What We Are Born For

 

I think humans have a biological need for purpose, for goals to reach. I think it’s literally what we are born for.

What, after all, is the ideal life that people imagine when they feel buried by the noise and confusion of life? A monastery of some sort. That isn’t a place where you sit and do nothing – it’s a place where you can give your full attention to activity. A monastic life is spent, almost every hour, doing something important: making wine, repairing churches, prayer. It’s not an escape from goals; it’s paring down your day until it consists of almost nothing except pursuing goals.

People imagine escaping from duty, labor and goal-setting, of a life where all your needs are met lavishly without working, only because the goals set for them come from other people, and the tasks are boring or worse, destructive. Many people understand this, and imagine a life where they are free to choose their goals, often difficult ones like service in the Peace Corps, or ones which offer little monetary reward, like painting in watercolors.

Karl Marx envisioned the Utopian state of “True Communism” not as a place of regimentation and overbearing rules, the way it keeps turning out in practice, but as a world where a person could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as they have a mind, without ever needing to find a paying job as a hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

This is the biggest reason I’m in favor of some form of Basic Income: you can count on it that it won’t create a nation where nobody works, but a nation of people who LOVE their work.

 

 The prompt for this comes from "Before Winter Solstice" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:

This, too, is what we are born for,

this waking in darkness, unable

to see, but still able to hear the shush

of wind in bare branches, able to feel

the charge of our heartbeat, the swell

of our belly as it fills with borrowed air.

I have spent my life learning to love

these shapeless hours before the light

finds us, these shadowsome nights when

my whole being seems to stretch beyond

the bed, beyond the room, beyond the home,

beyond the valley, beyond even the globe,

as if I rhyme with the dark all around us,

the dark that holds us, the dark that surrounds

this whole swirling spiral of galaxy.

Sometimes, I feel how that infinite darkness

calls to the darkness inside me as if to say,

remember, remember where you come from,

remember what you are. And the darkness

inside me sings back.

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "By hammer and hand do all things stand."

It Is All One Thing

 

“It is all one thing.”

I couldn’t tell who had said it. Literally, it could have been me. The way we were all huddled together, our bodies touching, breathing one another’s air, smelling one another’s bodies, it was difficult to tell where one person ended and another began, if that term actually meant anything.

There’s a wonderful animal smell that is generated by multiple human bodies huddled close together, their scents and their exhalations mingled. It’s a beautifully comforting smell that’s not like anything else, not like the smell of being in a close space by yourself or the smell of intimacy between two people. The smell of communion.

At some point, the spell broke, and we began by an unspoken agreement to move apart. The breaking of the communion was as much a proof of its existence as anything that had happened while we were together. I looked around the group, at the friends and co-workers and the friends’ parents and children, thinking about the range in ages among us, which I knew to be from eight to eighty-two, and felt an added delight in that span of time. This was my idea of a utopian society, a community where people came together at all ages. So different from the segregation of race and age and gender that Ernest Callenbach imagined in his novel Ecotopia, where children went away to boarding schools and old people went away to group homes (and eventually to the equivalent of ice floes), while ethnic groups “voluntarily” or sometimes not-so-voluntarily isolated themselves to keep things tidy and keep his imaginary utopia blandly white and youthful and suspiciously able-bodied.

Qurum said, “Did anyone else hear someone say, ‘It is all one thing’?”

“Of course,” Daniel’s father said. “I’m not sure who said it, but it was perfectly distinct. I didn’t think there was any chance it was hallucinatory. Did it sound odd to you, dear?”

“Kind of. It seemed sort of…distant, like it might be coming from outside the group, so I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it.”

“No, it was real,” Carl said. “So, who said it?”

Then Aaron signed, [It came to me, too.]

Everyone was quiet for a bit after that.

 

 

 

https://poets.org/poem/hymn-time

The Magic Eight-Ball Says: "It is all one thing."

The Afternoon Froze

 I sat in the small space in front of the apartment, looking out at the parking lot, savoring the August heat. For some reason, I relished the warmth, and welcomed it into my body, as though I had dropped into this moment from some colder part of the year. I looked down at the book in my hands, then up again at the world around me.

A person crossed the parking lot to get into her car. I recognized her as someone who was very conscientious about wearing her droplet mask, but she wasn’t wearing one. Neither was I, I noticed, like someone in a dream noticing he is naked in public. Then I stopped worrying: clearly, this must be a time before the pandemic, or after. A time when people had no need to mask. This thought was reinforced by the sight of two jet contrails in an otherwise-clear sky, and a jet overhead, laying down another one.

I lowered my head, relishing the silence. It was so very quiet, without the constant, oceanlike sound of traffic. Was I wrong? Was this indeed a time of quarantine and isolation? I looked up to try to confirm that my neighbor was unmasked, if she was still in the parking lot.

She was still in the parking lot. In the parking lot, she was still, sitting in her car, hands on the wheel. Ready to back out of her space, but not doing so. Just sitting, still.

I noticed that the jet overhead seemed to be in the same position as it had been. I moved my head so a telephone wire lay between me and the plane, and as I watched for several heartbeats, it didn’t continue past the wire. The plane was still, flying. Clearly, the afternoon froze around me.

Well, if this is the End of Days, I wouldn’t mind it happening here and now. If, on the other hand, it was simply a temporary phenomenon, I welcomed it; I had often wished I could step outside of time and settle my mind before proceeding onward. I remained in place, afraid of disturbing the frozen time. I sat motionless, like the third person at the end of a Police Squad! Episode while the two principals stood motionless in a seeming freeze-frame, trying to fit in.

I looked down at my book again, and read it. I read for several pages, until I became bored, or maybe it was that the silence was getting to me. I looked up, and saw my neighbor still in her seat, the plane still overhead, everything still.

 

This is the poem which contained the phrase, “The Afternoon Froze”: Minor Miracle by Marilyn Nelson. I recommend it highly: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47528/minor-miracle

The Magic Eight-Ball says: "Wow."

I Visited the Poetry Dispenser on 5th Street Yesterday

The poem for March was from Rainer Maria Rilke:

Live the Questions

I want to beg you, 

as much as I can, 

to be patient toward 

all that is unsolved 

in your heart 

and to try to love 

the questions themselves—

like locked rooms 

and like books 

that are written 

in a very foreign tongue. 

Do not now seek the answers, 

which cannot be given to you 

because you would not 

be able to live them. 

The point is, 

to live everything. 

Live the questions now. 

Perhaps you will then 

gradually, without noticing it, 

live along some distant day 

into the future.

In other news, chronic pain continues to impair my quality of life.

//The Magic Eight-Ball says, "Keep doing your stretches."\\