One Hundred and Fifty Eight

Lately I’ve been waking up during the night, often two or three times. 

I look at the clock, wondering why the alarm didn’t go off, because I feel as though I’ve slept all night.  But I always find I've slept only a couple of hours.

I feel as though I’ve slept all night because my dreams leave me exhausted.

I used to remember my dreams in detail.  And they were detailed.  They were elaborate spectacles and I watched them as a spectator, aware they were dreams.  I learned about myself from watching them.  Now I remember nothing of my dreams after I wake.  I wouldn’t know I’d been dreaming if I didn’t have the feeling that something momentous had been happening, and suddenly it stopped.  A great cacophony suddenly stopped, leaving nothing but the silence of my bedroom.

It was as though I'd been dreaming I was in a forest, and heard the sound of a distant battle.  It grew louder and louder as I walked towards it until, finally, I climbed a hill and saw the soldiers below me, fighting; and they, seeing me, stopped fighting and looked at me.  Did they think I was their general?

It was as though I'd been dreaming I was in an insane asylum, and heard its inmates wailing.  The sound grew louder and louder as I walked towards it until, finally, I opened a door and saw them; and they, seeing me, stopped wailing and looked at me.  Did they think I was their doctor?

It was as though I’d dreamed I was in hell.

I am in hell.  We all are.  I used to think I could help them.  But now I know I can help no one.  So I no longer remember my dreams.

One Hundred and Fifty Seven

Google commemorated Marlene Dietrich’s birthday today with a Google Doodle of her dressed in white tie and tails. Her ‘legacy’, claimed one of the accompanying comments, was her “willingness to challenge gender norms”. Another comment described her as bisexual, which is less obtuse than those who call her a lesbian, but still wrong. 

Dietrich wasn’t attracted to men or women. She was an actress, and therefore a narcissist. She created an androgynous persona to attract an audience composed of both men and women because she knew they both felt trapped in their conventional gender roles, and wanted to see them challenged. Like Narcissus, she was attracted to an image of herself that she created and saw reflected in the eyes of her audience, male and female.

She was an actress who enjoyed the company of men like John Wayne and Ernest Hemingway, who performed their sexual personæ as skillfully as she did hers. One comment in support of the view that she was lesbian quoted her as saying “Sex is much better with a woman, but then one can’t live with a woman”; but what she meant by it isn't as obvious to me as it is to others. Was she speaking as a woman, or as the androgynous persona she had created? Either would find sex with a woman better than sex with a man because ours is a patriarchal society in which women must learn to please men, but men aren’t expected to know what pleases women.

A woman might find sex with another woman better than sex with a man for the same reason that a man might find sex with another man better than sex with a woman. It’s forbidden, which makes it attractive. It’s forbidden because it’s attractive. 

Most men don’t really like women, and most women don’t really like men, because most people are conformists; and people who conform to conventional roles, and expect others to do the same, are boring. Most people are such conformists that the only nonconformity they can imagine is sexual; which is why they’re obsessed with sex.

One Hundred and Fifty Six

They say they believe they'll live forever.  That would be terrible if it were true; but they say all the wrongs we suffer in this life will be made right in the next, and all the wrongs we do to others in this life will be forgiven in the next.  I’m sure they want to believe it, but I don’t see how they can.

I think I can live with the truth.  At least I try.  But they don’t think they can.    

One Hundred and Fifty Five

I woke this morning with the words of Major Amberson echoing in my head.  They're actually the Major’s words as spoken by Orson Welles in his film of The Magnificent Ambersons, which so impressed me when I was a child that I read the novel on which it was based.

As he nears the end of his life, the Major becomes uncharacteristically philosophical.  He asks himself what happens to us when we die, and reasons that our souls return to wherever they came from.  The sun is the source of all life on earth, therefore our souls return to the sun.

I knew Tarkington’s novel won the Pulitzer Prize, but I found it inferior to the film.  The Major’s words sounded magnificent when spoken by Welles, but looked banal on the page.  This was perhaps the first time I became aware that a second-rate novel can inspire a great film.   

