Jack Spratt

I discover myself as moving via empathy into situations way beyond my capacities. Consciously and unconsciously in thought and dreams. 

Add to which I am processing massive, at least for me, amounts of information making up for feigned self indifference to education. I do crash and burn. And am dependent upon mentors. Or as I have learned, I remain an apprentice to the wisdom of those I love and trust. 

I have come to trust the process of whatever it is that I undergo by experience, imagination and love. It is even for me difficult and demanding. At the same time humbling. Not humiliating . . . I lie. I take myself apart like a child's construction toy attempting to see and understand what and why I seek and the way I go. 

I don’t take myself too seriously given that I am well aware of myself as an integrated system dependent upon continuance and the discontinuity of life, especially at my vintage. What I imply is an pastiche derived from desperate resources. Each in fugue. When I saw Jesus weep, he wept without grimace, eyes filling with tears.

And so it was not to long ago driving to water aerobics, the musical commentator said that J. S. Bach’s greatest fan was Mozart, something I never knew and impossible for me to imagine; then followed with a string quartet arranged by Mozart from one of Bach’s themes . . . wrecked on music. But no. I was able to control the automobile continuing on my way.

Thinking back to my first conscious mentor, a fellow journalist, who said of me that I was then, and remain now, “sullen to discipline.” In her presence I was able to laugh and cry without explanation.  

I bolted from sleep conscious of a number of scenarios wherein I was witness to harm being done to others by peers. Assessing what I might do or say to forestall the incident; influence the outcome. I fear I failed the tests. It was not in distress that I awoke but in the realization that we fail because we are helpless not to. Implying that there are forces at play hugely beyond our influence; in some sense entering the victim and the predator’s state of mind. Empathy is astonishing that way. 

I should know better having been utterly helpless to die instead of my son as his disease destroyed him. There was a certain grace within the experience since I am aware of parents whose children simply dissapear and their fate remains forever unknowable. It is true of me that my consciousness if that of a parent informed. More profoundly so than the victim I was as a child. Add that I retain a sense of responsibility for life that I do not apply to myself making of me a fraud. 

So it is that while reading Annie Dillard and Michel de Montaigne concurrently I am being cross pollinated by the sewer of violence world wide. On one hand euphoria, on the other, diving head long into a box of broken razor blades. Wafting though this is a sense, the genius of God, manifest in various prophets and saints who I sense faced the same issues personally. 

I once read a contemporary Hindu’s sense of addiction as being the avoidance of God. This is a vantage point I glean from both Dillard and Montaigne sans conclusions; theirs or mine; learning to live with it. This life and time we live. . . .Ask, receive and find yourself the strength to adapt, improvise and prevail. Accepting the reality of being imperfect; failure inevitable yet it is worth the price to own yourself.

In the following sense. In failure we learn to get back up on our feet and keep on keeping on, our consciousness ever so slightly expanded and kinder to all. 

In conclusion neither of my children were “mine” but their own life to live regardless short or long. Laws are remedial while love is preemptive; though dead they both live in something vaster than my mere memory. 

130104 03:33 parenting
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved