The Hammock Papers: Courage.

09 April 2016

Courage.

Obviously I need courage to deal with my current dysfunctional body. And religion? The bible says that the kingdom of God is within you. If so, I haven’t noticed it lately. I’m not making light of devotion or a mother praying to bring her baby back to life after it’s been cut out of the stomach of an anaconda in Venezuela. Human suffering has to be the largest of all question marks. You must beware of hope, a radically dangerous emotion. Hope can roll over and crush you. I went to a dozen doctors last winter in Tucson for shingles relief and each time I had a wide-eyed Midwestern hope and faith that was promptly smeared. Hope is a bourgeois Tinker Bell toy that can transform into a guard dog of the most vicious nature. You raise your expectations then are gutted like a deer. However, if you need to say a little prayer, go ahead and moisten your lips for the deaf gods, although it’s like fly fishing in a sewer: “Raise your chin, o son of man, your doom is around the next corner on the left.”

These infirmities have been mounting up to a degree that I can’t help but think I’m close to cashing out. Tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. I get a steroid shot in the spine that might offer some temporary relief, then a booster in August in order to go to Paris. I’m desperate at the idea of missing the Paris trip, though it’s a book tour and I’ll mostly sit on a balcony near the Odeon and do interviews. Interviewers are muttonish but part of the game. Yes, I write longhand with a pen and tablet. This is hard for people to believe but to me the computer is the spawn of Satan. Then again, I’ve always been a Luddite, much saddened by the invention of the auto. Many people think a Ferrari is beautiful but it isn’t if you compare it to a horse.

Of course we are loaned this life, then suddenly one day it’s overdue. This is a little tight and nifty but so was Rochefoucauld. I fully expect to make a long walk to Virgo to see the clusters of a trillion stars. I wonder how they counted them? I had worried about reaching the year 2000, at which I’ve been successful. All my dark dreams about dying young like so many in my humble trade never happened. Hundreds warned me I was going to die young from smoking and drinking but I disappointed them.

Returning to earth, my favorite place after all, at least for the time being. This evening we’re having our first pesto of the summer, what with the basil having matured. I love this dish. It is the taste of early summer eventually overtaken by garden ripe tomatoes. The garden is huge, the vegetables mixed with dozens of species of flowers. It is visual splendour. I stare at it for hours in an effort to forget myself. When the Lakota used to ride into battle they would say, “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts.” I am notably not a Lakota though I have visited Wounded Knee several times to kneel and pay my respects, also the site of the death of Crazy Horse, which reminds you of the utter shabbiness of Washington now. When his three-year-old daughter died he climbed the tree to her burial platform and stayed there for three days, playing with her toys.

I am not a Lakota warrior in the nineteenth century.

CONNECT

No comments:

Post a Comment

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL