Robyn Hitchcock's album Globe of Frogs has a track called Flesh Number One. The lyrics include this verse-
There's a plane crashing down on the studio but
we're in luck, we're not there, 'cos we're somewhere else instead.
Everyone worries so much about themselves
There's nothing happening to you
That means anything at all.....
So many things are happening in my world and in the world at large. I have control over almost none of them. I am by turns anxious and depressed, waiting to hear whether I will have a transplant or not, working far from home, aware of the transient character of love, hate, anger, and joy. While reacting to these various events and emotions, I am aware others feel them too.
In fact, they are all going on at once, all the time. All emotions. As I drive down the road some drivers around me are leaving home after their spouse tells them they want a divorce, some are driving from staying over with a new lover for the first time, glowing with satiated desire and requited love, some are anxious or angry about work, etc, etc. All at once. The WORLD does not oscillate; WE do. All the strands of political thought happen simultaneously. While our government and society veer from right to left, from conservative to liberal social values, the strands of such values are always present, always have been. The track of life does not look like the sinuous trace of a snake in the dust. It looks like a multi-ruled page, many lines sliding along, all wiggling a little bit all the time.
Apollo Sunshine's song We Are Born When We Die (used in Breaking Bad) expresses this succinctly-
Why say goodbye?
We are born again when we die
We will never leave our lives
Everything that ever will be always has been
And everything that ever has been always will be
We worry about the political track of our nation. We worry about our jobs, our bills, our spouses, children, money, age, illness. Everything. And it is all pointless. Nothing that happens to us has any meaning. Nothing happens TO us. It is always happening around us constantly. None of it ever changes.
What changes is US. WE oscillate. Our emotions swing between love and despair, joy and rage. Our bills might pile up, or our work end. Work never ends, nor do bills, nor does joy, despair, love and rage. We try to control our environment to keep us from being 'in danger'. We run away from our spouses, rage about politicians and taxes, stage protests, all in an effort to control our environment, when the only environment that changes is inside of us. We externalize our problems rather than look into ourselves. We yell at others, or invest others with emotions, motive, etc.
Instead of trying to control our external environment, it is our internal environment we need to control. Love, joy, peace, contentment are all inside of us if we look for them. No one can 'give' them to us, and no outside action can take them away. All of them are happening at once in the outside world anyway. When we find love in ourselves, we suddenly find love all around us. If we find rage and hate inside ourselves, we project that onto our world.
Gandalf tells Aragorn to turn away from the world and look where are is barren and cold. It is there, in the snow, that he sees the sapling of Nimloth, the descendant of Telperion of Eressea, oldest of trees. He had to look away from the world to find it.
So do we. We must be inside ourselves the values we wish to see. It is said that we only know what we see, but in fact we only see what we know. If we 'know' that grass is inedible we will starve in the middle of a field. If we know rage we will find it. If we know peace we will find that too. All of it is happening all around us all the time. I don't know how to find it, I just know it's not outside of me, and that the only real battle I've fought my entire life is with myself.
Ted
There's a plane crashing down on the studio but
we're in luck, we're not there, 'cos we're somewhere else instead.
Everyone worries so much about themselves
There's nothing happening to you
That means anything at all.....
So many things are happening in my world and in the world at large. I have control over almost none of them. I am by turns anxious and depressed, waiting to hear whether I will have a transplant or not, working far from home, aware of the transient character of love, hate, anger, and joy. While reacting to these various events and emotions, I am aware others feel them too.
In fact, they are all going on at once, all the time. All emotions. As I drive down the road some drivers around me are leaving home after their spouse tells them they want a divorce, some are driving from staying over with a new lover for the first time, glowing with satiated desire and requited love, some are anxious or angry about work, etc, etc. All at once. The WORLD does not oscillate; WE do. All the strands of political thought happen simultaneously. While our government and society veer from right to left, from conservative to liberal social values, the strands of such values are always present, always have been. The track of life does not look like the sinuous trace of a snake in the dust. It looks like a multi-ruled page, many lines sliding along, all wiggling a little bit all the time.
Apollo Sunshine's song We Are Born When We Die (used in Breaking Bad) expresses this succinctly-
Why say goodbye?
We are born again when we die
We will never leave our lives
Everything that ever will be always has been
And everything that ever has been always will be
We worry about the political track of our nation. We worry about our jobs, our bills, our spouses, children, money, age, illness. Everything. And it is all pointless. Nothing that happens to us has any meaning. Nothing happens TO us. It is always happening around us constantly. None of it ever changes.
