I've been meditating lately on how people talk and think about politics, which is to say economics (creation, distribution and use of wealth) and religion (what binds us together, sacred narrative, myth, ritual, culture, history, the etiology of desire) and how silly our discourse and thought often is.
These last ten - no scratch that - last twenty years have been educational.
There's a stupid trope that's been making the rounds in the so called conservative circle-jerk for at least that long, usually attributed to Winston Churchill that keeps getting recycled, that goes something like this: "If you're not Liberal when you're 25, you have no heart. If you're not Conservative when you're 35, you have no brain."
People of a certain age like to repeat that like a mantra, as a means of soothing themselves for have gone on that drug and sex binge from 1967 through 1975, and then having "grown up" and "seen the light." Seeing the light usually means having "accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior" in an encounter with God while smoking that last jibber in 1977, finally getting that CPA and real estate license, moving back to the suburbs and having two kids, then registering Republican and voting for Reagan in 1984.
That's been a common American life trajectory these last 60 years, and somehow even teaparty trogs seem to sense in their undulating rotund weightwatched guts that it's not a pretty one.
"I mean the commune, we were young, idealistic, you know? Then I woke up and realized I needed to get a job."
"Liberals suck! Keep your hands off my Social Security!"
Whatevah hoss. We all gotta do what we yabba dabba doo.
Being that I used to call myself a conservative, and almost joined Pat Buchanan's campaign for president back in the mid- nineties, but now find myself watching Democracy NOW and reading the likes of Hunter S. Thompson, Naomi Klein, Michel Foucault and Marx with immense pleasure and suppressing the urge to get a baseball bat and plant it in the set every time someone turns on FOX news or anyone from rags like the Weekly Standard or National Review starts flapping their gums on any channel, I find that quote immensely amusing.
It's not as if my essential loyalties have changed, mind you: I'm still both anti-abortion and anti-war, because I still believe in mercy as an ecstatic and immanent actuality. I still am a practicing Catholic who takes his faith seriously (perhaps still too seriously..) I still love my Country. Love my family, my friends, my tribe, my people, my language, my home.
It's just that my ways of thinking about all of these things, the prism through which I understand them, are changed.
I still believe in a supple and lyrical (even elagaic) orthodoxy, in truth, but I no longer feel like I can utterly control it with my mind. I feel like I can express and defend it poetically, somewhat, not with the rank certitude I used to.
I know longer really know what to think, I only know what I believe, want, hope..
What I love.
It seems to me that love is a species of humility. I wrote a brief post a couple days ago, where I wrote that desire is its own consummation and parody. I wrote that without thinking too much, out of my heart, as a sort of metaphoric impressionistic aphorism..
What I meant is that love and desire are in and of themselves satisfactions, yet also crucifixions.
It's in the tension of desire, not in pleasure, that I find my meaning.
Why do I want what I want? What am I wanting? Who do I want?
Dante wrote in detail about hell and purgatory. He could describe it all.
In heaven though, he was silent. There was nothing that could be said.
Some people mock heaven as boring, imagine eternal love as tedious.
The same way they find seem to find masturbation ecstatic and the cubicle secure.
I know only enough to pity them.
I'm not wise, smart or holy enough to teach anyone anything, probably. I can only dissent.
I'm on strike.
Me, you'll find contemplative in these woods mulling a rainy day mantle of mist wrapping smudgy ethereal swathes about the trees from my study, a fire in the pellet stove, my dog on my feet, earl grey in the mug, my books in stacks on every table and in cases on every wall, home of glad ferment (especially in the basement) and with a heart of quizzical gratitude and ever less frazzled bemusement.
I mean, if anyone cares to come look.
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