Yes, this still exists and there is a reason to catalog the world that is intentionally ordered, set up as something normal and predictable. I will keep going, reveling in the fall season which throws oak dust in my eyes, reddening them in the yard when the breezes passes, seeing sticky new orange or brown and crispy leaves scraping over the wood of the ragged deck. Staccato acorn sounds on the bedroom window blowing north, no reason for waking but seeing the darkness tarry in the morning, slow, patient. Fall is a great season, a time to possibly develop a beer gut without trying as indulging season looms. It is a season when you might want to experience and employ the idiom of the nature you see so much of, hating or ignoring or dealing with in some evasive way, not stopping and seeing.
I thought of this poem for the occasion, of which I'll include an excerpt:
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky-way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles
and rocky sure-foot trails.
-Gary Snyder, "Riprap"
25 September, 2012, Richmond VA USA, 2100 hrs.
It is a fight to write this, a struggle to see it mean
something and to want to see this space survive: The demands of myself and the
world are different now, and urgent, unrelenting and dizzying. Tonight I am
here in my home office (where I got bitten by a *$^%ing mosquito, as usual)
after coming home exhausted and not even knowing why, perhaps the simple idea of
having stood in a classroom on a day where it felt like every sentence was a
fight to be heard, where people might have learned, maybe something, and I left
exhausted, and incidentally encountered every iteration of traffic possible in
all the cardinal directions of Richmond. Well, the majority of them were
covered, as I happened to come from my chiropractic cult in the West End at
5:00 to my house on the North Side, on 64 as usual the stupid Boulevard exit was
closed for no reason so you have to pass perilously close to the Jersey
barriers, over the Beirut-quality asphalt of the right lane, east of the
Boulevard, passing the comely woman wearing David Yurman/Chik-Fil-A/VCU
basketball trio of billboards headed towards Belvidere. Getting off at
Belvidere and seeing the same homeless guy that I made eye contact with last
night, this afternoon he looked sleepy and didn’t seem to remember me, just a
day later. For some reason when I saw him I thought of the Halloween store that
looks bigger than it needs to be, bigger than anything related to Halloween
needs to be, that seemed to pop up over night near the chiropractor’s office I
was in. Passing north up through the usual Chamberlayne Avenue melee of
clueless pedestrians and creative U-turns- certainly a different planet than
its genteel parallel neighbor, Brook Road-, seeing the world’s most criminal
grocery store, “Neighborhood Market,” that could be so much more, who I would
support but I have boycotted because they sell nothing but assorted junk food
dust and Murray’s frozen meats, and charge criminal prices for anything real
like olive oil. Pass them, pass the Popeye’s, always remembering the one time I
went there with two friends after my maiden home brewing voyage, high on what
was not yet our own supply and starving.
You didn’t think I was going to post directions to my house
on the Internet, did you?
The steady cadence and cyclical nature of the world of work
can change, or even chip away at, what you may have thought were any grand
revelations, as the dailiness piles up, over and over, and that novelty that
you might have achieved before starts to become repetitive, or deadening, and
eventually oppressive. It doesn’t have to be this way, as seeing the world in
different ways and experiencing something new is vital to existence, even if
the world of security that we have constructed here in the good old USA requires
that we go to a place, most of us anyway, and do something for eight hours so
that we can achieve at least an illusion of freedom and experience away from
the shackles of employment and the demands of work and a job. It sounds crazy
and completely contrary to most Eastern ideas of balance and the pursuit of
unified opposites, because it basically is- we endure the eight hours so we can
do other things away from the eight hours. In so many ways we have just
achieved a different captivity than those of the other ages. When man is not
enslaved by another there is usually a good chance that he can find a way to
enslave himself with something. Just give him time to find it!
For most of my life I have known that I basically hate all
of the jobs that people have talked about. Being in school, when the guidance
counselors would talk about jobs, I found it depressing, uninteresting, and
exhausting. I recall doing these interest surveys where I would put outlandish
answers just to see what the result would be (I remember saying that I would
highly enjoy cutting and styling hair, for instance). Rightly or wrongly, I was
never motivated to have a job and the idea of sitting in a cubicle, for
example, always seemed suicidal to me. (If you're reading this in a cubicle, please do not commit suicide). I have had one real job where I actually
have a salary, and I am also not required to sit down, and I am unobserved and
self-directed 95% of the time. (In fact, sitting down would be a bad practice
at my job, a lot of the time). Most teachers know that the desk is a crucible and
an albatross, something to hide behind and clutch to when you don’t really want
to weather what is going on in the classroom (I refuse to just call it a storm).
