The Value of Hard Work

In what might have been some kind of sub-conscious slip up, I almost wrote down for the title of this post, “The Value of Hard Words.” Perhaps it was just a mix up in the right and left hand digits, some wire that got crossed somehow—seeing as how the same finger on both hands is responsible for the D and the K respectively—but perhaps that is what I meant to say.

“In the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god.” Word is god. I’ve been struggling a lot lately with the concept that we don’t employ language as a part of our existence, rather, that we are language. We exist language. Whatever it is that has brought us to this understanding, it seems to be a very real and difficult to understand concept.

I teach English to Korean children. My teaching strategy basically revolves around reading. Any time you are trying to learn a new language, there are four aspects that you must consider: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Those are the four components of any language, really. I make every single one of my students read whatever the current passage is that we’re working on out loud. Sometimes, they get bored because, especially for the higher level classes, the passages can be long; however, when reading out loud, you are practicing three of the four aspects of language: reading, speaking, and listening. Once I explain this to them, they usually understand. Then, a curious thing begins to happen. They get noticeably better at the language.

What I have discovered is that when they are reading out loud, they are interacting with the language, and, by proxy, with themselves. That’s why reading is such a dangerous thing for your totalitarian regimes: any time people are reading, they are learning about themselves and understanding their essential freedom in the form of consciousness and understanding. When we read we understand that there is nothing anybody can do, as long as there is something there to read, about how far we can read (I meant to type “reach,” but I like “read” better) into our own minds. But, the turnaround is, of course that this is a lot of hard work. You don’t just pick up a book and not work through it. Even when reading for pleasure, there is a certain amount of work that goes into deciphering the symbols on the page.

Language, the thing that we essentially are, the thing that we exist as, is an exemplar of existence in that it requires work. Life ought to be work. Don’t let me be misunderstood here: I’m not saying that life should be about going to a job. There is a difference between going to a job and doing the work of life. I think I’ve said it before, somewhere, somehow, but your life is either your work, or your work is your life. This is why I will never rise to the top of a Fortune 500 company. In the words of Bob Dylan: I’d give ‘em my heart, but they would want my soul—and, believe me, I’ve been close enough to this situation to understand that this is exactly what they want.

I have also been thinking about words, and heresy has come up pretty often, because I have been thinking about consciousness, as such, and the nature of religion—especially in its Christian mold—and there seems to be a parallel in the structure of the trinity and the structure of human reality, and I can’t help but think that my thinking here is complete heresy.

The three aspects or manifestations of the almighty are God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. Taken at a metaphorical level, God the Son is the physical manifestation of God, and this would represent the human body. God the Holy Spirit is the untouchable, but felt, essence of God that is haunting the world, and this would represent consciousness. God the Father is only knowable, only touchable, only approachable at a purely “real” level, after death. Oh, I understand fully from my years as the son of a Baptist minister and the grandson of a Baptist preacher that you can communicate with God every day through the power of prayer; however, what I am talking about here is approaching God in the sense that you can see him in his full glory in Heaven, you can eat at his table, and walk on his streets of gold. After going over the Nicene Creed, it is an understood part of church dogma that Jesus as God’s son was made of the same stuff of god and that he was not made, but rather begotten—meaning that he was always with god. In the same way, the Holy Spirit has always been. They are all manifestations of God. More accurately, they are all God. God is God. Jesus is God. The Holy Spirit is God. This only begs the question of me: what am I? Am I my body? Am I my consciousness? Am I the death that know awaits me eventually? Yes, yes, and yes. Also: no, no, and no. Just as god is not JUST God, or is not JUST Jesus, or is not JUST the Holy Spirit, I am not simply my body or my consciousness or my death. That kind of parallel structure is difficult for me to reconcile. Ah, faith. The issue isn’t faith, either, because what is implied is a specific form of faith. You can have faith in just about anything. Any time this fallback is invoked, in the sense of, “You just have to have faith,” what is really being said is: “You just have to have faith in what I and other people believe. You are not allowed to have another faith, because you’d be wrong.”

