Since mid September I’ve been involved writing my third book within the last two years and it is finished, which means editing follows, proofing, grammar checking, footnoting, and all the many little details before it is really finished. This book has been a pleasure to write and it comes in about 41,000 words or maybe 134 pages, nice, short and compact. As you have read in prior blogs, it is about my long distant relationship with Krishnamurti, perhaps the greatest spiritual genius of the twentieth century. The book has taken on the air of an extended memoir, a reminiscence that has lingered for over three decades. Wafting through my writing of this effort are the remembrances of things past, as I associate to my younger children, my wife, Rochelle, of the good and difficult times we had during the seventies and eighties, struggling times. As I write about my response to K, I recall the place and often the time, what I was doing as a teacher, like asking an Egyptian slave to remember how he schlepped a massive stone with others for Ramses’ pyramid. A sweet melancholia drifts across my mind, but not for too long, but it is the kind of melancholia that makes you smile a little like Mona Lisa, it is there, but encrypted.
The book contains my fevered youth, rising in the morning, heading out to work, writing, parenting, whatever that is, working as a shrink part time late into the evening and rolling in after one a.m on Wednesday nights and up five hours later to go to work. And now I skulk about the house and fart along down the stairs as I am superannuated. In Nevada I experience anomie, for it is an environment, at least in Henderson, in which you have to join an organization in order to curry attention for your existence and from that you may extend your connections to others. It is an implosive community out here and this New Yorker is sometimes looked at askance, nervy, et al. At least I have nerves as opposed to abdominal fats for a brain. Nevada is the equivalent educationally of Mississippi in the 50s. It is a well kept secret. The difference, let us say, between Nevada and New York comes down to guiderails, that is right, guiderails. Here if you drive near a cliff or a significant precipice you do not come across these metal barriers, whereas in upstate New York they are manifest. I have figured it all out. If you go over the side, that is your fault, your responsibility and the government stays out of it; if you are less than a rugged individual, the consequences are severe. In New York State the government evinces a reasonable concern for your safety.
Once you step out of the Strip, you are in Paducahville. My long range plan is to become an ex-pat, living in Costa Rica, let me say, with a woman Presidente, drug-laden packages bobbing toward shore late at night, and outrageous insects crawling about, beautiful beaches, not so expensive homes for a couple, with the knowledge that this country is corrupt as well as ours, except they know it and we don’t, free of our hypocrisy. And so I write my book about K, stemming from my years as a spiritual seeker, if you will, while the decadence about me almost oozes through the windows. I am a stranger in a strange land and the humor for me is that I enjoy that, for it allows me to experiment, to observe freely without conditioning, to be outrageous in my thinking, braver in my feelings, outlandish in my perspective on things and savage about the “governing” we are experiencing as a people. Everyone should, at least once in his or her life, experience being a loner or outsider, but better still, rather than recoiling from that situation using it as an armed combatant, bravely. Imagine all the well-bred shnooks who cannot conceive of ever going against their society, these jerks who refer to protesters in Wall Street as “mobs.”
You may feel that I hopped the rail here and that I’ve gone on a rant. Yes and no. As I wrote the book on K I “relived” the issues I had with him and I recalled the new thinking he presented me, especially on conditioning, indoctrination and the need to question authority. Hiding latently in that miasma that is Washington, is the latent expression that might lead to repressive measures if we are not attentive. I observe “newscasters” on Fox news in their late twentties and early thirties, especially ahistorical women reporters, expressing archaic and rigid philosophies that sadden me, for I can only imagine how much more arthritic they will be in their later years. I wonder what went wrong in their childhood to produce such mean spirited thinking, often without any historically accurate references. So street protests are equated to “mobs,” the Tea Party protests were orderly, neat, anal while others are labeled as “lefties.” I can’t wait until the word “pinko” returns.
Socialism is constantly bandied about, although these historical nincompoops haven’t the slightest idea how socialism was the coming wave throughout the ninetenth century and if W.W.I had not occurred, we would most likely be living under a kind of socialist state. They don’t want to know, they don’t want to read. We are a notoriously unread people and we really know little about our own history which has a strong genocidal streak to it, as an example. The Yahoos are in large measure in charge in Washington. I may be accused of cutting and running, leaving our desperate straits here for other Americans to handle. I have several responses to that red herring. Implied in this is that it can be rectified, implied in this is the old American myth of the can-do people, that Americans can be suckered but that they finally wake up and ultimately act nobly. It reeks of American exceptionalism. Patent nonsense! It reveals, to me, an inept capacity to assess human nature. In the thirties some in Europe realized the threat and got out, I’m thinking for example of the immense array of artist emigres who fled to Hollywood — Wilder, Wyler, Lorre, et al. The only loyalty I have is to my own personal freedom and my family. Since Individuals are now being told to leave America and go elsewhere, I may very well heed that “advice,” but for different reasons. At this point, at this time, we have become crazed.
Of the candidates running for the Republican Party, does it flabbergast you that except for Huntsman, all of them are Creationists?
