LoveSolution

Dig the well of love. Find the spring of wisdom. Nourish the tree of peace.

How Did I Get Here?

Someone asked me what philosophical books I think that they should read.

I listed some things.  Emerson.  Tolstoy.  Dawkins.  Zhuangzi.  Hesse.  The Gospels of Matt, Mark and Luke.  The Gita.  Ginsberg.  Twelve-Step literature.  But not a lot of stuff that could be considered literal, academic philosophy.  

The more I listed, though, the more I realized that the things I have come to know, or that I have come to believe, or that I have intuited about life are things that came naturally out of a life of vicious war against myself.

I think that I learned more every time I woke up on a jail cell floor, wondering where and even who I was, than I ever did from reading a book.

More seemed to be learned from the days when I was stealing, trading, selling or hustling to scrounge up enough money to buy another bottle of 100 proof liquor than from any text.

No philosopher or writer has ever taught me as much as the experience of watching my father nearly die before my eyes time and time again for nearly a decade.  That kind of pain is revelatory in its beastly cruelty.

No book or teacher ever taught me as much as I learned from coming down off of alcohol and not being able to sleep for three or four days at once, sweating out a yellow liquid, like fermented stinking bile, from every pore with my head and my body aching in pulses and with blue faces of terrible demons and shamans of death appearing in my field of vision every time I closed my eyes.

I’ve learned so much from my own personal struggle to leave God, to find God, to leave God, to find God, to redefine God, to kill God, to pervert God, to appeal to God for my life and to curse God for making me.

Cutting myself and burning myself taught me more than Bertrand Russell would have had to teach me if he had lived to write one thousand books.

Making myself throw up for years gave me a sense of who I am.

Having my heart broken gave me a degree in something that transcended all of philosophy.

So what can I tell someone?  I can’t possibly prescribe this kind of life to anyone in good conscience.  I would never want to lead someone into that kind of pain, just as I know I would have trouble loving someone who told me that I should go through greater pain than I already have.  Pain is relative, and I have suffered little compared to many.  At the same time, though, I think it was this pain that probably defined me more than any of my academic forays and more than anything I have ever read.

If I can’t prescribe the path I have taken to anyone else, yet feel simultaneously that the place where I’ve arrived is preferable, what am I to do?  Does any effort on my part, from here on out, constitute only futility, unless I change my mind and begin encouraging those who ask me for insight to begin degrading their life with self-violence and strong drink and drugs and crime?

Perhaps it is the question that makes me uncomfortable, and not the having to figure out how to answer it.

Perhaps I’m not ready to be asked anything.

I’m going to begin a fast now while I think about this.  Love to anyone who reads what I write.  Love to anyone who doesn’t.  Peace, peace, peace.

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  3. rubyr3dlies said: Ahhh. :)
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