Do I have to believe in your shape of God? Do you have to believe in mine? What is the shape of God? What gender is God? Is he beyond gender? Where we created in God’s image or was he created in ours? There is something entirely incongruous about the image of god as a squishy human. As he exists in reality, God seems to be contingent on the physical human form to exist through, and that's weird to me. How can we be created in his image if he is omnipresent and omniscient? Or, did he have an image of us and create us into that, which would effectively make us a work of art? What are the ramifications of a thing like that?

I don’t really want to be heretical. I have a lot of work to do to understand this god character, especially now that he seems to be something of a metaphor of words. Or, perhaps, god is metaphor precisely as word is metaphor—there are hints of post-structuralism running around here. God is a lot of work to understand. God is a lot of words to understand. Words are a lot of God to understand. Words are a lot of work to understand. Work is a lot of words to understand. Work is a lot of God to understand. It would be a lot easier to just give up the struggle and go one way or the other: I believe in your Christian god OR I am an atheist. I choose to be other. I think I’m actively choosing, right here, right now, to engage in this struggle. Christian God is not winning right now, this is true, but who knows what happens when we truly engage and work out the words of God.

Scribbling

I oftentimes find myself someplace, it doesn’t really matter where, seized by the urge to scribble down some note or other. Last night, a piece from a napkin entitled: Buzz Bar, Since 2003.

“For some reason
the primal need to
lay words down on
a blank field is
especially strong and
who am I to resist
a primal urge, huh?
What is this thing
we call need? Really?
I have to… I have to,
what? I have to survive
and reproduce. Those are
the only rules, technically,
but what are the repercuss-
ions of the biological
imperatives? Art is the
abstraction of reproduction.
It is the essence of the
“I have created something,”
and this, if for no other reason,
is the importance of art.
The primal need to create
something other. Reproduction.
What do we make then of
the mass produced? That for
which production in a
quantity is the only rule?
Does quality always suffer
from quantity? (and vice versa)
Is it merely the result of
having so much that
we actually wind up
regressing? Is it not
the sheer possibility
of vacancy that truly
troubles us? The sheer
possibility of the very
real anything that
terrifies us? Do we
not, rather, feel far
more comfortable
in a world in which we
understand everything?
And to that end, do
we avoid the incomp-
rehensible nature
of reality?”

A little piece I call: Scribbled on My First Setlist, Busan, January 2009

“What good
are all those
pills if they
don’t actually
help? It’s all
personal.”

And finally, an ambiguous piece I call: On the Back of a Grocery List

“It seems as
though there
is an absolutely
necessary number
of things that
Must, Must, Must
occur to me on
any given day, and I
am either suffering
them or controlling
them. Today I woke
up late and didn’t get much
done this morning. I paid for it
later.”

What does it all mean? And why do I HAVE to do it, knowing I don’t HAVE to do it?

What Do We Make

of the world? Obviously, that’s a loaded question. There are layers. The first layer that presents itself is simply the observational mode of determining what is there in the world and, perhaps—but god forbid—making value judgments. In this mode we stand as in inactive participant. This is, in other words, a rather individual investigation of the ways in which the world works, and it has definite value for, especially, the scientist beginning on his road to analysis. In this particular mode, let it be understood, that there is simply the glance, the feel, the sensation of drinking in the thing itself, and in that this is an experience, it has what could be called value in and of itself. The human experience is unlike anything else in the world: to be an individual subject on the face of a planet with so much to offer in terms of the sensory world, experiencing many and various sensation is indeed a step on the road to understanding our humanity.

The failure of this first mode of operation in determining what we make of the world is precisely that we have only allowed the world to act on us instead of acting on the world and realizing the potentiality of what it means to be a human. From being acted on to being the creator of the action is a terrifying step because there are two very distinct and opposite possibilities: success and failure. The first is precisely the achievement of the goal set forth in the original plan of the action, and the second is the non-achievement of the stated goal. It is to be admitted that these terms lack something, and that something is that they are confined solely to the effort undertaken, and not to the undertaker at large. What this means, quite simply, is that success and failure can only be ascertained in terms of a particular venture into which the subject has decided to take him or herself. Now, there is a way to call an entire life a success or a failure, but this is only generally possible in a postmortem way. In this way, it is possible to say that, “I am successful”--which carries with it the connotation of "right now"--but not technically accurate to say, “I am a success,” because this latter would always have to qualified temporally with a “… right now.”

