Mr. Bageant,
When I was 18, I woke up for the first time, and for a few minutes, without aid of drug or drink I felt a twinge of the good old cosmic. I was attending a Community College course on religious studies. The professor was strange, uncategorizable. Part militant hippy, part middle class refugee, he was tall, cheap, foolish and wise. He embodied the coyote spirit.
Our class final was a riddle. It was about a gentleman farmer who led a busy life, busy and full of important things to do. His 80th birthday approached, and one of his employees wanted to give him something that would surprise him. The gift was a baby goose in a glass bottle. The gentleman farmer appreciated the gift, and put it on a special spot above his unused fireplace. The gentleman farmer fed the goose on his way out every day, and didn't notice how much it had grown until one day he saw that the goose completely filled the bottle, only his beak poked out.
Now, answer this: without harming the goose or the bottle, how do you remove the goose from the bottle?
I wrote down ideas as they came. Vaseline, mild starvation (how much starvation would harm the goose), etc. Every answer was absurd. I spent less and less time working on it, but I dreamt about it from time to time.
Two weeks before the class was over, the professor told an anecdote about a class in exigesis. The more he studied the Bible, the more contradictory and elusive it became. He found that he couldn't reconcile the work into a cohesive whole, and was becoming frustrated. He told his Jesuit professor about his problem, and the professor replied, "What's the matter? They're just fairy tales."
Then the damnedest thing happened. I had to leave the classroom. I felt out of breath and at the same time brimming with laughter. All that wrestling with that damned riddle, and it was just a riddle. How can you harm the goose or the bottle? They don't even exist. That answer just took over, and I saw the moon completely, from every side and angle, and felt connected to everything and nothing at the same time. It passed, and has never happened again.
I recognize that the world is wrestling with excessive attachment ... yet most of us aren't attached to anything. You can live your life without actually loving your family, your spouse, or your kids. If you can't love them, you sure can't love anyone else. You can't feel compassion and understand the mirror image of your neighbor. You go to your death and nothing has existed. You might as well have been a ghost for all that you contributed. The deepest feelings you'll have in your whole life are grief and annoyance. The only attachments are addictions. Addiction to sensory displays from without, especially television. Television is more real than you are, the business you work for is more real than you are. You come home, and your debts are more important than you are.
I joined the Marine Corps during a war I don't support because I needed to support my family, fill the empty leg on my psychic table with an artificial father, and explore my own feelings of being a warrior in a world that disallows its expression. I have to see what something is like before I can criticize it. This is where it gets difficult to express. Am I trying too hard to be unique, or am I genuinely trying to find the all important ANSWER to what the fuck this life thing is really all about?
I just wanted to tell you that I read your work, experienced deja vu, as if I've had a conversation with you in the blood and shit-stained dirt of some remote conflict where we both realized that we've been cheated ... I think it was Rome, and we'd had our asses handed to us by the Scythians. Neither of us expected to be mortally wounded, in pain, joking about how nothing we'd ever been taught and trained for was true or even helpful.
Thank you for your work on the web. I don't know what else to say, so goodbye.
Eric
29 years old
Lance Corporal, United States Marine Corps
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Dear Eric,
Once in a while I get an email that is so like the inside of my own head that it is chilling. More than chilling. Usually it is from someone about 70 years old who has endured something more dreadful than I can ever imagine, and I can imagine some dreadful things, having endured a few of them myself. But the most dreadful and most to-be-feared of all, as you seem to know, is a banal existence.
The mindscape you just painted is so EXACTLY like my own I scarcely know where to begin. So I will reply to you in the order in which you dealt with this great riddle.
My own personal awakening came at age 17 in the US navy aboard the USS America, an aircraft carrier, and was later further plunged forward into what can only be called an all-penetrating religious-like sense of the cosmic by access to LSD, plus the good fortune to encounter (seek out actually) people like your professor. There seemed to be a lot more of them around in the Sixties. The Tim Learys, Stephen Gaskins, all those people who've since been discredited by our state sponsored media propaganda machinery.
The LSD experience, was, as you so well put it, like being:
" ... out of breath and at the same time brimming with laughter. All that wrestling with that damned riddle, and it was just a riddle. And I saw the moon completely, from every side and angle, and felt connected to everything and nothing at the same time. It passed, and has never happened again."
About the only difference between our experience is that, with me, it happened perhaps a thousand times, simply because we took so much LSD in my young peer group in those days. After a few years, it became a different experience, rather like it was atomized across my existence and I quit taking LSD because, as Ken Kesey once said: "When you get the message, hang up the phone."
As to the riddle, the one that was left ringing inside me forever was: "What is the question to which my life is the answer?" It's still my question 40 years later. My inner life, (spiritual life, if you will, we are not supposed to have one these days and even admission to one is punishable, enforced by unseen forces imprinted into the self by the natural culmination of the mechanistic Age of Enlightenment), I realized, was in a sense, like your goose in a bottle. Trapped. But nothing would ever be the same, and that was its gift.
Like you, I recognized that, "the world is wrestling with excessive attachment ... yet most of us aren't attached to anything. You can live your life without actually loving your family, your spouse, or your kids. If you can't love them, you sure can't love anyone else. You can't feel compassion and understand the mirror image of your neighbor. You go to your death and nothing has existed The only attachments are addictions. Television is more real than you are, the business you work for is more real than you are. You come home, and your debts are more important than you are."
Unfortunately, that understanding did not keep me from attachment, and I went back and forth for decades trying to be part of the illusion of job, nation, family. Only in the past couple of years has it lessened its grip. Meaning only that my attachments have changed. Changed to such things as dogs, daily breath, drink, the reverie of writing.
As to "trying too hard to be unique," I think you are already blessed-plagued with being unique. We all are but it is the expression of it that is the plague in modern society's need for standardization.
Oh, I know what you mean about the Marine Corps. It was the same with me and the Navy. And much as I hated it, I learned from it. I suppose we learn from every experience.
I do believe you are right that we have been together in "the blood and shit-stained dirt of some remote conflict where we both realized that we've been cheated... I think it was Rome, and we'd had our asses handed to us by the Scythians." Ever thus was the class war that none dare name in this country and this age.
In closing, let me say this son (and I do think of you as a son though we may never meet, because we are a lineage of struggle, you the younger one and me the older). You are one hell of a writer, thinker and human being. You walk with eyes wide open. And if I may be allowed the vanity of giving a younger man advice, it is this: We have been victimized, but we are not victims; we have been taught to do the useless, but we are not useless. And though we are indeed mortally wounded -- all men being mortally wounded at birth -- we cannot fall.
That is the horror and the beauty of it. As to the pain, the pain felt is for our brother's pain. Knowing our brother's pain and joking about our own is, to this old man's mind at least, truly living. It may not come with a remote control or five gigs of RAM, or even a taste of true love, but it is deathless.
In the brotherhood of art and labor,
Joe
