RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,157
(a humble dis-astonishment)
Making my way through
this increasingly obstructed
world has become more and
more torturous and/or difficult
for me - it now having reached
the point, I'll admit, where I
do avoid any social interactions
whenever I can. I do not usually
enter stores, and even attending
to a post-office visit causes me
consternation and anxiety. My
goodly wife, for her part, tends
to those sorts of usual chores
for me. What a strange end-point
for me to have reached. This
form of reclusiveness, however,
has numerous good points. I
never need to dine out, restaurants
now being acceptably passe and
most other 'social' duties, except
perhaps answering to a routine
police pullover, can be successfully
shirked. I have fund that most of
the things people seem to think
MUST be done are, in actuality
done by choice and need NOT
actually ne needed at all. Yes!
The way it should be.
-
Malcolm Muggeridge, a British
writer from some time just past
the 1970's, as I recall, wrote
once of his life-long love of and
quest for nothing but 'the word.'
Writing : "Words were my metier.
There was nothing else I ever
wanted to do except use them:
no other accomplishment or
achievement I ever had the
slightest regard for, or desire
to, emulate. I have always
loved words, and still love
them, for their own sake. For
the power and beauty of them:
for the wonderful things that
can be done with them." Well,
that sure summed up for me
some part of the attributes of
living that I'd begun adopting,
even in my seminary days. As
I've noted here before, it was
early on, once I'd gotten set
and established there, that I
realized little of that was really
for me at all and that the
looming threat over my head
was of staying and thus being
forced to accede to something
that was not about me at all.
Ill-suited religiosity, of the sort
there peddled, would be ruinous
to my future life and days. It's
said that a wise person realizes
these things, and limitations,
intuitively, as he or she learns
to sense and read what's coming
in - the intuitive soul messages
of self. I recognized mine right
off, and they were calling from
some far, other place; and they
were telling me 'Get off, get
off this boat now, and don't
look back.' The funny thing
was - in the manner of life
replicating itself and causing
its own realities - that I didn't
have to do a thing. All around
me whatever I needed fell into
place itself, bringing to me the
needed result. And I gauge the
remainder of my life from that
point.
-
It is also said that a wise person
commits suicide numerous times,
albeit in a symbolic sense. In that
vein as well, I ended, as dead and
buried, a few lives and a few versions
of myself that no longer fit me. This
sometimes caused, or causes, among
others, a consternation; a reaction
to me as being too changeable or
too fitfully inconsistent. I never
viewed it as that at all, and rather,
instead, prided myself on the
honesty of having and heeding
a guiding self which (again)
intuitively led me on and towards
the paths and pastures where I
should be headed. It worked,
though never by worldly standards.
My own viewpoint of 'worldly'
standards anyway has never been
a good one, nor an accepted one.
To those, perhaps, who did
understand something of me -
like my friend Mary Kay of
long-ago previous mention, I
was always seen as a 'burn down
the mission' kind of character;
in equal parts talented and bizarre,
though often, as well, beyond
comprehension and unpredictable
too. Many wakes, attended by
many, varied people seeing me
out. I suppose somewhere out
there there will be a real one
awaiting me as well.
-
In Shakespeare's 'King Lear,' the
blind Gloucester says to Edgar, who
has just commiserated with him
on his blindness, 'I stumbled when
I saw.' There has always been a
fraught meaning there for me. Those
who have single sight, (my term),
are condemned to but see things
one way, one time, over and over.
By such means is life itself turned
into a boring wreck. 'I stumbled
when I saw,' on the other hand, has
always denoted for me the idea
that those considered otherwise
'blind' by the world - because of
a refusal to go along, conform,
assume - are actually the fner
characters, who can sense and
intuit, with higher means, the very
clarity of that which they are after,
or seek. This it has always been
for me, and by those ways I found
always my refuge in (what are
ignominiously called) 'words.'
-
Such a dumb word as 'words'
does little justice to the otherwise
transformative power of (perhaps
what should instead be called)
'grasp' : of Reality and of the
world. It was when I had sight
that I stumbled most often. Once
I became blind to all else, and
stayed on my course of 'words'
that I could see most clearly
and no longer had obstacles to
avoid, nor steer around. I was
able to live the rest of my life
in a humble dis-astonishment
about the other foolish things that
drove those all around me onward.
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