A Blind Squirrel

And there are other reasons besides exhaustion, lack of time, and harassment that keep you from doing a blog entry, and that's lack of pleasure.

Hawthorne said he could do good work only when in a "grass growing mood", Michaelangelo complained to Pope Julius II that he couldn't do art if he were to be continually besieged by creditors; Dostoeveski envied Tolstoy the peace of Yasnayna Polyana. There is a best mood to write, and that's when you can simply enjoy it.

Now, you do what you have to do. Dostoevesky wrote The Gambler in 28 days to satisfy a creditor. It's a good book. I wrote business correspondence, because I had to, but I didn't write a blog entry because I didn't have to and because I certainly wasn't in the mood. If I had written I would have produced what I normally do.

Is the blog to be fun? Or is it to be something "I have to do?"

It is clear that no volume of work ever gets done apart from drive and discipline, but do I really want to make the blog a discipline? How severe a discipline? I go for my run each day. I never want to go, I do go, it's always fun once I get moving. Could the same happen with a blog? That to start would be unpleasant, but once started it would be fun?

Possibly.

But I see I'm giving this the wrong cast. I make it sound like a self indulgence: "I will do it if it makes me feel good." That's not it at all. The thing is, I don't feel good. This loss of my own time is driving me nuts, and the question becomes: "When you're being driven nuts, is it still possible to live a productive and a cheerful life?" This lack of cheer is the extraordinary thing. It's just not the way I live, yet it's the way I live now...

This is why the blog is important. It's a marker. I do it not as a discipline, but as an exuberance, and when I don't do it, that is, don't do it at all, something is wrong. It means I'm in a funk, and I really do not like being in a funk, but for weeks now there just has been no lightness in my mind. There's a fragility now in my three day existence. When anything disrupts my three days it disrupts my whole life, and that is a big deal. It destroys good cheer. It has got to change.

Years ago, when I was yet young, I confided in a friend certain matters of unhappiness concerning romance and asked him what I should do. He laughed, and said: "Howl at the moon." That was a wise statement. Unhappiness has to be as truly acknowledged as good fortune, and it has to be felt as deeply as joy. The personality incapable of grief is incapable of joy, because in each case the personality hides at a distance from life. It's pretend, pretending there's a middle course. There is not a middle course. As an intent "Moderation in all things" can be an ideal, but it can not possibly be a true life experience.

Still, there has to be some core unflappable, unchangeable, serene...? I have thought about this a lot and I find it difficult.

But ignoring now this huge problem, in the short course is it possible to achieve something of the same through something simple...like discipline? The habit of discipline doesn't make a man unflappable, but it certainly makes him embarrassed to not be disciplined, and so if to escape embarrassment he insists on discipline, why that's pretty darn close to unflappable. It helps. In general, routine is good, maintaining routine is better, because that's a moral discipline, and while I can't fully make this next argument I'm certain it's true: The discipline of daily discipline is core to good cheer. The body, mind and spirit simply find it so. It doesn't matter just why, it just is. And good cheer is an absolute necessity to a good life... And this concept needs more work. But I do know good cheer is aggressive, it's not timid, and it is very active...

I should note, when I'm with others, no one has ever noted this lack of good cheer. Two reasons: I believe it my obligation not to be a burden to others but to be a pleasure; and in fact, when I'm with others I enjoy them. After just a few minutes conversation I don't have to fake good cheer, I am cheerful. I'm having a great time...

Saint Jerome, as a hermit in the desert, intending to purify his soul, found his mind constantly taunted by images of naked women. When he went back to Rome and became a scholar he had no such problems, his mind was too busy with other things. When I'm up here I'm in a cave. I associate with no one. I have so little of my own time I want it all for myself, and I'm taunted by "images" of my lack of time, and burdened by my lack of good cheer.

Perhaps I've made a psychological mistake. At home I'm constantly aware I have no time because everything is an absorption in nonsense which is the same thing as no time at all, just time lost (you have to do this Alzheimer's gig before you can believe it). But it occurs to me that it's not study and thought that's lost in this loss of time, it's communication, it's fellowship. Maybe that's what my personality now craves, rather than just time for work?

This is a new thought... I'm with my folks for fours days, a virtually constant concentration. That's more people contact than has ever before been my habit. Four solid days of people is enough, for God's sake... But I do call it Dippyville. In fact I'm alone. The neurologically disrupted and atrophied brain of the Alzheimer's victim is not a real brain, not in terms of real communication. Bits of something like perception and thought can sometimes be spotted, but mostly it's nonsense. The personality seems "nuts", but in fact it's just disjointed bits of pretty much arbitrary chemical and electrical stimulation. It's a mind disjointed from itself, in no normal sense is it a recognizable personality. And this largely has been my society for two and a half years.

This is unnatural. It is not natural to stay in the desert attempting to not think about women, it is unnatural to stay in a cave and attempt to work when what the mind craves is talk...

Man, this is simple. I just don't have enough contact with plain old ordinary people, and this is why my personality has gone haywire. Muscles are toned by work, the personality is toned by talk. Without talk, the personality goes spastic, and finds stress simply in being conscious. Without talk the personality loses structure and so loses strength. Without talk a man is in solitary confinement. People in solitary confinement go nuts...sometimes. This is an insight, and man, is it simple: For two and a half years I've in effect been in solitary confinement, and I have been going a little nuts.

So... I'm going to do something about it. I'm going to surrender even more of my limited time; I'm going to seek out conversation. I bet I end up getting more work done, not less. This is an insight. Sometimes even a blind squirrel finds an acorn.
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Things I should have written about but didn't:

• --The cartoons: More of them.
• -Dick Cheney: Impressive.
• --The bombing of the Shiite mosque and fear of civil war: Won't happen, there's too much violence there already and the people know what they're avoiding.
• --The ports deal: We need allies.
• --Islam? Islam has been around a long time and it's got to go. Allah's okay, there is in fact only one God, however differently He may be perceived, but that Muhammad guy is a disgrace. "...and Muhammad is his prophet". That's not the worship of God, but of one man. "Muhammad lied, people died", and have been dying for fourteen hundred years. I'll bet you half of all Moslems recognize this is a problem, but they're afraid to say anything. Muhammad was primitive, Islam is primitive. It's not going to change as long as Muhammad is more important than Allah.

More on this at some later time. This blog is turning strange, but I'm gong to follow it for a while and see where it goes.