When I was younger I used to read for hours, maybe days at a time. pausing only slightly to take naps. In military school i would, after lights out, hide under the sheets with a book and flashlight, not concerned with the morning or the world outside of the book I was reading.
Responsibility prevents that now, prevented that and even suicide, although it can be said that you've accomplished everything your going to accomplish before you die. The occasional artist or homosexual scientist who is discovered more or less after their death belies this, but generally it is true. In this day, if I were to carve my words into stone, after the next apocalypse, I would achieve some level of fame, people of the future wondering why such a mediocre person was memorialized.
Part of my programming was the need based on the view of my grandfather and father to leave the family a quantum leap richer than the generation before, the primary thing that would ensure I was never happy in life. My neurotic compulsion always keyed genetically to that rather than to any other, more important feature of life. It is odd, because the patriarch of the new world came over essentially penniless and settled in the least likely of places and founded a business that can only be described in terms of what it wasn't; an easy life. I do not know enough about whether he was happy or not, whether he questioned every wrong turn, I suppose in the beginning he could always say, I least I got out of Europe, to a new world, the land of hope, opportunity and last resorts. There was nowhere for me to go.
I felt deep inside, as I still feel. If I could just fulfill this quantum leap in wealth, then I could go on with my own life. This I could start living instead of my grandfather, my father, maybe even my great grandfather living my life for me.
Perhaps it is time to talk of the real estate investment, stucco and palm trees, pools that were more ornamental than functional. The functional pools would come later, with their own loads of corruption. The brief success of achieving the quantum leap forward followed by the exponential leap back.
When I set out to write this I was on the run for attempted murder, my own. I had not overtly killed myself. I had taken no steps in that direction, but I had wished it on myself. The pain of the loss was too great to bear, the uncertainty of the future too dire. Kahlil Gibran argues "Doubt is a pain too lonely to know that faith is his twin brother." That is what led me to nearly murder myself, that and the terrible pain associated with misplaced criteria.
The source of pain only matters at the moment. It is, in fact, a shifting thing. Being alive necessarily involves pain, but only when you focus on it does it have the opportunity to route deep and begin to control life rather than spice it up. It is like the border between just enough jalapenos and too many.
I could take it back to that one summer day in June, I think it was June, when things were uncertain, but not painful.
When I went on the run, i had the look of a convict about me. I was uncertain about my appearance which I might make good or leave be for days at a time.
I am keeping a record of the things I am not writing and expecting more than I am hearing.
The book progresses, because it must progress, emotion buried in exhaustion of mind, spirit and body.
The eye of consciousness must be made to look coldly on events lest the days be lost, even if all beauty in the day is lost, the time itself must be preserved.
No comments:
Post a Comment