pain

There is a place you go when you can't bear the pain. For some people, it is isolation. For other people it is in the midst of many. Each shelters the soul in different ways.

Isolation allows the noise to die away; the echoes of other voices. It is the refuge of the exhausted, the frightened, the guilt-laden. When you cannot defend yourself from the bullying Other, you seek the cave.

The anaesthesia of revelry works when there are stores of unspent energy, a cargo of motives without opportunity. The crowd mind is no-mind, not in the zen sense of release, but in the sense of appetites unbound from reason and ratio. Reason and ratio do not satisfy anyone. Why do we keep appealing to these abstract qualities while the world goes to Armageddon in God's side-car?

When you can't bear the pain, the soul is saying that it needs a different container. We have forgotten how to craft a vessel for our souls within the limits of our material lives. We don't even believe we have that power any more.

Prozac reassures us we don't need it. Alchohol excites us and makes us forget the problem. Other drugs lift us up or smash us against or shrink us beneath the true dimensions of our problem.

But the problem doesn't know it.

It thinks it is there to complement our soul, to engage it, to befriend it in a survival mission which cannot be forgotten, shouted down, or crawled under.

The problem is right.

But you might have to disobey it to solve it.

Solving the problem is marrying it.

Obeying it is living with it.

The paradox: obedience and defiance are the wave form of being married to the Problem, which is simply that we have a soul in the first place.

Oh yes we do. You wouldn't be longing for the cave or the party in the first place if you had no soul.

Mas o menos

Mas o menos means "more or less" in Spanish. I finished my Precalculus final exam on Monday, and have been waiting with some apprehension for the grade in the class. Today I was scrolling through my "unofficial" transcript, waiting for the grades to be posted, and at the bottom I saw that I had earned a B- for the semester in math.

Have bombed on several major topics in two midterms and come out of the final with a sense that I was lucky to get a little more than half right, I was understandably ... well, actually I was ecstatic.

Wow. This really meant something to me. More than I expected.

There is the problem of the "minus" of course. After consulting my conscience, I decided it is okay to tell people I got a B in the course. And if they keep looking at me, waiting for the other shoe to drop, as it were, I will add "mas o menos."