But, again, the terms success and failure run into opposition there in terms of the whole, and that, at a general level, is precisely because almost anything undertaken, any action worthy to be called a human endeavor is a success from at least one level, and that level is the education of the human character. To be there and alive and involved with that corner of time in the world is to make one’s stamp appear forever there, even if that forever is only in the one’s mind. Human endeavors are generally always life changing.

(I feel like it is important here to point out, simply for clarity sake that a “human endeavor” is first and foremost one that adheres to the (attributed) Hippocratic aphorism: primum non nocere: “First, do no harm”—which would rule out a priori murder, war, terrorism and abuse of any kind.)

Given that a human endeavor is what could, arguably, be closest in relation to the “long con,” how on earth can it always be positive? The answer is that the human creature will always benefit from experience, even if it is an experience of the failing kind that leaves a tinge of pain and hurt in the heart. To quote a few examples:

“Hindsight is twenty/twenty.”

“You wanna go ahead and stick that fork in that light socket, huh? Well, go ahead. I won’t stop you. Hurts don’t it. Won’t do that no more, will you?”

The Scientific Method—whereby the veracity of a conjecture can never be proven, it can only be falsified.

Scientific investigation is therefore the mode of operation that says, “Well, that didn’t work.” Or, to be made more pertinent to our discussion here, “That was a failure.” Life is a little bit like the scientific endeavor: one ought to be out there using their experience to formulate hypotheses, deducing predictions from the hypothesis, and testing. One of the first things Aristotle tells us in his Nichomachean Ethics is that it is a work of Political SCIENCE. It is an investigation into the ways of the world from the perspective of a scientist: “Here’s a proposition. No, huh? Well, how about this? No, huh? Well, it can be derived from this that our proposition was inaccurate, let’s revise, and, in fact, let’s test the opposite and see what happens.”

It is the perpetual looking into the way in which we make our world. “We must work our land.” Our land is precisely the possibilities that we have been provided with as a result of our being on this terrestrial sphere and having the physical and mental capacity to do something with this reality of possibilities. To make our world, what we must do is first accept that at some point, we will all fail—from a purely technical standpoint—and, from this understanding, move on to ensure that this failure isn’t multiplied by fundamental failure in the sense that after the technical failure of the body, the fundamental failure of a human is that all that can be said of a body is that it was…full stop.

No more seek the security of a life unlived. And no more allow failure to have a negative connotation. Actively seek out those avenues that afford one of the potential for the most glorious failure. What’re you busy?

For some reason, and I don’t really know why, but I feel like I need to insert here the idea that attempting to raise a good family unit has one of the greatest potentialities for failure in the world—and simultaneously the most potential for success (and I’m beginning to see that the two are contained in each other). But, if you are not actively involved in the lifelong investigation of what it means to raise a family, then go make something of the world. “Reach for the stars, and if you only make it to the moon, remember there are those who haven’t made it that far.” Make of life a journey, not a destination.

No Direction

Well, I suppose that for what is the first time in a long time I have opened up a word document having no idea exactly what it is I’m going to write about, but it seems like something needs to be put down on the page, and there is no time like the present… ever. With the smooth beats of JJ Cale singing me along, a cup of Earl Grey warming up my insides, and the memories of a full, rich day floating around my head, there’s got to be something, right?

My day started with my possibles. What is it really possible to accomplish in a single day. Obviously my thoughts were turned to Joyce and Ulysses and the accomplishment that is contained in that single day—literally and metaphorically. Then, I was thrown into the realities of my days and the amount of things I manage to get accomplished in a day, and my head started to spin with the awful realities of our real, uninhibited possibles. This can kind of be a dangerous place for me to be, if only because I am well aware that I can be overwhelmed a little too quickly. Sometimes the sight of a sunset is too much for me to take. Sometimes the words on the page, their simple presence brings tears to my eyes. Sometimes things happen to fast, and in my desire to make good decisions, I am disallowed the opportunity to look at the big picture, and I make awful, abysmal decisions. Sometimes, it is too much to think about sometimes.

