The clustered repetition seems banal, infantile, even a bit vapid in a sense of description, yet in consideration of WHO is saying it, somehow it is perfectly appropriate.
Books. NOM NOM
Puppies. NOM NOM
Old people. NOM NOM
Sillyness. NOM NOM
Ideas. NOM NOM
Community. NOM NOM
Garden. NOM NOM
Intimacy. NOM NOM
Get chu sum new teeth thar sonny, thar a'rottin' cauz ya ben nibblin' on too much schweetness!
A presupposed Hunger Games of sorts to which I find myself adhered. Yet, it is no game, since I always win. (Ask to see my moves, post-blog read). Always hungry...which in some case may just be a vain allusion in appearing passionate or overzealous. It should be rather, ALWAYS HUNGRY. All caps to communicate the fleeting sense of extreme intensity. But that is my predisposition-- I cannot refrain from that honest fact. And to compensate in being overzealous, I hunger for knowledge to somehow equate some sort of balance in my brain.
It's such a silly question to pose, to question why you hunger for such things and ideas. Is it consummated from an unknown deficiency to which you can never quite fill? Is it your own irreconcilable and dissented disposition? One in which you are hastened to for your blood, for your very breath, for some mild sense of sanity?
Hell if I know. Really it seems asinine to analyze the thought. How unfortunate the yearning to be made aware-- and then the powerlessness to which your very awareness catalyzes.
I remembered life back in West Virginia, living with my 50 year old landlord with whom I haggled on about politics and we smoked out our angst like we were first years at an Ivy League university. We prompted so much pretense, so much forethought as if our opinions would further enlighten the godforsaken ignorant world. I was restless as hell, on my own, uncertain and unsure of my direction with deep longings for clarity. She was going through her third divorce, dissuading my cultural conditioning and pushing me to pursue my own individuality and independence. I did not lack avidity for independence. She unsettled me greatly, maybe because she hadn't figured "it" out despite our similar hungers. Or that her life was inexhaustibly messy, and hers was perhaps a precursor to my own. She was tall, strong, stubborn, and intelligent. Why would I not want to end up like her? Was her struggle with men unnecessary or preventable? What distressed me most was that she did not choose her struggle, her fight. Let me be clear: I want struggle. I want challenge. But I desire it the way I yearn for it, not as it is designed for me. But who has that ability...to design an appropriate destiny by one's will? One infallible with a remnant of livability?
At that time,I was so sparked by Edward Abbey, of course, the infamous outdoor enthusiast. He was a sad soul, someone who echoed the long aura of aloneness, but one akin to my own and who remained surprisingly comforting. His confession reverberated back to my own: “Gluttony - that's my vice and my curse. I want too much of everything. Books... Love... Music... Color.. Form... Philosophy... Travel and Adventure... the result of this bestial lust is the indiscriminate and promiscuous splaying of my energies - wanting all, I accomplish nothing; desiring everything, I satisfy nothing and am satisfied by nothing.”
Could it be said any better? There are those out there that understand this, and others who do not. And Edward Abbey could have gotten lost out in the woods and died and yet HE STILL WROTE THIS QUOTE so he sure as hell accomplished something. What a beautiful, magnificently turd-ish soul.
And then back to Chile, a mesmerizing time when I lingered in the presence of strangers. I remember an evening at a lounge in La Serena where I met a charming German man. Suave, alluring, confident...and he spoke the endearing language of words. I don't quite remember how we came upon the topic, but we spoke of our places in life, amidst time and the process. It was an unusually strange initial conversation, but I was all in, no doubt. He talked about this word in German called "sehnsucht." It referenced the deep, unimaginable longing within--as if anticipatory and in expectation, an indicator that excites. I loved sehnsecht. I didn't know what this guy was expecting in relaying a word about expectation to me, but I didn't care. I was in a love affair with this word. It was as if there was this innate confirmation that if you know hunger, there must be food. "To every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." So, research shows.
I want to remain angry. Angry and bitter that I YEARN (reference note: Seinfeld, Season 3, Unknown episode). Oh poor baby Betty-- her self-imposed martyrdom is just a projection for a future prolific obituary... she just wanted so much, especially the articulation of her own juxtaposition with the physical and spiritual realm.s So verrrry poignant. It's so arrogant!! How to love yourself amidst your wants? How to fulfill your own needs with sound judgment and realistic expectation? Is this suppose to occur naturally? Yet we find our desires coalesced with our blood-- risking arrogance, risking disappointment. Feeling something. And that seems like terrible, terrible philosophical rubbish, but what philosophy is not?
Something tethers goodness in our souls. And that reminds me of that word, that ethereal and exuberant word, Shalom--the ushering of some sort of universal flourishing, or wholeness. Shalom, the life blood to what we are and what we crave and where we are going.
“In speaking of this desire for our own faroff country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
All I can ask is that grace be my prevailing constituent and sweet patience my closest companion. And also to yearn for Toblerone more frequently... well all the time, preferably..anddd a regular bowel pattern...and maybe a puppy. Wait a second.....is this real life?!?!
