On Being Bamboo

I woke this morning on a Harley riding through my old home town, my old friend Phil on the back: Where is that old restaurant-bar, Phil, where our parents would always eat white-man tacos every Wednesday night? Where our friend, Rick, found a used bandaid inside his omelette?

The Poor House?

(Laugh), yea, that's it...where is it?

It's dead.  It no longer exists.

I looked at the clock: 4:30 AM.  I remembered Quinton, E.M's character in "The Sound and the Fury", who woke up every morning staring at the clock. He was obsessed with time...and impermanence.  He committed suicide.

Got up. Closed the kid's door. Made some coffee. And then went outside for a moment to watch my bamboo. It's almost 30 ft tall and just beautiful against the deep-blue morning sky. I didn't realize a breeze had blown through the yard until the bamboo revealed the invisible spirit.

I was sad...almost crying.
Time was moving too fast. Twice as fast as I felt it was. My son will be ten years old in May...half way through his childhood.

My daughter still clings to me.

My wife and I went through our expenses last night...putting reality to the math test.  We are applying for food stamps for the first time in our lives--it's actually a debit card now. I guess that helps with the shame.  We are missing our monthly nut by $130/month--and have been for a long time. A slow drip, drip, drip.

"The State" will give us $80/month to help out.  The math saddened  us.  [Yes, to my conservative friends, I have been exposed as a Taker...lol]

Time is running, and I am walking.  Last night I came across a bill for the roof. I would have bet my life that we did that work and paid that bill only a year ago. It was two years ago. Time is running, and I am walking.

I've been on the edge of poor for most of my life--I guess I'm too comfortable here. Ten years ago, at age 47, I had my first good paying job after struggling for over 25 years to find a full time job teaching philosophy and religious studies.

These questioners are not useful.  Never have been--ask the hemlock-drinking Socrates.

I had given up and was now doing internet graphic design--really more production than design--for eBay--and made almost 50k/year. A CEO friend twisted some arms to get me the job. My manager never wanted me there.."He was a Beatles guy, and I was a Stones guy".  I guess it's "the fit" that matters. And I was an old guy who asked too many questions.

My son was born, and one month later I "lost" that good-paying job helping others become good little entrepreneurs selling their things. I still haven't figured out whether I walked away or I was fired. It's hard to tell these days. What exactly does "restructuring" mean? I was restructured.

I wasn't happy there...chronic melancholy--that's what intellectuals call depression--especially when it's productive. Its a structural rust that sets-in on rainy days.  A constant battle; a futile war. And so I moved my young family to Oregon [That was smart].

Oregon: A beautiful woman cleansed by the tears of a noon-day demon.

There is no urgency in my disposition. Maybe that's because deep down inside I feel, as a youth would feel, as if I am immortal. A grand delusion.  It dogs me.

Maybe philosophy makes me feel immortal. The constant searching, constant dogged pursuit of "the truth, the good, the beautiful"--to use the normative cliche. Cultural history, religious history, anthropology, economic history, political philosophy--the questions--too many questions--and not enough money.  And now the "chickens have come home to roost"--I've never had chickens. Why does this cliche mean anything?

Am I anything other than questions and cliches? The questions must be immortal...no, they are not.  That bamboo doesn't ask questions.

Or does it? Ha...another question.

Perfectly useless question. I seem to thrive on useless questions: Is the "unexamined life not worth living?" Is the examined life worth living? Why did I have children?

When I have no answers to hand on to them. The answers I hand out to them are like the sand I try to hold in my hand on a hot summer day. Impermanent. Eventually they will figure that out for themselves.

Maybe the questions are the rust.  Where is that God who answers all the questions?  Another question...more rust.?

Life is a tale,
told by an idiot
full of sound and fury,
...dirty dishes, dirty clothes
hugs and kisses..
signifying something.

There's no urgency to my disposition...to my questions.

Today I apply for food stamps.

I wish I were bamboo. I am not bamboo. Via negativa.

on being Liberal

Via negativa: Since liberalism is (in principle) an ideologically fluid and multi-perspectival way of being-in-the-world, defining "liberalism" is often an ironic and troublesome work-in-progress. So maybe the best way to characterize (rather than define with rigid boundaries) what it means (to me) to be a liberal is first of all to recognize what one is not--or at least hope one is not.  Liberals tend to deplore dogmatism--without being dogmatic about it.  Any kind of strenuous attachment to belief that closes the mind to alternative ways of thinking and valuing, of being-in-the-world, a liberal wants and needs to avoid.  I say "want" because the freedom and pluralism that liberals value can also become a kind of dogma--if that makes logical sense--as any "conservative" will readily tell you.  So a liberal, as liberal, is open to the possibility of being dogmatic, or at least trying to understand the need for being dogmatic--because this is also a form of otherness within his openness. Still, dogmatism is deplorable to a liberal as a kind of visceral reaction, which is why liberals and conservatives often fight. Conservatives of all stripes, economic to religious, at least appear to love and cherish dogmatism, or are overly attached to one way of looking at an issue. So liberals are not conservative--although they are in principle (if not in practice) open to the possibility of being conservatively embedded within certain (liberal) traditions (as we'll see later)--which is also why liberals also often find the "conservative-liberal" dichotomy overly simplistic (but it's useful, so I'll use it here).

Because liberals are averse to dogmatism, they typically are not "religious" in the more traditional sense of a strong attachment to, or following of,  a particular religious tradition. Liberals tend to enjoy religions from some intellectual and emotional distance. We love to critically and playfully absorb metaphysical and "spiritual" possibilities, but cannot (or don't feel compelled to) take any one system too seriously, if nothing else because this would limit the free play of our metaphysical musings--and might precipitate the slipper slope into dogmatism. So the most consistent of liberals would not typically be rabidly atheist, either, since most atheisms must necessarily be dogmatic--how can anyone really "know"? So (consistent) liberals tend not to be atheists nor religious in any traditional sense.

Liberals are certainly NOT fundamentalists. The idea of killing someone for the sake of belief is abhorrent to most liberals--although we certainly do enjoy some brutal (but playful) intellectual beatings of any kind of fundamentalist. So liberals are not not sadistic, and certainly unwilling to be masochistically attached to, or willing to perform, any kind of self-immolation for the sake of belief or tradition. Even "sitting" as in Buddhist zazen for a long periods of time seems a little too "religious." Although killing fundamentalists for the sake of freedom is certainly more possible than killing liberals, but only in freedom's defense--yes, another slippery slope. So liberals are typically not sadistically or masochistically attached to any one "religion."  Liberals like to play with religion and religionists-- serious play but play none-the-less.  We are, if you will, the real "children of God," with no-God, no-foundation, total annihilation as a real metaphysical possibility. For liberals, issues of "God" are real mysteries--and will probably remain so until death.

Liberals don't like philosophical foundationism either--although Mahayana iterations of "nothingness" or "emptyness" are often appealing (more of this later) as a kind of foundational, non-foundation.  This category is, of course, only meaningful for philosophical types. Plato's absolute and logical "Forms" behind the ever-changing and fuzzy irrational appearances (or "shadows") are not abstract metaphysical objects of worship for many liberals. Logic, reason, mathematics...are intellectual tools (or "bombs" to use Foucault's metaphor) to break down and destroy dogmas, including the dogma of Reason itself, for the sake of more freedom--although a temporary winter home based on reason and science is more palatable than one based on dogmatic religion or philosophy. So neither dogmatic belief nor reason can provide a foundation for the liberal construction of an intellectual home. Even practical reason or science can only provide temporary relief from the wondering and ever expanding horizons of a true liberal.