Only a fool would allow himself to be fastidiously conditioned to the present, to the emotions of the present. What is the present but buildings, freeways and the pressure of bodies scrambling around attempting to see what, if anything, is happening? The present now has the globe as its stage. The globe and its daily activity so richly detailed by big data.

What is the present but a man alone in a fishing boat off the coast of a Pacific island at 3 in the afternoon wondering how in the world he got to the place he now is in. The stadiums get filled. There is debate and laughter about the pretenses of those who want to be President. You could fight a major war in 4 years.

Or you could uselessly dream it all away.

4/10th's of 1% of the millennium. Nonetheless we want the present to be the best, to excel, to be excellent; to offer the best that human beings are capable of.

There are certain facts which repel us, but, never the truth. The truth belongs to the mighty human spirit.

What have we learned from staring into the blankness of what we see?

Only what is excellent, only what nourishes the spirit, only what one can build on. That is the requirement.

We instill in ourselves the sounds of the happy soul!

The earth has known great wanderers, great lost men and women who find themselves through the world. The earth has known tribulation to the point of offering up a kind of exasperation that can only be heard by the sensitive souls.

Where is the center? This is what is missing in this epoch. Christ and God are evidently not the center. There is no aristocratic elite that perpetuates itself at some center. There is no centering principle that I am aware of that drives survival and profit.

Perhaps the problem is in the scope of asking the question. After all, we have the experience of seeing the planet whole and distant from our own imagining; our own actual condition. We are aware of the vast population of the planet. We are aware of the variety of problems. We are aware of the look presented by cities and landscapes. We are aware of the way the world works. We are aware of how things, some things, get put together. We are aware of death and that inevitability. We are aware that the future will come and pass, too, and the face of everything will change and our little moment will have as much meaning and resource to the future as the year 620AD has for us. And yet love it we must. And love it so the excellence is squeezed out into the light rays of the sun which will nourish and inspire more excellence.

So the sun goes down, the sun makes a mighty fall down among the darkness of the stars and we wonder for the loss of light.

We sleep, we are put to sleep and are tortured by the dreams we did not make. They are ours! We are the dreams. We must awake, so we do.

There is in myself the figure of a bureaucrat. I'm not happy about it. One, that is, who wants to belong to the world rather than as one who is cut adrift, aloof and staring into the mysteries that the world, in all of its speed and smoke, cannot touch.

It is the feeling of dislocation. That one is not in any significant circle. That one is not connected to what is on-going except in an artificial way. Perhaps that makes knowledge that much more important. If one, finally, cannot fuse with the literary crowd or the vanity of self or the bulging sense of nation that presents its variety, its strangeness, its freedom, its character than one simply re-trenches and learns a few things over again.

This condition is the result of young brains up against a doomed and evil war. Young brains in relation to their first taste of political corruption. Young brains in relation to an unprecedented world. Young brains watching men walk on the moon and listening to scientists tell them that the world is going to end within the century.

It is, then, young brains suddenly released from the tension of these things and pushed out into the world where there is a great deal less sympathy and where the scope of things narrows considerably. And so it becomes very competitive and one against all.

Afterwards, everything dissolves into petty political divisions and nonsensical ideologies that have no base in common sense. There is a vivacious sort of empty-headed spirituality that makes the rounds. The times have uprooted the powerful rhythms of the unconscious that is much more spiritual in orientation. People express the eternal dissatisfaction with the way everything is turning out.

1988

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