I generally analyze from the particular to the general. When i travel to a new location, my strategy is to land and learn as much as i can about the environment where i have arrived, and then make decisions about where to expand to based on what i’ve learned. The same is true for people; i find it is more helpful for the way i think to learn as much as i can about an individual, or group of individuals and how they interact with their environment, then choose where to expand my circle from there; i understand this to be “inductive reasoning” - a prejudice from a passing comment by a lower division math instructor who i respected greatly, and from whom i learned a great deal. The downside is that as a strategy it borders on an inflexible, one size fits all approach to understanding - the opposite of what our world requires just now to extricate itself from the tar pit it is sinking into.
As a youth, i turned 16 one year after Woodstock - wide open is the only expression that fits. I remember friends disappearing and reappearing weeks later sporting knee high moccasins from Haight Ashbury in San Francisco with stories of sexual free-for-alls; drug portals to a new universe and continued victories against a war machine that was vacuuming up young men to kill strangers who’d never caused a moment’s grief in our quiet suburban “wonder years.” Based on this heady experience i had every faith in deductive reason and searched far and wide for particulars that conformed to the general euphoria of the time; that search soon began to resemble a drain with the good shit circling an increasingly violent police presence, and what had been a magically musical phenomena, more and more resembling the pinball gates of a slaughterhouse designed to separate you from your money rather than connect you with the loving others of your emerging tribe.
Given the wild card of synchronicity, i just met a friend that i never expected to find - i am grateful more than i can say. It is heartening and at the core of what i search for in existence. Master Thich Nhat Hanh calls it Sangha and was a prominent feature of the turbulence attributed to the 60’s: the spontaneous sexual escapades with strangers, the long distance rides with people you’d never known and will never forget. They were useful and loving times and i don’t care what Thomas Wolfe says about “you can’t go home,” it is worth the search. Last night i had an aborted virtual tryst with a former landlady who lives in Oaxaca. She is a member of this exalted tribe and i reached out from loneliness and too much selfishness having convinced myself my former virility would be sufficient to provide her what actual sex could not. What i accomplished with my sexual greed was not to assuage her loneliness or help mend wounds not of my making, but what the Dalai Lama cautioned against, “if you cannot help, at least do no harm.”
Nor can i say that what i experienced squares with the facts; because she did not immediately respond to my need, does not necessarily mean she does not welcome a sexual distraction from the tedium of living in a country adhering to the practicality of “shelter in place” and that she is simply waiting for the mysterious tempo of a woman’s sexual appetite to ramp up - i d k · I do know that the Calvinist tradition of my birth nation has created a monster of denial and shame about all things sexual that i have no interest in preserving and find no useful purpose for in the last years of our existence. Sex is good; non-attachment is good; romance is distorted beyond meaning and jealousy of another’s happiness is destructive. So where to go from here¿ i am 65 and not what young maidens seek for satisfaction to their biological imperative. I also understand that sex in all its manifestations contains enormous information and potential growth for me about the pathology i was raised with however well meaning.
Madame Paradox once again comes to promenade with me, though she is too distant to hold my hand and comfort me in my despair - i have gotten far enough to recognize the despair is of my own design and no one else has responsibility for its outcome but me. Need and attachment create their own vortex that like my own reluctance to inflict pain on a woman who would use me for her sexual satiation, can also be vulnerable to the pain of a love breech, the same as my sitting here aware of how vulnerable my new friend is for a lack of simple communication that he waits to finish a conversation that can never be finished. I struggle to contribute meaningfully to my brethren and often feel guilt for not being able to fulfill all the deficit i perceive in this world, but i keep trying. The question remains why and to what end¿ i am not jesus, unless i can be jesus to myself, or help others see the same. I sense great loneliness from the individual sitting to my left, how do i honor that and make amends for 1,000s of years of failure, while honoring my own pain? May we all entertain such complex questions in the decades that are left to our species.
jts 14/07/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
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