Words on St. Stephen

He shook a cigarette from a crumpled pack and lit it with a match, shaking the flame out with a flip of his wrist. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, except I tell everyone. I’ve learned very little in this life, and most of my words aren’t worth the spittle that comes from my telling it. But listen to me if you ever gave a damn about something.” His Irish drawl hung in the air like the smoke around his face. Behind us, the sun was setting, our shadows stretching out before us, pulled toward the creeping dusk. “Tell your woman what you feel and allow yourself to feel. Feel hard. Be passionate. Allow life to knock you ass over tea-kettle. Because everyone one of those times that you're left reeling was precipitated by something wonderful, something that makes colors exist. Something worth living for. I see men go through life stoic, straight-faced, like something made of granite. And I think to myself, which one of us is missing something?" With that he stood up and walked away, toward St. Stephen's North, where the shadow of Fusiliers Arch bled back into the hedgerow.

Life in a paragraph.

"I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing through and wonder. Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think that is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feelings and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?"

John Steinbeck
"East of Eden"

Perhaps this is simplifying things too much, a world of lives and thoughts boiled down to a pair. Or perhaps it's true, when a life is truly looked at, the magnified parts finally scrutinized with a keen eye, things truly do boil down to those two. Good or Evil.

Personally I think Steinbeck has brought out the dramatic side in me. He tends to do that. For the next few days my mind will be filled with the philosophical implications of every moment, every thought, breath and action. Great books do that to me.

This is when I recede inward, after the last page is turned, the last sentence read. A world of words, Steinbeck's canvas splashed with my paint. The outside world fogs over as my eyes go in, reliving and contemplating what I just read. So many people I've just met, new souls. They exist as real as any other soul I've known, perhaps more so. Cal - I don't know if I've ever truly liked a character more, a bird of a similar feather.

In parting...

"Thou mayest rule over sin,' Lee. That's it. I do not believe all men are destroyed. I can name you a dozen who were not, and they are the ones the world lives by. It is true of the spirit as it is true of battles - only the winners are remembered. Surely most men are destroyed, but there are other who like pillars of fire guide frightened men through the darkness. "Thou mayest, Thous mayest! What glory. It is true that we are weak and sick and quarrelsome, but if that is all we ever were, we would, millenniums ago, have disappeared from the face of the earth. A few remnants of fossilized jawbone, some broken teeth in strata of limestone, would be the only mark man would have left of his existence in the world. But the choice, Lee, the choice of winning! I had never understood it or accepted it before."

Timshel.

Looking for some inspiration?

If this doesn't move you, you're already dead.

Passion

Excerpt from a book that a beautiful young woman recommended to me, Eleven Minutes, by Paulo Coelho.

"Passion makes a person stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. A lot of people are frightened because, when it appears, it demolishes all the old things it finds in its path.

No wants their life thrown in chaos. That is why a lot of people keep that threat under control, and are somehow capable of sustaining a house or a structure that is already rotten. They are the engineers of the superseded.

Other people think exactly the opposite: they surrender themselves without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for their possible unhappiness. They are either euphoric because something marvelous has happened or depressed because something unexpected has just ruined everything.

Keeping passion at bay or surrendering blindly to it - which of these attitudes is the least destructive?

I don't know."

Me either...

What me write?

I suppose you have to start somewhere. That’s probably the hardest part - that’s what I try to tell myself when I’m reluctant to write.

“It’s alright Self. You haven’t actually produced anything substantial since you graduated a year and half ago, but you can write. The story is there, waiting to spill out like of you like beer from a tap. You just gotta pour. Pour baby pour!”

But I’m reluctant to write. The blank screen stares back at me, taunting. The cursor calls me a bitch. I hate that fucking white screen.

Sometimes I claim to be a writer, very rarely to others, but sometimes I try to pawn the idea off on myself, sneak it under the rug of self-definition.

But I’m not.

What defines a writer exactly? It’s not being published, being recognized, or even being good – it’s actually writing. Just do it. (Sorry for the infringement Nike) Just produce, sit your ass down and type. And I don’t.

Whenever I’m not sitting in front of a keyboard, letting the thoughts that swirl upstairs regurgitate through my fingers onto a screen, I always have some excuse. I’m taking notes, planning the next (first) big thing. It’s all bullshit.

---A quick interjection here. I’m in front of a computer screen all day at work. Check that, two screens – filled with a flickering plethora of spreadsheets, databases, quotes, e-mail addresses. I hate my goddamned job. ---

The hard thing about writing – actually writing – might be the vulnerability of it all. Once a word is down, read by another, or even by one of my own many personalities, it is absolute. The harsh finality of acknowledging your own thoughts, really contemplating them rather than letting them sit in the background, is daunting. They become real, tangible manifestations of your own dysfunctionality.

I wouldn’t say I’m certifiably insane - perhaps borderline, but not off the deep-end-shit-my-pants-fucking nuts. I call it eccentricity. Keep your semantics off my psychology.

One of my self-concluded redeeming qualities is my adamant claim to “Not care what others think of me.” It’s a mantra, a verbal talisman to rid the incessant premonitions of mediocrity that haunt my peripheral. But regardless of what I say, everyone cares a little bit about the thoughts of others. How do I rate? What do they actually think of me? Any relatively self-aware individual has to accept that; it is all part of the social code, the unspoken Charter man accepted when he entered society. I’m okay with that.

The important thing is to what degree you let that worry of outside opinion influence your individual actions. Actions define the person to an extent. That’s another mantra I suppose – a rarely uttered one but the lesson is routinely prevalent in my unconscious curriculum.

If you fail to act because it is against the social norm, because it is unpopular, because others may think you are a fucking weirdo, then you’re allowing outside opinion to affect you and therefore, your life. I’m not saying out-rightly that that’s a bad thing. I’m merely acknowledging the fact that an overriding worry of other’s opinions has a drastic, yet often unobserved and unmentioned effect on our daily lives.

How much do you care?

I’d like to think that I don’t worry too much about how others perceive me. In the end, it’s uncontrollable therefore irrelevant to my personal agency. Yet, there are many things that I don’t say or do.

I have brief, tangential scenes that play in my head in any given social situation where I do the exact opposite of the expected, socially accepted behavior. If I’m talking to an old woman, I smack her. If someone is showing me something expensive, I break it. If I see someone with a rat-tail, I cut it off. Each of these actions are as easy and as possible as anything – yet I don’t do it for fear of reprisal, along with the knowledge that it’s the wrong thing to do morally – save for the rat-tail thing.

Writing offers that rare freedom to do or say whatever you feel like. Fuck the norms, fuck limitations.

So here I am, unsure of what exactly I want to write except that I know I have something to say. I am alive. And I am very, very aware.

I realize I’m a lazy ant living in a giant’s world. I’m okay with that for a variety of reasons but two quickly come to mind:

-I am surrounded by other ants, equally inconsequential yet striking in potential. We’re all schmucks.

-It is a beautiful world.


**Listening to Warren Zevon's The Wind album.**