Yes, you can sit down and it is physically exhausting to stand up all day long,
but the desk is ultimately a crutch and not the hull in a classroom. (Not sure
where these comparisons are coming from, and I'm not worried that literary criticism would have the classroom be a wheelchair equipped clipper ship).
Other jobs I have had include a
lifeguard (at pools, and the ocean in Kill Devil Hills NC), a fitness
instructor (a euphemistic position which basically included changing the radio
station to not bore myself to tears and cleaning equipment, and discussing attractive girls in the gym with libidinous co-workers), a Jersey
Mike’s sub maker, (along with a crew of winners who used to smoke
marijuana in the walk in freezer and turn off the neon “Open” sign a half hour
before we closed, just to deter customers…they also bought beer for underage people),
and a swim instructor (where I actually taught swimming). In Blacksburg VA I
worked at a Cajun restaurant, with people who were mostly jerks, for one
summer. The highlight of this was the employee parties where they closed the
restaurant at midnight and allowed you to use the open bar, and you could stay
till about 6AM. Needless to say these were bacchanalian massacres where people
would raid the walk-in refrigerator and stuff their pockets with shrimp
cocktail and the like before they went home (this actually happened, and I do
remember partaking of the shrimp cocktail). There have been others, but all
these jobs didn’t seem like real ones. I could continue with a lot of stories,
a famous one being when I was wrongly fired from a deli because I switched
shifts with another guy, and the manager said that it wasn’t allowed based on
what I had written down as my availability. In other words, she knew my own
schedule better than I did and thought it was etched in stone, and since my originally scheduled shift came first on the calendar, I didn't show up, and was fired. Brilliant management technique, as she naturally informed the other guy and not me. What is a real
job though? Well, I don’t care about the semantics here and am going to rely on
the usual assumptions: A real job has a salary, requires shoes and a shirt, and
doesn’t let you come in half drunk (like the Cajun restaurant job, whose culture almost
encouraged it). There was the board operator job at WXGI 950 AM in Richmond,
which included listening to the Richmond Braves’ boring baseball games during the season that they won seven games during the month of June, including the night when they
were playing someone who could have been the Toledo Mud Hens, and there was a
rain delay, and then the game went 16 innings, which means I got home at 4AM,
accounting for the other time zone starting later anyway, plus the delay. There
is a level of isolation than can only be appreciated after listening to a minor
league baseball game in an empty room all night for a paltry paycheck. This was a job where a woman
who I had never met told me that she had drank Sloe Gin the night before and
was wretchedly hungover on my first day. We had never met, and this was in an office, during a
work day. One time at that job I was supposed to do some sort of menial board
operations for a horse race on a Saturday morning, and I slept through it.
There were no repercussions- I don’t think anyone even knew. I also translated
some warning on an electrical panel into Spanish, expecting to be paid by the
word in the target language, as is the norm in the translation racket*. I was
paid nothing, and no one even told me thanks. But then again I slept through
the horse race. Fair is fair. I wish I could recall this, but I cannot…but
there was some sort of clever couplet above the toilet, advising gentlemen to
hold their aim true, and I put quotation marks around it and attributed it to
T.S. Eliot. No one ever mentioned this either, possibly because I did not add an Eliot-like Latin footnote.
*A common misconception is that translation work is actually
free. This is not the only time I have encountered this.
