The World Beyond The Mist — Roaming with Roth

With deepest regards [and apologies] to Claude Monet, I offer in recognition of his most perfect analysis of light and the impressionist aesthetic as displayed in his inimitable study of Water Lillies, my photographic version which I am calling: “Morning’s Misty Mountains” [or “Misty Mountain Mornings” or Mountain’s Misty Mornings” or “Mountain’s Morning Mist”] - It is not easy being a literary esthete {lol}

It is September already and Adele and I have been home for over two week. I will not bore you with the perfunctory tasks necessary to ‘land’ and make one’s home fit again for habitation. What I do wish to convey is that this blog has taken since the above post date for me coalesce my thoughts into a coherent expression and elucidation to make sense of the whirlwind of grey cells in my head.

An idea came to me while reading a science-fiction novel entitled, ‘Station Eleven’. A futuristic, post-apocalyptic tale as told through the eyes of “Traveling Symphony”, a band of actors and musicians performing in old Walmart parking lots and sleeping in abandoned warehouses, gas stations and stores. They drive from town to town in three trucks with their name brightly printed on the sides. But, the truck driven by the leader of the troupes’ has these additional words below, “BECAUSE SURVIVAL IS INSUFFICIENT’. When I read these words, all that I had written before had new meaning - a ‘coda’ to my musings.

It’s August 11: I don’t know if this morning I am overly internal, conceptually transforming my ‘view into viewpoints’ or if the world manifested a philosophically unavoidable ‘mis en scene’ provoking my personal projection. Either way, from the balcony of our apartment my mind is time-lapsing along with the slow, transfiguring shift of perspective.

The original, arresting scene drew me outside for its subtle beauty. Yet, while standing and staring, I realized what initiated me to seek this scene was the mystery that dwells in the veil of mist. Yes, the awe at nature’s persistent perfection; and, the peace of harmony and balance. Yet, there was another element that compelled and bound me. The insinuation of what may lay beyond the mist. Moment to moment the view, although continually captivating and consuming, began to disclose aspects of what lay ‘on the other side’.
The possibility of revelation? Thus, the fascination shifted from what is present to what might be anticipated (hoped for?) This deflection altered my emotions. My attention was now minimally split, if not alltogether amended, giving greater consideration to what is yet to be uncovered than what is present. Such is the attraction, lure and perversion of the unknown.

A Buddhist psychologist once said, “You can look at the past…but don’t relive it; you can plan for the future…but don’t pre-live it.” Great advice. What is that combination? How and when do we get ‘trapped’ in the past instead of utilizing its lessons to build upon? How and when do we wish or opine for a future and fail to build it? Psychologists today, manifesting statistically greater outcomes, are moving far from Freudian analytical therapies to cognitive, functional technologies that empower action over insight. Choice, action, and outcomes seem to create, not ironically, deeper insight along with profound change. Creating evidence that one can live a productive and gratifying life in the absence of fully understanding the why’s and wherefore’s of every precipitating event in one’s past, produces relatively immediate results that might be anticipated to occur only after years of psychotherapy.

But, I digress. My sense is that religion is based upon the fear and insecurity of the unknown. Religion fails to recognize the rightful place and spiritual ascendency that comes from what is ‘not’ known…absent the need for ‘faith’. But, the politics of religion and its institutions, requires dependency and reliance on ‘safe-makers’ and ‘popes of predictability’. I have referred to Alan Watts, I believe, in these pages before who, in his landmark book “The Wisdom of Insecurity” speaks directly to this, “If, then, my awareness of the past and future makes me less aware of the present, I must begin to wonder whether I am actually living in the real world.” The desire and search for security and/or safety is an opioid, “…the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold you breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet. If we cling to belief in God, we cannot likewise have faith, since faith is not clinging but letting go.”

There I am at 7:04 in the morning drawn to our balcony, struck by this talc-like puffy suspension, an enigmatic cloud of mist dusting the valley and insinuating what may lay beyond. I was mesmerized by this gritty teaser, this opaquely transparent moist tarp of persistent questions. I felt provoked and irked by the gnawing need to know what may lay beyond. Staring but not seeing, I waited for what was not seen, whereupon the scene changed. And, so it was ay 7:06…and 7:25…and 8:32…and 10:25.

Miracles are performed every day, in the moment, performed by each and everyone one of us. We don’t need to die to be bestowed into ‘sainthood’. We are canonized every second we pay attention. Humankind appears to not be able to live without myth, “without the belief that the routine and drudgery, the pain and fear of this life have some meaning and goal in the future. At once, new myths come into being – political and economic myths with extravagant promises of the best of futures in the present world. These myths give the individual a certain sense of meaning by making him (her) part of a vast social effort, in which he/she loses something of his own emptiness and loneliness. Yet the very violence of these political religions betrays the anxiety beneath them – for they are but men huddling together and shouting to give themselves courage in the dark.”

Yet, it is hard to not be disturbed and distressed by the heartbreak of our current social and political reality. How I am trying to deal with it is to distinguish between what I am able to change and what I am not. It is only when I grieve over what is outside my control that I tumble into survival mode. And, I am not here just to survive. I can do what I can. That is all. I will not be drawn into ‘story lines’ or others mythologies about dire world prognostications. I wish to exist with what is in front of me. “But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket.“

Years ago I wrote a phrase that still appears to me true, “How can the inevitable be anything less than Perfect”? This reminds me of a passage in a Michael Connelly novel in which his detective, Harry Bosch, is describing a Los Angeles sunset that “burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers’ bathing suits, It was a beautiful deception,…Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story”. Life and death is like that if you hold the process in judgement. If death is part of life, what is there to resist. Or, put more accurately, the comparison is not between Life and Death - they are not opposites. Birth and Death are opposites. Life continues. In what form; for how long; as ourselves; as souls? Who knows? What I do know is that we are all a part of a closed, multi-dimensional energetic system that will likely survive for millions of years. And, that is enough survival for me that I don’t want to think anymore about survival.