love is a virus with a nod to Eric Hoffer

Cyclonic disturbance, within the quiet scintillation of conventional conversation, banter actually, gives rise to events unfathomable. statistics well known but causes mysterious.

Spectral dances a potential of resolution.

“The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.” - Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State Of Mind, and Other Aphorisms (1955), Section 124

Is love really a choice given all the tears in our collective continuity? I think love is a virus afflicting, a contagion going viral, only to those who seek to know the good of all life not the one, immune, masked as indifferent. They who seek immunity do so by isolation, being unique in a celebratory way, and sequestered behind walls become stone. Fixed, immutable, and untouched by the flow of life; intolerable.

I sense we are born with the virus of love, some call cynically or skeptically: dependence. Life becomes adaption to chaos; for or against, this or that.

“The impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.” - Eric Hoffer,  The Ordeal of Change (1963), Ch. 15 : The Unnaturalness Of Human Nature

. . . 130104 05:14 . . . Winter Dance, in order to survive the season, for the most part, I silhouette the vinyl floor tiles beneath my bed and wait for it to be over. It very well be that I am a victim of Seasonal Effective Disorder? Too sensitive to the longest night yet very couscous of the now increasing light.

However, that stated, I remain bewildered by the chaos annotated by world wide news and feel victimized by it. In empathy I feel their pain, the victims, perpetrators and those who remain bereft. To survive I read the Bible, but not only the Bible but other resources as well. Finding as much balance to counterbalance my distress in Eric Hoffer, Annie Dillard and Michel de Montaigne.

Add that I continue to expand my garden of quotes and am able to rest in them randomly . . . the words, sentences, concepts copulating with reality; worthy of remembering. For now my distemper is ameliorated with the wisdom of those who have, in their time and way, encountered the same issues that never seem to go away. Pimps, whores, assassins and thieves who run the world, all seem to adore chaos in that it lends a smoke screen to their crimes against humanity. Yet they too are afflicted by the virus of love making exception not by indifference but addiction to power instead.

Be well.

130103 05:29 love as virus
© 2013 by Jack Spratt - All Rights Reserved

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