Two Hudred and Eighty Seven

I’ve seen too much, and not enough. 

The good was like sunlight glittering on the water's surface, the bad like smoke from a distant fire drifting across the water. 

I’ve seen the surface, but never dived beneath it, into the maelstrom.  If I had, I would have drowned. 

I should have drowned. 

Two Hundred and Eighty Six

Who am I?  What am I?  I no longer remember.

I know I once had the potential—was born with the potential—to become more than who and what I was.  Why did I fail to realise that potential?

Most of us fail because we’re born in the wrong place at the wrong time.  But has there ever been a right place and time?  Perhaps there was, before we became what we call civilised. 

When I was young, I wanted to be and do everything—writer, composer, singer, dancer, musician, actor, artist—because I did them all well.  Or so others told me.   

Most people are multitalented—probably we all are—but they become successful only by limiting themselves, and focusing on their most marketable talent.  I didn’t have to read Marx to know capitalism’s division of labor forces us to become machines performing one and only one task.

I wished I lived in Marx’s ideal society, so I could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and philosophise after dinner without having to become a hunter, a fisherman or a philosopher in order to earn a living.  Like Whitman, I contain multitudes.  But I had to be one and only one person, so I chose to be a teacher.  A bodhisattva.     

The moment I became aware of the world, I knew it was broken.  I never imagined I was the only person who could mend it, but I believed I was one of them.

Others thought so, too.  As soon as I was old enough to read and write, other children gathered around me, sitting on the porch steps and listening as I read to them.

Later, in school, some teachers resented me because other students came to me instead of them for help.  Others have always come to me for help—not only other people, but lost and/or wounded animals—but although I helped other animals, I could never help other people.  They thanked me, but kept making the same mistakes, like children who never grow up.  I finally got tired of telling them what they already knew.

All we know, we knew in the beginning.  But we forget what all animals know in order to become what we call civilised.

I always felt more at home in the company of other animals than other humans.  We’re both prisoners in the world humans made, and call civilised.  

When I was a child, other people’s dogs jumped their fences and followed me as I walked home from school.  When I sat down, birds and butterflies perched on my head and shoulders.  Now I seldom see birds or butterflies in the city.  I am alone.

The failure isn’t mine alone.  We all took a wrong turn at the beginning, and now from the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can be made.

I know I still hear them in my dreams, because I’m aware of a sudden silence when I wake.  But I no longer remember my dreams.

Two Hundred and Eighty Five

Fear makes them do what they do.

We all come into the world helpless and vulnerable.  If we’re welcomed, it’s usually because those who welcome us hope we will help them—will be their allies in a war that began before we were born. 

If we serve them well, they reward us with what we agree to call love, even though we know it isn’t.  We know what love is, even if we never experience it, and it isn't payment for service rendered.   

He tried to kill me because he saw me as his rival for her.  But I knew he also loved me because I knew him better than he knew himself.  I knew he loved us both, and wanted both of us to love him as a father and a mother love their child.  And I tried to, for her sake.  That was the problem.  It was for her sake, not his.

They're all frightened children, and I tried to love them all.  Now I’m tired of them all.

Two Hundred and Eighty Four

I’m nearing the end of the book, just as I’m nearing the end of my life.  And what have I learned?

All we know, we knew in the beginning.  We all know that life is misery for most people most of the time.  But we make ourselves forget what we know in order to go on living, hoping our life will be different. 

The moment I knew the world, I loved it and wanted to know it better.  Even when I no longer loved it, I still wanted to know it better in order to make it better.  But I also knew that knowledge is not power.  Only power is power.  In order to know the world—to know why it is what it is, and how to change it—I'd have to become the world.  I am finite and it is infinite, so the lover’s quest for knowledge of his beloved can only end in his death.

We used to pretend that not only did we want to live, we wanted to live forever.  But we know nothing lives forever. What we pretended was a desire for immortality was in reality a desire to be nothing, to forget what we know.

Two Hundred and Eighty Three

As I continue to read the book, it becomes less difficult for me to read.  Or rather I become accustomed to the way it’s written.

Most authors write this way now, not only authors of schoolbooks.  They assume they must explain ideas to readers who’ve never encountered them before, so they describe them several times in several ways, hoping their ignorant readers find something in their limited experience to which they can relate them.  No author seems to know there are no new ideas.  All we know, we knew in the beginning.  What seems new to the ignorant, the wise know is a revival and revision of old ideas.

The ignorant are ignorant because they see things as facts, separate and unrelated.  Teaching them how to think doesn't consist of making them memorize these isolated facts, but of showing them how things that seem isolated are actually related.

We’re taught to think of knowledge as isolated facts, and memorize them, by teachers who don't themselves understand how they’re related.  Fortunately my childhood experience with mysticism taught me that everything’s related because we’re all parts of a greater whole.

Two Hundred and Eighty Two

 I lay in bed last night, trying to read another chapter of the book; but eventually I gave up. 

I decided to give up reading the book as well.  I’m an old man with no time to waste reading books that are difficult to read—no time to waste reading anything, doing anything.

A great calm descended on me.  Nothing was worth doing, so I would do nothing.  I would wait to die.

After my last suicide attempt failed, I decided I wouldn’t try to kill myself again because I was already dead in every way that mattered.  I would wait to die naturally.

This morning, I woke and tried again to read the book.  It was difficult, but not impossible.        

There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to die.  The desire to understand has kept me alive.

I used to understand other people better than they understood themselves.  They behaved irrationally, but in predictable ways.  Now they’re going completely insane.  

If I'm no longer able to understand what I read, or why other people do what they do, the part of me that doesn't want to die seems ready to accept that it would be pointless to go on living. 

I may have a reason to live, but they don't.  They want to destroy themselves, and I don’t want to see what they’ll do next.