Work is a strange necessity that didn’t really happen back
in the hardship periods of history, when people were busy being oppressed,
eating broth for dinner without salt, and writing treatises with no electricity
on stoicism and ways to endure the oppression. During the Middle Ages you may
have been born as a serf or born as a nobleman but that is what you were, and you just
did that until you died, regardless of any sense of purpose or contentment. (Of course, minus its romantic notions of courtship and heavy mead consumption, we all know that the Middle Ages generally sucked). Likewise,
you could be considered someone with the talent to regale the king or whoever
with the latest etude and that is all you had to do, and you were supported,
while the king had to attend your performance and attempt to stay awake and
bow to people or whatever. Now we are forced to choose and that burden causes (or
can cause) just as great of a sense of pain and loss as the old arrangement,
since now we have the onus of “finding ourselves.” This in turn creates yet
another layer of dysfunction, psychologically speaking, where each citizen in a
free society has to fill his or her time and to use it “productively” (I wince
at the trite term) in order to attain the material comforts that we expect to
make us happy, as well as to take on the existential burden of the outcome of
what we choose. The questions becomes: When do we really become happy, and
which home project or possession takes us to that tipping point? How do you
measure the time to stop? The answer is that you don’t, if you don't let yourself. It is necessary in our
society to continue acquiring possessions and to continue improving your
situation in order to have purpose outside of the workplace, to carve out a
sense of autonomy and to feel fulfilled and sacrosanct as an individual. The
unfortunate, or perhaps just realistic fact, is that no one is exactly immune
from this groundswell. It takes a conscious resistance to really push back
against the culture of material acquisition- and it isn’t automatically
negative to acquire stuff (I sometimes catch myself admiring stuff that I own,
and I am not materialistic: I have owned the same TV since 2001 or so). It is a
cliché certainly that materialism is inherently negative, but those that do not
subscribe to it, or claim not to, appropriate just as many false possessions, which are not required to be physical objects,
that they prop up in place of the divine. That is the need that we are trying
to replace, as we continue to work in the yard and do all of this stuff in
order to reach some imaginary finish line where there is completion,
contentment, and closure. The problem I have found as a homeowner is that this
imaginary place is just that- not real, and unattainable. The striving
continues, the ideas to improve continue, and they go on without satisfaction,
year after year. In the United States this is usually just called something
like ingenuity. If you watch the Home Depot commercials, which make tasks like
laying insulation look tolerable, well-lit, and simple, it is hard not to catch
some glimpse of the contagiousness of completing hard work. And I agree that
this sense of progress and inertia toward improvement of the home and the self
is not negative, per se. Really its danger is that it (to invoke the Kerouacian
IT here, this isn’t that different: Purpose and calling in the world, a reason
to exist, or eventual ecstasy and joy) can become negative and often replaces a search for something more
daunting and urgent, the search for eternal purpose and meaning. It is a
delicate equation that we face as humans, seeking to commune with a God we
might even actively reject as we deny ourselves blessing through self seeking
and personal goals. It gets complicated and many philosophers could easily
shoot holes in this. I do not care about them and I do not need to believe them-
their intellectual walls are the same principle as what I’m talking about, an
appropriation of the self in place of communing and glorifying something/one
external. Humans will create gods out of their own minds, in other words. Worshiping your own
mind and the aggrandizement that comes with doing something like writing this
paragraph (look at this clown, writing a paragraph, how vapid!) is rampant in
the world we are in, and it can appear sleepily like an idea to work in the
yard or menacing like a plot for something more sinister. The depravity of
pleasure and our ravenous appetites are also culprits, seeking the same Medusa!
The Medusa reference, for me, was funny. Hopefully that
plays well in the Heartland, where Medusa and other mythological lightweights
are often forgotten.
In closing, I will say that we are not lost, and there is
hope for us as we’re given zillions of chances at redemption and that we are
pursued and sought after by one who loves us. Sorry if this is not Kantian
enough but the reason there are moral codes is that we protect our own hearts
and minds following them, we seek something other than ourselves and we become
truly content and full of zeal and meaning. The life we choose is often one
without rest and solace, where we want to create splendor out of something that
is empty and vapid. The moments we can create based on pleasure or feeling or
even brief and fleeting bawdy abandon are all destruction and damage, in
disguise. Through ambition, the aggrandizement of the intellect, improvement of
our personal worlds, we seek to propel ourselves into self- flagellation and
castigation, the way of all flesh.
(Remember, the mind is but another extension of flesh).
Next time you’re at Lowe’s, think about this, and have a beer
in your backyard instead. And feel free to invite me.
