I woke up this morning profoundly troubled, but not so put off-balance as to abandon my training; the unexplained sneering of the Banh Mi maker had to stay with her, and i suspect it is conflict about believing she had been “looked at” admiringly by one of my aged cohort - i am very careful who i admire here in VN · as i am anywhere in the world. My game is intact, but largely removed from the arena, for i have little patience any longer with dalliance - a game for the young · i am far too old. I seek the “heart of gold” i heard sung about in my youth, but never found or found but was too emotionally retarded to know. I ended up with a nap prior to writing that invigorated me more than i’d have thought possible given my suspicion about other’s ideas as to what benefits me. My friends in Oaxaca are suffering from their recent earth surfing “set”, and there is not fuck all i can do - i am finding that truth more and more common the weirder my life gets.
For example; in the midst of a perfectly reasonable emotional miasma facing death in a foreign nation where i had quixotically fantasized a “worker’s paradise”, is more likely a resort enclave surrounded by reactionary billionaire “investment” money, yet i also enjoy from a tree growing adjacent to my wall a plethora of grapefruit that my lily white, most likely cajun sympathizing Nova Scotian paternal great grandmother Munner ate religiously which i am sure aided her in reaching the ripe old age of 99 before giving up the ghost. My father her grandson once explained to me when asked “why did you become an English Teacher” - “because i love to play with words” he remarked without losing a beat. Munner’s vocabulary, at least the one she used with me, was uniformly “superlative.” Every action, thought or childish exclamation was met with some variation of “how Grand, how Wonderful - how Remarkable.” It is a small wonder that my father had been a high school cheerleader at Bell High School, before he became a B-17 pilot to fight Nazis - it would seem · the same Nazis occupying the White House today, some 77 years later.
So I shouldn’t be too surprised to find myself at times shoulder to shoulder in VN with _rumpf emisaries who nurse aspirations of reeducating Ho Chi Minh’s warriors to the superior wisdom of “Anarchistic Capitalism,” i mean look at how successful the Koch Bros’ health care for profit has been in combating the latest plague to hit the planet - like “greed” wasn’t the preeminent threat to our species. It’s not. When i woke this morning i had a brief encounter with a friend in Uruguay on FB. If it was 10 sentences i would be surprised; but because we had once shared air, i as a lodger - her comments cut to the core of my waking pain and i felt touched · soothed. I would welcome the ability to accomplish that on command, but all i seem to manage is to deflect aggression with some withering response that i had learned somewhere in the emotional battlefield and now have great difficulty dissolving, or at least transforming to a more constructive end. I do not want all close to me - many i find are too toxic to my bizarre makeup and only wish to be far from before they see in my eyes how little attraction they have for my attention.
Or more accurately, how difficult it is for me to suggest another approach toward communicating; my father and mother were both teachers and in their own way struggled to help each of us to learn. I was unable to make the leap and utilize teaching as a platform for propagating thought, maybe because i am crazy or maybe because the schools in which i tried to teach were - it doesn’t matter · all that matters is that someone learns. Not knowledge which can be forged and appropriated to dubious ends, but the ability to see each condition one faces in a unique light and make the most constructive use of that vision to aid the next person in line. C.G. Jung - described our species as a rhizome, living just under the surface of death/dirt but alighting new to the turning of the seasons full with each lesson we had learned from a previous turn at breathing - i fantasize and he said no such thing, but you get the gist.
We face a similar quandary about how to perpetuate our deeper knowledge to children and parents who will be literally plagued by much worse than what to eat, or where to stay - the world we are leaving our posterity will involve more fundamental issues, like how to breathe in a superheated environment, what collective behavior will aid the propagation of food and protection of water in a world laid wast by generations of greed; what steps can be taken to neutralize: atomic, chemical and nutritional degradation ? This is not an academic consideration, but simple logic that needs be addressed with what little resource remains to the commonweal. Scientists have been coopted - my own family contains executives of corporate concerns feathering their nests with proceeds from asbestos as talc for POC - and these are decent caring people who have more to gain by ignoring the consequence of their complicity than they do by pulling up stakes and throwing their lot in with all who have been abandoned by the “economy.”
fuck the economy - protect your brothers and sisters as best you can with whatever emotional wherewithal you can find close · love, might be a good place to start. “But what do I know” - Michel de Montaigne
jts 27/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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