There is nothing wrong with mind. Mind is completely perfect in every respect except for thinking there is a separate you that possesses the mind and persists in wanting it to be different, which is impossible.
It is perfectly ordinary and normal that much of what we experience makes no sense. Sense is the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, the more sense we make the further away from nature and chaos we go, until we find ourselves isolated, alone and suffocating from an excess of reason, logic and meaning.
What if you did not separate yourself from the experience that is here now - whether that moment is a dark sky, a dark mood, or the joyful giggles of excited children? What if you allowed your heart to open to ALL of life, all experience - not just the things your mind imagines “should” be here? Why not awaken to the truth that what is here is an expression of a perfectly whole Reality, and invite it all back Home?
The price of living in a consumer culture is that we are tyrannized by things. Not just by things themselves, of course, but by our thoughts about things.
Out dancing last night the DJ played Prince’s Mountains and then Miss You by The Rolling Stones. This reminded me of an interview when Prince was asked if there was any Rolling Stones tune he wished he’d written to which he replied ‘Miss You’.
Asked the same question about U2’s catalogue he said something along the lines of, he could have written any of their songs but wouldn’t want to.
Previously I posted here about my soft spot for Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman. On further reflection it occurred to me that one of the reasons it resonates so strongly with me as an adult (having first fallen for it as a young child) is it embodies a romance of the (American) open road.
In my youth I was lucky enough to fulfil my adolescent dream of driving across North America (east to west) and travel back (west to east) via Greyhound.
Looking back on those memories I can barely detect the boundaries delineating the reality of it from the dream of it. Such is the unreliability of the mind when it comes to certainty about anything. Perhaps it is in this liminal zone, prone to suggestion, that our unconscious emerges unbidden presenting us with desires and aversions of which we were previously unaware or had forgotten.
It comes as a great relief to realise that you could not have lived your life in any other way despite all the reasons and stories you tell yourself about how things could have been different.
They weren’t different because they weren’t.
The degree to which we think our conscious awareness has control and agency over our actions is greatly overstated.
Indeed I would go as far as to say what we think are choices and decisions are pure fantasy applied after the fact to instantiate a sense of a separate, autonomous entity of selfhood.
I don’t read a lot of fiction but an author I had never heard of popped up in my feed today – Fleur Jaeggy. Her work sounds incredible. She’s been described as a master of hyper-brevity.
Years later the bigot Agnes Blannbekin, on the 1st of January, again and again turns in her mouth, tender as egg-skin and very sweet, Christ’s foreskin.
Just ordered this collection of short stories from Abe Books. Can’t wait!
Fleur Jaeggy is often noted for her terse and telegraphic style, which somehow brews up a profound paradox that seems bent on haunting the reader: despite a sort of zero-at-the-bone baseline, her fiction is weirdly also incredibly moving. How does she do it? No one knows. But here, in her newest collection, I Am the Brother of XX, she does it again. Like a magician or a master criminal, who can say how she gets away with it, but whether the stories involve famous writers (Calvino, Ingeborg Bachmann, Joseph Brodsky) or baronesses or 13th-century visionaries or tormented siblings bred up in elite Swiss boarding schools, they somehow steal your heart. And they don’t rest at that, but endlessly disturb your mind.