What changes is US. WE oscillate. Our emotions swing between love and despair, joy and rage. Our bills might pile up, or our work end. Work never ends, nor do bills, nor does joy, despair, love and rage. We try to control our environment to keep us from being 'in danger'. We run away from our spouses, rage about politicians and taxes, stage protests, all in an effort to control our environment, when the only environment that changes is inside of us. We externalize our problems rather than look into ourselves. We yell at others, or invest others with emotions, motive, etc.
Instead of trying to control our external environment, it is our internal environment we need to control. Love, joy, peace, contentment are all inside of us if we look for them. No one can 'give' them to us, and no outside action can take them away. All of them are happening at once in the outside world anyway. When we find love in ourselves, we suddenly find love all around us. If we find rage and hate inside ourselves, we project that onto our world.
Gandalf tells Aragorn to turn away from the world and look where are is barren and cold. It is there, in the snow, that he sees the sapling of Nimloth, the descendant of Telperion of Eressea, oldest of trees. He had to look away from the world to find it.
So do we. We must be inside ourselves the values we wish to see. It is said that we only know what we see, but in fact we only see what we know. If we 'know' that grass is inedible we will starve in the middle of a field. If we know rage we will find it. If we know peace we will find that too. All of it is happening all around us all the time. I don't know how to find it, I just know it's not outside of me, and that the only real battle I've fought my entire life is with myself.
Ted
What a post: full of turbulent chaos. I have just finished reading a memoir of Oliver Sacks, and he, too, was a gifted high achiever who was by turns anxious and depressed.
ReplyDeleteOff-the-Cuff Reactions:
1. That we humans oscillate is true. But if humans make up the world, then how can it be possible for the world to not oscillate as well?
2. When you write, "We worry about the political track of our nation. We worry about our jobs, our bills, our spouses, children, money, age, illness," I couldn't help but contrast this with the lives of Stone Age tribes throughout the ages. They had no sense of a nation, let alone large population politics. There was just their tribe, "the people," and a few others. They didn't have jobs, bills, or money. They had no 401K to think about. What they thought about was food: how to hunt it, how to grow it, how to gather it. They thought about illness - WHO caused this - but rarely lived long enough to think much about age. They thought about their enemies, war, and violence: the perpetual states of mankind. And they also thought about sex, children, and their standing among peers.
3. I cannot see how nothing happens to us: when a car hits ours or a bullet hits our body, this sure seems like it happens to us. We are not disembodied spirits...
...we have a biology. Thus, our internal environment is not immune to the external environment. (To use a different kind of example, no one who lived through 20th century tortures in communist countries like the U.S.S.R., China, Ethiopia, Albania, Cuba, Cambodia, Viet Nam, etc. would ever believe that the external environment had no influence on the internal. Nor would they believe that things like joy, peace, and contentment could not be taken away by the outside world.)
5. Is it not true that though the goal is to control our internal environment, we really have no control over the neurology of our brains, the way our neurons are hardwired, the genetics we received, the hormones that course in our bodies and central nervous system? Is it not true that much of anxiety, depression, and peace we experience is determined by that which we cannot control? (Over the ages, the use of alcohol or drugs as temporary numbing agents by so many shows that many understand this truth. Likewise religion; or as Marx put it, ""Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people".)
6. I do wonder how much of the inner turmoil you write of in the last paragraph has been nature and how much has been nurture. (E.g., Had you grown up among nomads in the Steppes of Mongolia or in a medium-sized town in Iceland, how much of your inner life would be different from what it is now?)
7. I do hope that 2020 will see you get a kidney transplant, a job you like, and work that allows you to live at home. External factors like these are no panacea, but undoubtedly they would help.
Your friends value you and are rooting for you in 2020.
Truly one of them,
-D-
I was finishing up a lengthy response to this when I lost it, so I'll just talk to you about it later and say this now: I have problems with the (unintentionally) glib tone and content of paragraph 6. Some of the actions you seem to be implying are futile or misdirected ("run away from spouses", "stage protests") because content and control are produced and calibrated within in, seems a rather disingenuous comment for multiple reasons.
ReplyDeleteI agree with most of what you write Theo. I could argue some minor points but in the end its always been what's inside that guides us. Right or wrong is a different decision altogether but the guide that places us in a position to move in a specific direction is an innate one. Possibly genetic but certainly a learned one as well from parents, siblings, teachers, friends, and enemies. The path we each choose is a unique one never to be duplicated again until the end of time. That is kind of what is so special about it. It is ours and ours alone. The actions we take are usually for self preservation or self protection whether it be political, emotional, physical or some other reason. Stay strong and make your choices to protect yourself as those are also the ones that protect your family and friends. Best wishes Ted.
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