Continuing my experiment with color, I now have achieved "root beer," as well as a number of other subtle shades. As I look around this flat, there's evidence that this is a serious obsession.My seaglass, thousands of pieces in blue, green, brown, white, turquoise, lime green, orange, pink, and red. My blog about seaglass doesn't update as frequently as this one, because I rarely get to the beach anymore, but I promise to do so soon and to gather a whole new pile of these colorful, smooth shards, each one a part of a greater whole, now lost and shattered into these tiny fragments by the action of saltwater, waves, sand, and sun.
These photos, and the occasional story reside at Seaglass .
Then, there are the watercolors stashed here and there around my apartment. I like to think of my style as Primitive American, because it sure as hell isn't sophisticated. But it is colorful, in a watery pastel kind of way.
The containers holding my coins are stacked -- purple (pennies), green (dimes and nickels) and blue (quarters). The paintings and photos on my walls emphasize colors.
Finally, my imagination is in a range of color. Tonight I am fixated on the deep orange of that lava through a hole on the Big Island that I glimpsed in July 2005. At that point in my life, I thought I had a love life the heat of lava. The intensity of that molten earth flowing toward its death in the mighty Pacific, which transformed it into enormous clouds of blue-white smoke lighting the black night sky that seemed to me, at that point, to reflect our sexual life.
But, within months, all of that turned to the coldness of illusions lost.
***
Men hurt differently than women. Today a friend and I were talking about Jimmy, and his memorial, and what we took away from it. She mentioned that she suddenly realized how vulnerable we all are, i.e., that appearances can be deceiving in Middle Class America.
I mentioned how money worries seem to have preyed on Jimmie's mind.
There is a terrible pressure on men, she replied, that seems very different from that on women. She said her husband worries much more than she does about their family's finances.
I replied that there has not been a day of my adult life (defined as the day I turned 21), that I have not been consumed with worry about how to generate enough money to support myself and my ever-growing list of dependents. I've always felt responsible for everyone in my life, to the best of my ability.
That means my kids, first and foremost, my wives, my girlfriends, my parents (when they were living) and some friends when they became especially vulnerable. Last on my list are strangers.
So I have not been especially generous to the homeless or the beggars that surround us. I don 't blame them for their situation, but I've always feared (perhaps unreasonably) that I could one day join them.
My older kids remember our joke that I might end up, one day, on Sixth Street, bearded, ragged, a lost soul. Since I've made it to 60 in reasonable health, employed, trying to sock as much as possible into my various IRAs, I suppose if all trends remain positive I may be a pretty stable 70-year-old when my youngest turns 18 in the year 2017.
My biggest fantasy is just this: To be able to live out my years in a simple way, in a house with some land, growing food and flowers, playing music, eating modestly, locally, seasonally, and organically. Growing some of my own food. Teaching, writing, editing, but on my own time. Everyone I love able to visit me from time to time.
And the many stories still locked up inside me able to find their way out.
If this doesn't come to pass, the words drifting across this blog like drops of moisture on the incoming wind may have to suffice. I may not get to my goal, as there are nights (like tonight) when my body feels so weak that I cannot imagine making it to a much older age.
If by chance I don't, I hope those who love me understand that I have been pouring my heart out here, just in case. If I live to 90, which Dylan said he expects me to do, there will be so much of this stuff as to render my current concerns maudlin at best.
It matters not. I'll worry until the day I die or until the day I become rich (hah!) whether I have truly provided what I should have for those I love. How much is enough in a society like this one?
When will the burdens be over, so my last act can begin? I suspect we lost Jimmy over these kinds of worries. But do not worry; you won't lose me that way. I worry about money but I worry much, much more about global warming, about poverty, about inequality, and injustice.
These are the things that will render all of us meaningless, rich or poor, men or women, familied or alone. We bond together for this great battle, or we fall divided into clans.
So let me be absolutely clear, unequivocal, about where I stand. I love my family beyond words. I love humanity even more. Your family is my family, and mine is yours, and until we all recognize that, our truest dreams will never be realized and our flesh, as it falls from our bones, will have failed to achieve what we might have achieved, collectively, if only we'd perceived this truth in time.
That would be the saddest of legacies -- the species that collectively committed suicide, when an alternative guaranteeing a future (living sustainably, fairly, and in balance with all other life forms) was so easily within our grasp.
Why did we not grab at the chance? Will that be our last gasp? Some of my offspring may live into the era that these questions find answers. I will be hoping, in my spirit life, that we choose love and sharing over greed and violence.
