Blathering

Blathering

I’ve been blathering, babbling about speech, but deep down inside I wonder if I know zilch, nothing, nada about it. I guess I’ve been a blowhard about verbal pyrotechnics. But I like verbal pyrotechnics. Always do. And always will. Something about it attracts me, like a campfire to a moth at night. I like silence, too, but nobody knows about it. One day I told a friend that I practiced meditation. She laughed and said she didn’t believe I was in meditation, not a noisy, nervous guy like me.

There’s a hidden side in every one of us. Take a self-appointed expert on Buddhism I happened to know. He has a public persona of serenity and wisdom, but his private life is a mess, and his sexual life must rival that of David Carradine. I don’t care about his private and sexual life, but one day he displayed his arrogance over a trivial matter. After that incident, I lost all respect for him and I said to myself: this dude, like David Carradine, knew nothing about Buddhism. All talk and no practice. Or take an ugly, short, fat, cross-eyed, and financially strapped woman I also happened to know. You would think she would be full of inferiority complex and behaved accordingly. But no, she asserted herself constantly and demanded attention. A person needs to know his/her place in the world and behaves accordingly. Of course, we always try to better ourselves, but not at the risk of denying who we are and become strangers to ourselves. Self-alienation is pitiful. Self-improvement comes from self-acceptance, not self-alienation. A chicken can’t fly like an eagle, no matter how hard it tries. If you are short, cross-eyed, and born with an unattractive face, don’t make it worse by getting fat. Try body-building, dressing elegantly, cultivating your voice, and improving your mind. Work within the confines of your limitations. Anyway, I once thought despite all her shortcomings, at least she had a heart, but one day I discovered that she didn’t have a heart. All those talks about compassion and empathy were an act; she only cared about herself and herself only. She went through life, making a lot of noise and nothing more. That was when I realized once again I knew nothing about women. And yesterday the news came that she had just killed herself by overdosing on sleeping pills. That was what self-alienation would do to you, eventually.

I’ve been taking an incursion again through the effusion and excrescences of an explosive mind, a mind that was on the verge on losing control over itself. Many comments were made about the extraordinary lack of self-restraint N exhibited when he wrote Ecce Homo. The lack of inhibitions made the book very readable, but then a few months later N went mad. I must take guard against the same possibility. Waves upon waves of thoughts keep inundating my mind.

I like the idea of going against the grain, of swimming against the tide. That makes my existence precarious but exhilarating. I want to forgive myself again and again. The image of Sisyphus pushing the huge rock up the mountain and then seeing it rolling back down again has sustained me. As Camus put it, the face straining to push the rock up the mountain inch by inch and then yard by yard, the face so close to the rock, it became the rock itself. And the very moment when Sisyphus decided to walk down the mountain so he could push the rock back up again, he was stronger than the rock. He didn’t let the rock defeat him. He didn’t give in to the challenge despite the futility of his task. We must be stronger than the meaninglessness of our existence. And we must imagine that Sisyphus was happy. Happiness came from stoicism, not from staying up on the mountain, living among trees and clouds, and shying away from the task of pushing up a huge rock. Each man is defined by his rock.

Every challenge in life has a power and force. To meet the challenge, we must possess within ourselves a stronger power and force.

This morning upon waking up I walked over to the bedroom window and looked outside. The sky grew white with fluffy, billowy clouds as egrets took flight over a winding drainage bayou in the stillness and silence of an early morning not yet disturbed by traffic noise. And I told myself I needed to drain my mind of all the vestiges of past hurts and sorrows.


Wissai
June 11, 2009