(This has to continue…)
So there I am, sitting outside in one of the dead landlord’s aluminum lawn chairs with the cushions we bought at Wal-Mart. The chairs are fine, the cushions suck. You can still buy basic outdoor chairs this nice, but you have to hunt for them, and they won’t be at Wal-Mart. Anyway, there I am, just now. It’s cloudy-bright with occasional sun but mostly overcast, thundering in the distance, about 75 degrees. Humid, too, at 28 percent. The so-called “monsoons,” a stretch of dependable afternoon thunderstorms produced by air from Mexico, aren’t supposed to start until late July, but what the hell is normal any more.
There I am, looking at the plum tree a bear broke down to the ground in ‘03. I never saw it happen, but I saw the devastation. Fixed it, too. I pulled the broken trunks together — hanging only by a strip of bark and fiber — tied them up securely with rope, and bound it all up neatly with duct tape. (Some of the branches required additional bracing.) The tree lived. After a year I took the rope off and wrapped the trunks with fresh duct tape. A year after that, I took the tape off, and it’s been doing well ever since.
We always water this tree along with the apricots, you may be sure. This year the plums are just everywhere. You never saw so many plumbs on one branch, it’s almost ridiculous. And then just now I got up and took a closer look: almost every plum is damaged, some with sap oozing out, probably from hatching larvae of something I never heard of. They may turn out to be okay, but maybe not. I’m not counting on it.
So that’s too bad. It doesn’t necessarily make sense, but that’s too bad. You’d normally anticipate some loss from insects and the like (bears too!), but this is out of whack. That’s it! — it’s out of whack. It isn’t natural. Do you follow? It isn’t balanced. Either there’s something pushing in a certain way out of ignorance, or the bear was supposed to kill the freaking tree. I go back to my chair, the nice one that you can’t buy anymore with the cushion that sucks, and look out at the clouds and mountains: what an amazing and complicated interactive THING. I’m sitting there and realizing that it all just “is” and works fine by itself, unless we mess it up.
But it’s deeper than that. We don’t “mess” anything up, we’re just part of a system so vast we can’t even imagine, and we’re inseparable from the whole. We don’t manage, conquer, rule, or masticate a goddamned thing except inside our puny little egos, because all the while we’re tumbling in a roaring wind we never even hear.
This is what thrills and comforts me. I want to bow down to it and let it rip me open.
Comment by K.J. Webb
1 June 29, 2008, 3:35 pm o'clock |
That was a sweet little post, my friend. But “stop stuggling”? Never! If we stop struggling, we’re done for. And “obvious instructions”? No, there are none. If there were, we wouldn’t want to follow them. You and I always wanted to kick those instructions in the teeth when we were young. Why should it be different now?
Comment by Mike Gravel
2 June 29, 2008, 5:12 pm o'clock |
Toss the cushion-Keep the chair…(maybe there’s a bumpersticker in that…) Don’t we have enough “cushions”?
Comment by Mike Gravel
3 June 29, 2008, 5:39 pm o'clock |
“Why should it be different?” Because hopefully, as we age and become more “knowledgeable” and “mature”, we see that the instructions were there for a reason. Maybe half of the bumps and bruises we carry would have/could have been prevented, if we just followed the instructions instead of stomping them underfoot. But the past is what it is and thankfully, new instructions arrive daily.
As far as “stopping our struggling”…Do you really, REALLY think that ceasing to struggle marks the end??? ONLY by stopping our struggling can we truly be. Can we truly see. Can we truly hear, taste, feel, smell. When the struggling ends, only then can we find true peace. I’m with John. Rock on my man.
Comment by Carmel
4 June 29, 2008, 11:54 pm o'clock |
I think there’s a time to ’struggle’ and a time not to struggle. The trick is in knowing the difference.
Comment by K.J. Webb
5 June 30, 2008, 4:07 am o'clock |
Gee, I was kind of flattered that, unless my poor old eyes deceive me, John seems to kind of agree with my editorial comments - those offending phrases are now gone!
I’m with the Greeks. They had a word (”agon”) to describe all that they thought made us most human. You could translate that word as “struggle” or “strive” or even “compete” - strive for excellence in anything that man does and that animals don’t do. Along came the Middle Ages and that sort of stuff was supposed to be verboten. We were to suppress those impulses and submit to God’s will - to divest ourselves of our puny little egos, as John puts it. This new idea that came in with Christianity (and far earlier in other cultures) is powerful and deserves respect. In the West it comes into the Romantic Tradition without its Christian baggage. Some of the most powerful poetry of William Wordsworth draws on it:
“The eye it cannot chuse but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against or with our will.
Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours,
In a wise passiveness.
Think you, ‘mid all lthis mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?
–Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
Conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
And dream my time away.”
There’s more to Wordsworth than this, but you see what I mean.
I’m with the Greeks. I understand the impulse to kick back and get out of the way of the universe, which doesn’t care much about us. You could call that “wise passiveness”. You could also call it submitting to the inhuman.