Truthfully, though, it is hard to be hopeful.
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1 comment:
David, I was looking at another post, where you mentioned the idea of a generation able to see its own demise. I wrote a little off line, in response to that, at first, but the thoughts have not yet found their mark. They may not, these are big questions and I do not expect necessarily always to find some satisfying responses to them, as I grapple with the ideas they inspire.
Nevertheless, I am glad for the opportunity to engage with these notions. It is something I enjoy about the time I spend here; I encounter an idea or feeling you have opened out in your own way, through your own curiosity, and I can build on that. It is in my own way of course, but by and large with some sense of shared sentiment or hopefully shared respect for the core of the issue.
It makes the potential of an online body of writing, that can be responded to through commentary, a form of creativity very different from writing in your own space for yourself - whether as a private piece of writing, or as the initiator on your own blog. It also certainly helps that you cover so much ground, with so many poignant sensibilities therein, planted and cultivated with care.
Unlike my own journal, which is a vast collection of drafts and sometimes half finished thoughts – a writer’s journal, complete with ink spots and ramblings - this is a space where I feel better for only posting what I am ready to post, with a sense of the best refined thoughts of a time. They may not be complete, but they are not tumbled on to the page for the sake of releasing a writer’s creative tensions. Your posts are are polished, self realised and elegant to a point I would like to respond to in kind, rather than according to the dictates of my own blog project.
Somehow, writing in response to this post, it was easier to make a proper beginning on a path to examining what I feel about questions of that generation that sees its own end.
The following is what this post made me feel, while still considering my response to the other post:
I battle with this too. I suspect many thinking, sensitive people do, and I hope at least to be one of those, or at least scrape in somewhere among them, after my many fits and starts of action and reaction, grand visions and humbled discoveries. And boy, have there been a few of those. And probably many more to come, no matter how often I think I have found the answer, and can coast on rosy wheels, only to falter on the bumps and pot holes I little see along the road, in my eagerness for enjoying a path that is great for my latest brand of skates to roll on.
David, I guess you have worn more skates, in more styles, and learnt from more knocks that I have. But I have had a good few in my time.
The question sometimes seems to me to be: how do we get to love, if we think too much, want too much or fear not little enough? How do we grow towards love? Some just feel it; some are there already. Children are in some ways, but they have not yet discovered how to find it when it is not given to them without question or perseverance, or indeed, only lies after a journey through a landscape of disappointment.
Yes, there are grown ups who love as innocently and fully sometimes as children. But they are but some among many that make up the world; not all are as evolved in their sensitivity or the scope of their hearts from the starting line or not a long way past it.
A great number of us have to find love, and find it through struggle, difficulty and encounters with the limitations of our less than admirable greeds and misguided passions.
The dog eat dog world of literal survival, the egg breaking, the lessons learned from dangerous over confidence or too much self doubt, the hurt, pain, depression and mania. They are part of the world, no doubt. They are dynamics of creativity and discovery in a growing consciousness, perhaps more for young men, than young women, but probably in parallel ways, are equivalent maturity processes within different modes of feeling and perception. No one wants them at the time, but working through them certainly makes love mean something, makes love real, not imagined or too closely associated with wants, not needs - with covetousness, not generosity.
Taking advantage of the good fortune we are sometimes showered with before we recognize it – the young in our society seldom seem to do this unless they are lucky, or precociously gifted or spectacularly well trained by the wise, and receptive to\o them. Can we expect from our collective adult selves, so young really in the scope of what it means to be a global society, with so many new toys, and so much new power, to do any better?
If we are to survive, we are going to have to succeed, however, in finding a way to maturity, to moving on from our egoistical fascinations. We have to grow up as a civilisation. Our survival depends on it, as does in many ways the survival of a young person depend on finding maturity after the experiments of youth.
It is a bit more complicated with a global society with vast and intricate forces and temptations, than with a single individual, no doubt. Especially given that society is young in many ways, but also quite old in others. We blind ourselves to the consequences of our actions as well, as we blind ourselves to the lessons of history.
As a civilization we are both old and young at once. We can err in both directions. As a civilization we do not ever confront death and the gradual change of our body leading to it, at least not yet. We keep on moving on, learning some things, but also in a kind of eternal youth of the optimism of our own grand plans for a future we have not yet had to come to terms with.
It is this question of forward motion without true apprehension of the consequences, coupled with a constant effort to erase the troubling lesions of history that leads me on to further thoughts about the generation that can see its own demise. Hopefully they will settle into place.
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