How long has it been since you told your brother
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.
(Philip Levine)
I get to this point every time. It is a matter of introducing myself to you. I can tell you with a certain amount of dignity and grace that I am a scholar of the soul through the arts and letters of world culture. I can say that I have taken that search for soul as a matter of seeking into the repository of all our human wisdom and that I want to turn it into gold through the engagement of the difficult, recalcitrant, painful complexes that remind me each moment that we are not complete. If we were complete then I would not have to be there, and my soul would be dealing with the pointlessness of existing. But then perhaps we would turn to each other and say, we will be each other's shelter, and then we will turn and enter the house with the warm lights facing the cold and eternal night.
Who shall I expect will be reading me? I expect that they will be many sorts, some will be my friends, who will laugh and point and say, isn't it funny that he said what he thought himself to be! (An innocent incident.) But I have two responsibilities: one to call out and tell the world I have services to sell, and the other is to thought, and the nodding of the head, which some will call the soul. One is to offer myself to the market of potential employers, to say, please will you take me, or know that you might want to take me if you can stand for any one person to be so obscenely honest. The other is to thought, and to thought I have to be that honest.
I have been criticized mostly as one who demands very much to be deeply received, to be taken in. Oh yes, let me wax a bit maudlin that this is "a consummation devoutly to be wished." To which everyone outside can register a simple "Bah!" But I apologize, I know also that that was just a dream that I once had. I know that the world doesn't owe me anything, that its doors may be barred at every turn. I know that the doors may be open, but that is a matter for those who dwell within to determine, and I really am that outsider, the "Man from the land," maybe no better than the country bumpkin.
Who will I be. Looking out today at the ocean, in a matter almost of habit I thought to myself that I must somehow be something greater than this: a despondent and embattled man. I wish that I had fought my battles and that I could see easily ahead as to what this life holds for me. I am barely able to see ahead for the next six months. So much of this life is cloudy for me. But who am I to scoff or to beckon toward those rigid men, with their fists in handcuffs, walking down stiff corridors of life with their next twenty or thirty years all mapped out.
I want a job as an astrologer and as a teller of ways... a diviner of smoke, and as a teller of ways. -Not a bank teller, I mean I have already been that! Personality is so hard to form. I mean what a pain it must have been, for instance, for a Jung to become a Jung. It is hard to see that in all this byzantine paperwork. It is almost impossible to see that in the midst of the clutter of paperwork. I would like a job that seriously permitted me to sit and set the weave of a design of the work of black ink in a spiral across a piece of vellum, a shred of textures of once living tissue.
And life now, with the smell I smell of cedar smoke, outside the walls of this adobe hut in this writer's imagination, the blue, unfocusable light that pours in through my doorframe to me from mountain pines and a blue sky at mid-day. That's what I'm looking for!
Oh, I'm a fool, I serve anyone indiscriminately like chasing the flight of a butterfly. No, that's not true, I keep looking to serve the part that will break your heart, and mine too, if we read it right. It's like a corkscrew of existence that I am just beginning to read if I read it right.
I went to school to achieve an end, to become something, but the end was just a beginning, because then I really did not know what to do or who in fact I was. The report of the Jungians is that it is at this moment, when all the degrees and accreditations have been completed, that we have to get down on our knees and pray, that we have to sit here in wonder and perplexity and say, alright, now what will I do with it?
Enter the world of work. When I look at work I look at much suffering, There is a voice in me that says "It's work, that's why they call it 'WORK.'" There is another slim voice that will solicit an obscene little sliver of an etymology as a mild but insistent form of protest: "But work is 'orgy,' and also 'energy!'" Somewhere we had this sense that every instant of work was part of an essential matrix. Now looking out at the port of Los Angeles with a distant backing of atmospheric smog I think to myself that we are not born just to live to work in drudgery, we were born to be awake, and to work profoundly and passionately!
Disappointment is a good fifty-percent of life. I have been disappointed becoming a therapist because the social work dimension has been frought with such institutional complexity: I just wanted to work with healing, but I found that I could not operate within the walls that were given me. They were good walls, but something about them was entirely unfair and corrupted as well, something just leaves me terribly sad about the whole thing.
Lou Reed asks at the end of the album of his called "The Raven," who am I?
Sometimes I wonder who am I
the world seeming to pass me by
A younger man now getting old
I have to wonder what the rest of life will hold
I hold a mirror to my face
there are some lines that I could trace
To memories of loving you
the passion that breaks reason in two
At times such a song is a pathetic piece of fustian. I wish you well in sharing this with you. Much of the time we spend our time thinking about who we are and if there is something we can offer, like a drownding man in a dry well: "But who am I to offer any of this to you?" I think to myself over and over. Who am I to offer anything? Well, I am yet another man taking his passion into the world. I wish I knew what I could offer, or what I believe in, other than the dogma that to talk with those whom I love I believe will make us better.
What are my work prospects? My prospects are that I will work as best I can for as long as I can until I have to say that this is not my dream and I have to give up and make the leap like some ungainly weird locust into independent practice, and maybe that will be enough, like jumping into an icy-hot shower of emptiness.
Professionals are ones who profess. They profess and in exchange they receive the exchange of coin or money. Professors are professionals. But I am not a professor alone, I believe that I have to take the wisdom of the ages and apply it to the insane impoverishment of the world. I will however profess my faith: that I am finding a way in order to continue my living in order to sustain myself, but I will do so in a manner that befits one who longs for the difficult vocation of being a seer. I know that you will say that a seer is dangerously close to being one of those sages. But what is sage, allong with blessed sagess, is always prudent. As a seer, the void looks back into me with sharp imprudence. I will find a means to sustain myself and my wife that will be sufficient in some way, even if this life looks apparently back-breaking and improbable to say the very least.
What can I say? -at the least it is improbable. That is just the beginning. That is where we start! Is there a manner of continuing this path as holy, and as open as the heart can possibly make it, without resorting to some figure for salvation, Christ, Krishna, or the Buddha? We know all seeking of salvation is really the cause of violence and suffering in this world. Salvation must be lived now, in the terrible present, not in the "before" or "after" of our life. But I digress, don't you think?
On the way to the professionals, able and willing to accept the thirty pieces of eight for their confused declaration, that they must be here to tell us something important and valid, just like Judas of old, who spoke of something relevant and valid. We all know it is a mistake to do so, so that is not a profession we would seek. Professionals get paid, however, that much is certain; and they get paid in order to just keep themselves alive. The question always comes up as to the slipperyness of capital, and of money in general: at what point does compensation develop into self-indulgence and gluttonous greed? A slippery slope. So far as I can say, I do not see us surviving in the way we had. We may just need to go out onto the road. That is a bitter, bitter thing, not knowing and being so bitter, the milk teat of all nurturance that has grown so bitter. So now we go out on the road for the sweet flavor of adventure, that we were not meant to stay long enough in one place to see our own shadow, that we were not meant to set down real roots, deep ones, and to grow as a beautiful tree in a beautiful place and to live and to die in the very same spot. I wish I knew, and I wish we knew who we are or who we might be.
"Defeat is the price agreed upon," some will say. But can any employer comprehend that? No, my friend, every employer I have met is in the business, and the business is the business of personal gain. So I eventually have to just go out and set up a place, a house, a hut, a single piece of wonder and transience.
I wish I could be like a bird up in the sky
How sweet it would be
If I found out I could fly
So long to my song
And look down upon the sea
And I sing because I know
I would see you
I sing because I know
I would see you
And I sing because I know
I would see you
To be free yea
(Nina Simone, "I wish I knew how it would feel to be free.")
