Filthy Lucre

Quarter after ten.

I didn’t get a Snapple today. The work crew on Maxwell Road blocked my way to the little market, so I turned around and walked a mile to the grocery store on River Road. I totally forgot about going to the bank until just now. I was so worried about viruses and all that nonsense. The bank is only a stone’s throw from Grocery Outlet and it was after nine o’clock. I guess I don’t believe in psychodynamic theory, which would say that I sabotaged myself deliberately. What I did was an accident, not intentional. I just wanted to get back home in one piece… I think sometimes that everything would be right as rain if I could indulge myself in a drinking spree. But then I couldn’t use my brain to write or read or do anything constructive. You can never have your cake and eat it too. As I was out walking on Silver Lane, I thought the big machine of society is all fake, including the fiction of money and economics. During the stock market crash of the 1930s, I wouldn’t have been one of those brokers throwing themselves out of skyscraper windows. However, much of culture and history is economic. You can’t study history without touching on the role of the economy. Still it seems like such a Western thing, a thing that Native Americans have criticized us for. 

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Naked Masks

I’ve just had a nap for a few hours and now it’s black as ink outside. This afternoon was interesting with my trip to the bookstore. Nice to see Nancy. She was looking for the new biography of Ron Howard. We talked a little about Pastor Dan’s sermons, which have taken a dark turn since the pandemic started. Of course she asked me if I was coming back and I said I’d consider it… I bought two blank books with lined pages and a brown cover showing a Tree of Life image. And I looked at the bargain classics: they had a nice one containing the first five Oz novels by L. Frank Baum. Maybe I’ll grab it next time. It was only eight dollars. While I was there, nobody looked at me funny or anything; I seemed to blend in pretty well. Everyone was very nice.

One of the first things you see when you walk in the door is the section of bibles, shelf upon shelf, off to the right side. I guess this is the American scene nowadays, or maybe it’s always been that way. I wonder how I could have missed it before? Something about my upbringing wasn’t right, because my perspective is like an outsider’s. My parents both hid away from the Christian USA, drinking martinis and smoking cigarettes with the front drapes always closed to keep the world out. So maybe the program I ran into in treatment for addiction was not far from the truth. It taught that dislocation from your culture is a big part of substance abuse. Perhaps the same thing is involved with schizophrenia? Or maybe I’ve been a client at Laurel Hill for too long. This can also skew your perception of otherwise indifferent things. And maybe everyone gets brainwashed all the time.

I just do the best I can. The more I think about it, the more I feel I’ve been jerked around by social norms that don’t care anyway. And everything cultural is entirely relative and made up. The only constant truth is our biology, which is valid across all cultures.

Natural Science

As I write it is 100 degrees out and 85 degrees inside the house. It’s making me feel lightheaded and kind of dopey, but it could be a lot worse. Also there’s some smoke in the air from wildfires around in Oregon. This morning I noticed how the sun was a big copper ball through the haze. Not very pretty, though there’s nothing anyone can do about it. The firefighters are doing the best they can… And so to Keats. Endymion is only about 30 pages long. I was thinking earlier about the difference between reality and truth. Now I don’t know again; the eternal beautiful and true probably doesn’t exist simply because it is a thing that flatters human senses and makes us feel good. It’s hard for me to believe in anthropocentric ideas right now. They are fictions made up by people to validate themselves— and that’s exactly why they are not true from a perspective of science and nature, or even philosophy. Maybe this is difficult for some people to understand. The natural world doesn’t revolve around humankind, and really our existence came about by a happy accident. Human beings are incredibly vain. We think the world is here for us to plunder, even as it’s described in the book of Genesis. Adam names the animals he is to live with, etc etc. I don’t believe this is true at all. And so with Keats, there’s this idea of a beautiful truth tailor made for people to enjoy. I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. We have to get along with nature on its own terms, not in human terms. Our failure to do this will make our lives more difficult than ever in the future.

So I guess my faith in poetry has dwindled for the time being. It just seems irrelevant to me anymore when I can see our ecology going down the tubes, and all because of our shortsighted selfishness. Science has gone from geocentric to heliocentric and now to the center of the universe being merely a hypothetical point in space. And at that center you will not find a human being.

I suppose science really is rather hard for people to grasp because of its objectivity and remoteness from human things, especially when you look at astronomy and physics. It leaves you feeling rather cold and uncomfortable… It makes me want to dust off my old textbooks on biology and astronomy again. It’s quite a different place from church or from WordPress.

Tomorrow it’s supposed to be 95 degrees. After Saturday it’s going to cool down somewhat.