culturally-based interpretations of nature, with science being inferior to
mythology in that its mechanistic outlook, its human centeredness, and its
faith in reason and evidence, deny the possibility of a spirit realm and
therefore of ordained purpose. My animus toward such people comes from the fact
that they take obvious advantage of the fruits of the science that they profess
to hate while the fruits of the spirituality that they profess to love
remain anything but obvious. Indeed, I think their claim to
heightened respect, insight, sensitivity, compassion, and morality, are simply the products of their narcissistic imaginations. Our one area of agreement is that we both view the dominant forms of Western religion as wicked and depraved.
At
the one end, in our Western world, there lie the beliefs and practices of those
whom I have referred to, people who embrace such titles as pagan, spiritual,
and mystical; at the other are those like myself who uphold reason and evidence
as humanity’s only shot at objective truth; and between the two, the dominant
forms of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity; authoritarian religions all that
proclaim the earth accursed and treat it accordingly even as they pursue worldly wealth and power. As much as they hate one another,
pagan/spiritual/mystical people and mainstream religious people are alike in that
they share a contempt for reason and evidence, at least in regard to such things as they themselves believe in the absence of reason or evidence. Truly, once
rationality is declared a hindrance to the
discovery of “higher truth,” people are free to believe whatever they please without the least
embarrassment.
Yet,
in the case of the mainstream religions, if two people worship different Gods
of love—each of whom demands that he (they are invariably male, you know) alone be worshipped—how are they to resolve their differences in the absence of
reason and evidence? They cannot. They can but agree to disagree or, as usually
happens when one or both sides thinks it can win, resort to intimidation and
violence.
“A
religion, even if it calls itself a religion of love, must be hard and unloving
to those who do not belong to it.” –Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the
Analysis of the Ego, 1921
If Freud was right—and I think he was—there can be no peace among religions;
there can only be lulls in the fighting, and never any love.
I
can’t save that which I love; I can but ameliorate the damage for a short time even
while knowing that I myself am sometimes the cause of that damage. For
instance, no one has hurt Peggy more than I, yet I am the very person most devoted
to her welfare. If I have damaged other people less, it was only due to the
emotional distance that separated us, for I have often been needy even while
taking a hard line. I wish I could have been warmer, more caring, yet I
imagined at the time that I had given them all things good, and that it was they who had failed me.
I
awakened just now pondering one such instance that has haunted me for 38 years.
It concerned a friend who often brought me small gifts. One night, soon after giving me such a gift—I have forgotten what—he said that it would be nice
if I sometimes got him something. I became outraged and accused him of only
buying things for me so that he might get things in return. I later realized
that this was a hard line indeed, but maybe I believed it at the time. As with
the form of his gift, my interpretation of his words has been lost; I only
remember that he had made me happy with a gift and then taken away my happiness with a complaint. We both could have spoken better, but what haunts me is not the feeling he expressed, which was reasonable, but my response, which was unconscionable. We remained distant for five years, and he died a possible suicide soon after we rekindled our friendship. Long reflection upon incidents that I never imagined I would remember has shown me that, where I was a victim, it was often to my own petulance and obstinance. I didn't realize how soon I would run out of time to grow-up and set things right, or how quickly my life would be littered with corpses for whom my remorse is meaningless. Last week, I
went to a Harvard-trained Korean neurologist who has honors and credentials out the ying-yang. We discussed two issues. One is a hellacious tingling
from behind my right shoulder to the thumb of my right hand, and the other
is my failing memory. He told me that the tingling originates in my fifth
cervical vertebra, which I killed (literally) several years ago while taking
Yoga in a failed attempt to alleviate the pain in my shoulders. As for my
memory, he said that it isn’t bad enough to be labeled Alzheimer’s, but that it’s bad
enough to suggest a 10% chance that it will progress to Alzheimer’s within five
years. I reminded myself that pain, stress, depression,
and drugs all have an adverse effect upon memory, that some such changes are reversible, and that it’s often unwise to put much stock in a diagnosis that appears to have been hastily made. He ordered an MRI of my neck and drew six vials
of blood, half of which were immediately wrapped in tin foil. I won’t see him again for two
weeks, but I went online tonight and got the results of the blood tests. One of my abnormal results is rare in the absence of liver
disease, but then again, it sometimes indicates a disease of the nervous system or connective
tissue. As with spot diagnoses, I know that it’s unwise to put faith into one test once done, yet the result is consistent with my increasing worries about my liver and kidneys due to the
years that I’ve taken strong drugs daily for pain. In fact, I am awake now
because of pain. The night being half over, I would ordinarily
take an Ambien (narcotics keep me awake), and it would enable me to doze in
and out a little, but because I’m determined to take fewer drugs, I’m unwilling
to allow myself to take anything.
What with these concerns about dementia, liver
failure, my customary pain (which, without the pills, seems to be enveloping my
entire body), and my more recent tingling, I’m finding it harder than usual to maintain
a positive outlook. I regret this for my sake, but also for the sake of those
people who care about me, particularly Peggy. Even with all that I’ve gone
through, I never lost sight of the fact that I was still able to bring a measure of
good to her life, and I worry that this might not continue. If it doesn’t, I
would be left without a viable option, a thought that brings me back to where I
started this post. Not only can I not save the person I love most; the worst pain she
will ever have might befall her because she loves me. I can but do my
best to spare her as much of it as possible.