(no subject)
"I think I've changed. Somehow. I don't know how much. He found himself thinking of something Barry Grieg had once said to him about a rhythm guitar player from L.A., a guy named Jory Baker who was always on time, never missed a practice session, or fucked up an audition. Not the kind of guitar player that caught your eye, no showboat like Angus Young or Eddie Van Halen, but competent. Once, Barry had said, Jory Baker had been the driving wheel of a group called the Sparx,a group everybody seemed to think that year's Most Likely to Succeed. They had a sound something like early Creedence: hard solid guitar rock and roll. Jory Baker had done most of the writing and all of the vocals. Then a car accident, broken bones, lots of dope in the hospital. He had come out, as the John Prine song says, with a steel plate in his head and monkey on his back. He progressed from Demerol to heroin. Got busted a couple of times. After awhile he was just another street-druggie with fumble fingers, spare-changing down at the Greyhound station and hanging out on the strip. Then, somehow, over a period of eighteen months, he had gotten clean, and stayed clean. A lot of him was gone. He was no longer the driving wheel of any group, Most Likely to Succeed or otherwise, but he was always on time, never missed a practice session or fucked up an audition. He didn't talk much, but the needle highway on his left arm had disappeared. And Barry Greig had said: He's come out the other side. That was all. No one can tell what goes on between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. You just...come out the other side."
Thinking simply about how my falling out with Des reminded me that I'm still on a journey of self-improvement. I was starting to get lazy. Starting to stagnate. Can't have that. I like the refence to "that blue and lonely section of hell." I've been there before and I'm there again, or maybe still am, now. Maybe she won't recognize me on the other side. I thought of my last entry, about needing a sage and saying Des was the closest I ever had to that. But somewhere along the way she tarnished. Another something-subtle I can't quite get hold of. She seemed to just slip out of giving a shit and keeping sight of the shore between waves. Entered her own section of hell, perhaps, same as Beth and all of us trying to cross the river to adulthood. Some will arrive at a friendlier section of shore than others. Luck and godspeed to all of us. Resilience. Perseverance. Tenacity.
"'I sometimes think she was right off her block at the end of it.'
'Maybe she was,' Glen said mildly. 'If you read your theology, you'll find that God often chooses to speak through the dying and the insane. It even seems to me- here's the closet Jesuit coming out- that there are good pyschological reasons for it. A madman or a person on her deathbed is a human being with a drastically changed psyche. A healthy person might be apt to filter the divine message, to alter it with his or her own personality. In other words, a healthy person might make a shitty phophet.'
'The ways of God,' Larry said. 'I know. We see through a glass darkly. It's pretty dark to me, all right. Why we're walking all this way when we could have driven it in a week is beyond me. But since we're doing a nutty thing, I guess it's okay to do it in a nutty way.'
'What we're doing has all sorts of historical precedent,' Glen said, 'and I see some perfectly sound psychological and sociological reasons for this walk. I don't know if they're God's reasons or not, but they make good sense to me. There were several American Indian tribes that used to make 'having a vision' an integral part of their manhood rite. When it was your time to become a man, you were supposed to go out into the wilderness unarmed. You were supposed to make a kill, and two songs- one about the Great Spirit and one about your prowess as a hunter and a rider and a warrior and a fucker- and have the vision. You weren't supposed to eat. You were supposed to get up high- mentally as well as physically- and wait for that vision to come. And eventually, of course, it would. Starvation is a great hallucinogenic.'
'You think Mother sent us out here to have visions?'
'Maybe to gain strenght and holiness by a purging process. The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel. Take an intelligent man. Break his T.V., and what does he do at night?'
'Reads a book.'
'Goes to see his friends.'
'Plays the stereo.'
'Sure, all those things. But he's also missing that T.V. There's a hole in his life where that T.V. used to be. In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nin o'clock I'm going to pull out a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees the empty cabinet, he feels disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so? It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of T.V., a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the go. Your selves, gentlemen-they are turning into a window glass. If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time- Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebriac idiom that really means 'no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite awhile.' The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn't say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some.