But, all of this was laid aside (kind of) when I set to the task of writing. Well, I’m working on a book, and it is sort of my habit to sit down every couple of days and knock out a few more pages. I plan to have 365 single-spaced pages at the end of the year (a nod to those serialized authors of yesteryear), and then edit it down to a manageable book-length work. It’s funny writing something that you are pretty sure is just going to be edited out later. There are times when I’m writing that I get really serious, serious déjà vu, like now. That was unrelated but somewhat important. They’ve changed something. In a way, I like writing things that I’m going to edit out because at that point I know that I am making conscious decisions. When I go back through it, it might wind up making the cut, it might not, but it is probably one of the first things up on the chopping block for consideration. Contained in this same idea is the work that I know beyond any shadow of a doubt that WILL be in the book or there won’t be a book. These are the parts where, as I’m writing them, they mean the world.

I guess that all relates to the relationships we have in our lives. The reason I love writing so much is precisely because when I am interacting with the language in this creationary mode, what I am really doing is interacting with myself and learning about myself and getting to dig around those parts of my mind where I am otherwise usually unwelcome. All that being said, I have often returned to a metaphor that basically runs “our life is a book we write ourselves.” As much as we want to say that somebody else wrote this or that piece of us, the fact of the matter is that, consciousness being what it is, we accepted or rejected whatever it was that person was giving. In a way, we know when we meet somebody, pretty much, whether they will be significant or not, and, many times, it is this feeling of life-worth that guides our direction into relationships. Aristotle was right on with his “kinds of friends,” and I’ll even give a nod to my father for distinguishing between friends and acquaintances. One of the strangest relationships then, is the romantic relationship.

Romantic relationships have been a huge struggle for me lately. Where do these relationships fall in the realm of friendship relationships—if it is granted that the primary mode of the romantic relationship is being “best friends” (the Aristotelian Friends of Goodness)? Maybe I answered my own question, but I think I asked it poorly, because that is the ideal modality of the romantic relationship: a relationship of goodness toward each other; however, what happens if, god forbid that kind of pain on anybody, the relationship has to end? There are a couple of options, and I think it depends largely on what the people in the relationship decide in terms of how important the friendship is to their current and future existence.

For my part, I have trouble letting go of my friendships, especially if they were romantic, and perhaps this is a character flaw, or maybe it’s the human condition. Anybody that affects a person that much will forever have a place in the consciousness because we are what we were. I am the man who was with such-and-such person. And yet I am plagued by the idea that sometimes the reason I can’t let go is that I am deathly afraid of being truly alone… if only because of my possibles. One of the possibles that has cropped up in nearly every relationship I’ve had is that the other is probably better off without me as the object of their affection. Put another way, I am a lost cause in relationships. I am too addicted to change, and the reality is that relationships are built on stability. It seems as though when I’m in a relationship it becomes algebra, and I am probably most appropriately represented by the X: 2X = ?

That was probably the largest part of my day (the above cogitations) and they occurred while attempting to play (and being only moderately successful) Jeff Buckley’s version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It was too much for me. I was overwhelmed, and I carried it into my teaching, which I regret, because it was the students that suffered. Surliness is a terrible attitude for a teacher to have. I barked in a way I haven’t barked in a long time. I used to yell at these kids because that’s what Bone always did, and it seemed to be effective, then I remembered my education theory and I refused to talk over top of my students: when the teacher’s tone is low, supportive, and pleasant, most of the attitude and behavior issues solve themselves. It is a tribute to the power of voice. But, I did bark, and reminded me that I shouldn’t, and that I was affecting these kids’ lives, which kind of turned the whole day around. Focusing on work keeps at bay three dreadful evils: boredom, depravity, and poverty. I was bordering on depravity until I re-focused myself.

Then, the culminating ninety-minutes of my workday was pretty fantastic. I got to teach writing to students who really wanted to learn about it (my adult students are just starting on their writing journey, and it pleases me to an absurd amount how I see them grasping these new concepts). I introduced a roomful of Korean adults to Garth Brooks and “Ain’t Goin’ Down ‘Til the Sun Comes Up.” “This is a very big part of America,” I said while singing along—I am a simple country boy from Missouri after all. Then, I got to see light bulbs going off in the minds of my writers as they stared in wide-eyed wonder at what they could do.

What is possible in a day? Seriously. I’d like to know, and I plan to find out.