If I Had to Choose
Since mid September I’ve been involved writing my third book within the last two years and it is finished, which means editing follows, proofing, grammar checking, footnoting, and all the many little details before it is really finished. This book has been a pleasure to write and it comes in about 41,000 words or maybe 134 pages, nice, short and compact. As you have read in prior blogs, it is about my long distant relationship with Krishnamurti, perhaps the greatest spiritual genius of the twentieth century. The book has taken on the air of an extended memoir, a reminiscence that has lingered for over three decades. Wafting through my writing of this effort are the remembrances of things past, as I associate to my younger children, my wife, Rochelle, of the good and difficult times we had during the seventies and eighties, struggling times. As I write about my response to K, I recall the place and often the time, what I was doing as a teacher, like asking an Egyptian slave to remember how he schlepped a massive stone with others for Ramses’ pyramid. A sweet melancholia drifts across my mind, but not for too long, but it is the kind of melancholia that makes you smile a little like Mona Lisa, it is there, but encrypted.
The book contains my fevered youth, rising in the morning, heading out to work, writing, parenting, whatever that is, working as a shrink part time late into the evening and rolling in after one a.m on Wednesday nights and up five hours later to go to work. And now I skulk about the house and fart along down the stairs as I am superannuated. In Nevada I experience anomie, for it is an environment, at least in Henderson, in which you have to join an organization in order to curry attention for your existence and from that you may extend your connections to others. It is an implosive community out here and this New Yorker is sometimes looked at askance, nervy, et al. At least I have nerves as opposed to abdominal fats for a brain. Nevada is the equivalent educationally of Mississippi in the 50s. It is a well kept secret. The difference, let us say, between Nevada and New York comes down to guiderails, that is right, guiderails. Here if you drive near a cliff or a significant precipice you do not come across these metal barriers, whereas in upstate New York they are manifest. I have figured it all out. If you go over the side, that is your fault, your responsibility and the government stays out of it; if you are less than a rugged individual, the consequences are severe. In New York State the government evinces a reasonable concern for your safety.
Once you step out of the Strip, you are in Paducahville. My long range plan is to become an ex-pat, living in Costa Rica, let me say, with a woman Presidente, drug-laden packages bobbing toward shore late at night, and outrageous insects crawling about, beautiful beaches, not so expensive homes for a couple, with the knowledge that this country is corrupt as well as ours, except they know it and we don’t, free of our hypocrisy. And so I write my book about K, stemming from my years as a spiritual seeker, if you will, while the decadence about me almost oozes through the windows. I am a stranger in a strange land and the humor for me is that I enjoy that, for it allows me to experiment, to observe freely without conditioning, to be outrageous in my thinking, braver in my feelings, outlandish in my perspective on things and savage about the “governing” we are experiencing as a people. Everyone should, at least once in his or her life, experience being a loner or outsider, but better still, rather than recoiling from that situation using it as an armed combatant, bravely. Imagine all the well-bred shnooks who cannot conceive of ever going against their society, these jerks who refer to protesters in Wall Street as “mobs.”
You may feel that I hopped the rail here and that I’ve gone on a rant. Yes and no. As I wrote the book on K I “relived” the issues I had with him and I recalled the new thinking he presented me, especially on conditioning, indoctrination and the need to question authority. Hiding latently in that miasma that is Washington, is the latent expression that might lead to repressive measures if we are not attentive. I observe “newscasters” on Fox news in their late twentties and early thirties, especially ahistorical women reporters, expressing archaic and rigid philosophies that sadden me, for I can only imagine how much more arthritic they will be in their later years. I wonder what went wrong in their childhood to produce such mean spirited thinking, often without any historically accurate references. So street protests are equated to “mobs,” the Tea Party protests were orderly, neat, anal while others are labeled as “lefties.” I can’t wait until the word “pinko” returns.
Socialism is constantly bandied about, although these historical nincompoops haven’t the slightest idea how socialism was the coming wave throughout the ninetenth century and if W.W.I had not occurred, we would most likely be living under a kind of socialist state. They don’t want to know, they don’t want to read. We are a notoriously unread people and we really know little about our own history which has a strong genocidal streak to it, as an example. The Yahoos are in large measure in charge in Washington. I may be accused of cutting and running, leaving our desperate straits here for other Americans to handle. I have several responses to that red herring. Implied in this is that it can be rectified, implied in this is the old American myth of the can-do people, that Americans can be suckered but that they finally wake up and ultimately act nobly. It reeks of American exceptionalism. Patent nonsense! It reveals, to me, an inept capacity to assess human nature. In the thirties some in Europe realized the threat and got out, I’m thinking for example of the immense array of artist emigres who fled to Hollywood — Wilder, Wyler, Lorre, et al. The only loyalty I have is to my own personal freedom and my family. Since Individuals are now being told to leave America and go elsewhere, I may very well heed that “advice,” but for different reasons. At this point, at this time, we have become crazed.
Of the candidates running for the Republican Party, does it flabbergast you that except for Huntsman, all of them are Creationists?