In My End Is My Beginning
Every day and night I pray to release obstacles to my heart's desire.*
I have said goodbye to two people this week, people I was apparently counting on. And which I apparently was wrong to do so. I have been thinking about the formative book by Anthony Storr, Solitude, which contains at least two of the principles of the much less interesting voc rehab books the counsellor has me reading. First, pre-Freud, the het dyad was not viewed as the only mentally healthy, well-adjusted mode of existence. Second, something Eddie Said and the boomer job developers came to uh, late. There is a late style for creative solitude, in which masterpieces -- some of them the founding insights of modernity -- get made. Goya, Goethe, and Beethoven are mentioned. I forget about Newton and Copernicus -- if they had a Late Style.
It makes me feel weird, often, to think I internalized lessons 25 years ago others are still stunned to discover or who are writing boomer job development best sellers around. The biggest one is solitude. Nothing you want gets done without it, in celibacy or out. I have called it elsewhere the ruthlessness of purity, something William James discusses in The Varieties of Religious Experience.** Twisted versons of it -- isolated Guitar Hero assburger mass killers, for example -- get a malign agency these days, and the moral disgust with which it is enmeshed has an unscrupulous political dimension, as suggested in the research of Haidt. (The impetus for genocide is almost always couched in terms of hygiene.) For the reason that solitude must have a system of ethics and consolation, whether it's God or ethical sluttery or the numinous void. And only you can discern which one clicks the solace button. As one of the people I am letting go says, she drinks for solace. Without getting up into it, the solution is the problem. Right impluse, wrong avatar.
This long sojourn on the couch, stemming from last fall's message of You're working out of the wrong energy, is bearing fruit. I ran into a friend at the greasy spoon the other day, and she let it drop her daughter was a retired voc rehab counsellor. I'm going to follow up on that, if I need more.
Still cogitating on the role of family, congenital and exogamous. Beatrice Webb, long and happily and productively married to Sidney, both doughty old Fabians, thought of marriage as a wastepipe for emotion. Kind of like LJ. It's a nice atheist thought. Right now it's boiling down to the guardian and caretaker ad litem when I am too old to do it for myself.
There are any number of people and institutions in this world I'd trust my gaga old self to sooner than I would my family. They're killers. And that becomes clearer and clearer and clearer.
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*Emmet Fox:
The most secret, sacred wish that lies deep down at the bottom of your heart, the wonderful thing that you hardly dare to look at, or to think about - the thing that you would rather die than have anyone else know of, because it seems to be so far beyond anything that you are, or have at the present time, that you fear that you would be cruelly ridiculed if the mere thought of it were known - that is just the very thing that God is wishing you to do or to be for Him.
**James:
The next religious symptom which I will note is what have called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All the mind's objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity's sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a stroke -- we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy Bray's account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the latter form of achievement.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JamVari.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all
I have said goodbye to two people this week, people I was apparently counting on. And which I apparently was wrong to do so. I have been thinking about the formative book by Anthony Storr, Solitude, which contains at least two of the principles of the much less interesting voc rehab books the counsellor has me reading. First, pre-Freud, the het dyad was not viewed as the only mentally healthy, well-adjusted mode of existence. Second, something Eddie Said and the boomer job developers came to uh, late. There is a late style for creative solitude, in which masterpieces -- some of them the founding insights of modernity -- get made. Goya, Goethe, and Beethoven are mentioned. I forget about Newton and Copernicus -- if they had a Late Style.
It makes me feel weird, often, to think I internalized lessons 25 years ago others are still stunned to discover or who are writing boomer job development best sellers around. The biggest one is solitude. Nothing you want gets done without it, in celibacy or out. I have called it elsewhere the ruthlessness of purity, something William James discusses in The Varieties of Religious Experience.** Twisted versons of it -- isolated Guitar Hero assburger mass killers, for example -- get a malign agency these days, and the moral disgust with which it is enmeshed has an unscrupulous political dimension, as suggested in the research of Haidt. (The impetus for genocide is almost always couched in terms of hygiene.) For the reason that solitude must have a system of ethics and consolation, whether it's God or ethical sluttery or the numinous void. And only you can discern which one clicks the solace button. As one of the people I am letting go says, she drinks for solace. Without getting up into it, the solution is the problem. Right impluse, wrong avatar.
This long sojourn on the couch, stemming from last fall's message of You're working out of the wrong energy, is bearing fruit. I ran into a friend at the greasy spoon the other day, and she let it drop her daughter was a retired voc rehab counsellor. I'm going to follow up on that, if I need more.
Still cogitating on the role of family, congenital and exogamous. Beatrice Webb, long and happily and productively married to Sidney, both doughty old Fabians, thought of marriage as a wastepipe for emotion. Kind of like LJ. It's a nice atheist thought. Right now it's boiling down to the guardian and caretaker ad litem when I am too old to do it for myself.
There are any number of people and institutions in this world I'd trust my gaga old self to sooner than I would my family. They're killers. And that becomes clearer and clearer and clearer.
-----------
*Emmet Fox:
The most secret, sacred wish that lies deep down at the bottom of your heart, the wonderful thing that you hardly dare to look at, or to think about - the thing that you would rather die than have anyone else know of, because it seems to be so far beyond anything that you are, or have at the present time, that you fear that you would be cruelly ridiculed if the mere thought of it were known - that is just the very thing that God is wishing you to do or to be for Him.
**James:
The next religious symptom which I will note is what have called Purity of Life. The saintly person becomes exceedingly sensitive to inner inconsistency or discord, and mixture and confusion grow intolerable. All the mind's objects and occupations must be ordered with reference to the special spiritual excitement which is now its keynote. Whatever is unspiritual taints the pure water of the soul and is repugnant. Mixed with this exaltation of the moral sensibilities there is also an ardor of sacrifice, for the beloved deity's sake, of everything unworthy of him. Sometimes the spiritual ardor is so sovereign that purity is achieved at a stroke -- we have seen examples. Usually it is a more gradual conquest. Billy Bray's account of his abandonment of tobacco is a good example of the latter form of achievement.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=JamVari.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=all