'It's a state of mind,' Larry said suddenly. When they looked at him he seemed a trifle embarassed but went on: 'I've had this feeling for the last week or so, and I couldn't understand it. Maybe now I can. I've been feeling high. Like I'd done half a joint of really dynamite grass or snorted just a touch of coke. But there's none of the disorienting feeling that goes with dope. You do some dope and you feel like normal thinking is just a little bit out of your grasp. I feel like I'm thinking just fine, better than ever, in fact. But I still feel high.'
'When you empty out the vessel, you also empty out all the crap floating around in there. The additives. The impurities. Sure it feels good. It's a whole-body, whole-mind enema.'"
That last line was elegantly-put...
Something here about being in God's image... needing all the debris cleared away, our own opinions out of the picture in order to reach our full potential and complete the mission for which he intended us. Not that I'm turning into some religious nut. Just concepts for consideration. If not some for supernatural being in the sense that most people think of it, for ourselves and the electromagnetic field we share with all other living things. To contribute toward the purest possible energy exchange.
I wish I had such skill for writing as this. A lot of what good authors write I agree with, but often do not have the concise communication skills to make it make sense like they do. Actually a lot of authors seem to struggle with this as well. Have you ever read a book and found yourself having to fill in the blanks? You know what the author is getting at but have to meet him halfway because communicating in a way understandable to his audience proved too slippery for him? Or when you disagree with someone but cannot find the precise words to give weight to your stance, and end up babbling foolishly trying to convey something that seems intangible? Damn, I still haven't gotten there...
"'Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too- a chemical called acetycholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetycholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise once you started scratching your nose you'd never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car. Watching T.V., reading book, talking with friends, eating a big dinner...all of it runs off the battery. A normal life is like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?'
'Yeah,' Ralph said, 'Even a big Delco won't ever overcharge sitting in a Cadillac.
'Well, what we've done is to strip off all the accessories. We're on charge.'
Ralph said uneasily, 'If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she'll explode.'
'The capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger thanthe biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity." -All excerpted from "The Stand"
Someone else said once that poetry will always mean something to the writer, but good poetry will always mean something to the reader. I think this goes for writing in general, and this third quotation has given me the most food for thought recently, mainly because I agree with it. I think I'm one of those "certain cases." Me and Lance. The discovery that the harder you push yourself, the harder you are capable of pushing yourself, and that, with careful and deliberate progression, you will never find a breaking point. You become greater and greater (albeit this is a parabolic equation in which the slope you climb gets steeper and steeper until it (theoretically) reaches vertical at infinity. And once you get "beyond infinity" you simply merge with the light. Implode into the cosmos. When you peel away the last layer of the onion, what are you left with? Everything. -Dan Millman's "Way of the Peaceful Warrior" Become in and of everything. Like God. This is the opposite way to enlightenment from that of Buddhist or Taoist teachings, but all things being cyclical, reaches the same destination.
(Tangent: if it is circular, does that mean you can get unenlightened? Fall off the other side of the ball, so to speak? Or is there another parabola that starts at the top of this one? Like multiple orgasms, perhaps... What am I saying? I just got done speaking of "beyond infinity." How can I possibly consider more than that, when 'that' is already beyond my realm of comprehension?)
Buddhism encourages the path of least resistance. Non-strife. Away from the asymptote, always downhill, but less and less steep until you reach horizontal(theoretically) at negative infinity. Damn me and always wanting to do things the hard way!
Most people live suspended between these extremes. Too attached to things in the middle of the bell curve (sociological "ideal") too press too far one way or the other. Never finding nor wanting to find their limit. Some make it a ways out into the flats, but only by excluding themselves from others and leading lives of depravity, and some make it pretty far up the wall, but only by standing on others and living out a preoccupation with status symbols. I will be neither and, therefore, I will be the best of both.