Few drinks, long week, lots of emotional processing, strange places.
So, watched a Thomas Merton biography. Decided he was murdered in Thailand by Communists. His last public statement before being found dead alone of an odd, freak, electrical accident in his locked room was along the lines of “Communism only works in monasteries. But you can question me. Questions are tonight. For now, I’ll disappear and you can go have a Coke or something.”
Got to thinking about other thinkers of the 1960’s who died in freak accidents, and came across Albert Camus fairly quickly. Here is an article alleging he was killed by the KGB: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/07/albert-camus-killed-by-kgb
Ferlinghetti was in the Merton piece, so I looked him up, then Charles Bukowski (real name: Heinrich Karl Buko(v)ski: he was born in Germany, and had an accent as a child for many years). Bukowski was beaten with a leather strap by his father multiple times a week from an early age, perhaps 5 or so.
So: entropy: leather straps, failure, despair, creative response, alcoholism, p[oetry], sex, words, words, awful delightful words.
Sean Penn was apparently a Bukowski fan. They went to the track together. Penn seems big on symbolism, and relative photo ops.
So I got to thinking. This is the point of this post, which I am allowing to be meandering.
Bukowski in some respects represents the 1960’s. Many of the figures of the 60’s, like Ferlinghetti and Merton, were really from earlier generations. And so was Bukowski, born if memory serves in 1925. Hippies, proper hippies, were born in the late forties, and early 1950’s.
Dionysian: this is the word. Out of whack, countercultural, non-clicking, forgettable, outside, out there, stranger, death to normal: these are words for Bukowski, and they make a lot of people of a certain disposition like him.
Me, too.
But what I want to say, before I walk my dogs to avoid the smell of urine, is that this feeling of wanting to stand outside the normal social realm is in my view quite ordinary, quite normal. It is our culture (and you are me, no doubt: can’t I assume this?) which makes it abnormal.
Do we not need to integrate the unintegrated? Do we not need to make ordinary Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness?
I looked, in my overly simplistic way, the Enlightenment, Rationalism. And I saw a reaction to myth, a reaction to the religious abuse of power, a clinging to science in some form, and form in all events, to order, to reason, to the adequate at the expense of the insufficient.
Then I looked at Romanticism, and saw a reaction to reactionlessness, to unreason masquerading as order, which led to an insistence on myth.
Plato said moral values exist, roughly. Others say they do not “exist”, certainly. Ontology is greeted with deconstruction. The quest for values is countered with the claim that they do not “exist” outside the verbal realm and should thus be–argue the children–cast aside. Cue the assassination.
For me, I want to say that reason and unreason must coexist. One day one, one day the other. Like the alternating consuls, the alternating kings, of the Roman Republic, we must not ask questions like: Is Reason Paramount:? Is Passion Paramount?
Do we suffer from such questions? Of course: we suffer from all bad questions. No, I have not stopped beating my wife yet: have you stopped your abuse of truth?
Yup: It’s time to Walk the Dogs. I don’t like the smell of urine. [they really do pee on my rug: how truly do symbol and reality procreate?]