Now that I'm nearing the end of my own life, my thoughts seem to me as banal as the Major’s.

It’s obvious why the sun was our first god.  He rules the sky, and fertilizes mother earth with rain.  But before the gods there were goddesses.  And before them both, the void.

Egyptologists are puzzled by the fact that Nut was goddess of the sky and Geb, her brother/husband, god of the earth.  But Nut was goddess of the night sky.  The black void overhead was her body, and the stars that filled it were the souls of the dead.  Osiris climbed up a ladder to re-enter his mother’s body and become king of the dead.

The Book of Nut is the earliest known text on astrology and astronomy.  What we separate into religion and science is the study of the night from which we all woke and to which we all return.

One Hundred and Fifty Four

We had our Christmas party yesterday evening.

It wasn’t actually a party.  The last time I worked at the company, Don rented a suite at a local hotel every year and we’d have a real party.  Bob and his wife brought their instruments and played while we all danced and sang Christmas carols.  After I retired, the company lost so many employees that Don stopped holding annual Christmas parties.  Yesterday’s party was just dinner at a restaurant, and only for the employees, not their families.  Not even Don’s wife was there.

Sitting at the table, I became aware of how much the company’s group dynamic has changed because of Nick.

Most of the employees who are gone now had been around Bob’s age, and the new hires are all Nick’s age.  He and the women sat at my end of the table, giggling together, while I sat silent.

I asked myself if I was jealous, but decided that isn't the case.  It’s true I used to be the focus of the group, but only in a negative sense, as the eye is the focus of the hurricane.  Petty quarrels swirled around me, but I refused to be drawn into them.  I thought of myself as the only real adult in the room.  Nick has made himself the focus of the group by being the most childish adult in the room.

He babbles constantly about his favorite comic book heroes, video games, and the pranks he and his 'buddies' play on each other.  He doesn’t do this with the other men in the office.  His audience is the women, who laugh indulgently as they probably do at the antics of their children (The women are all married, with small children).

I might find Nick as amusing as the women do if I didn’t have to work with him.  But even Bob, who never says a critical word about anyone, told me Nick is ‘erratic’ and ‘disorganized’.

One Hundred and Fifty Three

Cogito, ergo sum and sum, ergo cogito.  If I must be a while longer, I must think a while longer.

Scientists now say the question is why there’s something rather than nothing.  It’s an unanswerable question because the distinction is a false one.

What they (we?) call nothing is not an empty void.  It only appears empty to us, just as light appears without color to us until we shine it through a prism.  An apt metaphor because light, with or without color, appears only to us.  Without eyes to see them and ears to hear them, what we call things are only waves moving on the surface of the void, which contains all things just as white light contains all colors.

We imagine the void is empty because it seems so different from us.  But we came from the void, and will return to it.  We are no more than episodes in its history.  For the void does have a history.  It exists in time, just as we do.  It exists because we do, and vice versa.

Once we make a distinction between something and nothing, it’s easy to make a distinction between living and nonliving things.  One error leads to another until finally we create civilisation.

Our earliest philosophers said we are spirits caged in matter.  Death frees us. It would be closer to the truth to say spirit (or life) is a disease of matter.  Once infected, matter begins to decay.

We are parasites, feeding on a world we pretend is lifeless matter in order to avoid judging and condemning ourselves for what we do to it.  We invented gods to forgive us what we do because we can't forgive ourselves.

There is indeed a god-shaped hole in our lives, and nothing can fill it.  Nothing has filled it.

God was a name for what we didn't understand.  The void is a name for what we refuse to understand.

 . 

Life like ours is probably rare, a mutation unique to this planet.  Here it proliferates like a cancer because misery loves company.

Life seems to me tragic, but the lives of other animals most of all because they don’t invent the illusion we call civilisation to avoid seeing what they do.  Other animals do terrible things, but not as terrible as the things we do because they don’t pretend they do them in the service of some greater good, as we do.