The Worship of the Dead

The worship of the dead is not optional if you live long enough to experience the full spectrum and varieties of love.

My dead, my family, I worship them, but sometimes like on Memorial Day I feel all the weight of all the dead and I feel they are like ghouls who want me to join them.  They don’t know me.  I’m not one of them.

These envious and vengeful dead don’t have any of the living to love them.  They are surrounded by such a profound emptiness they are compelled to react.

I’m a deep-sea diver disciplined and limited in my pursuits, by fear of exhaustion (boredom) and an awareness of the urge to self-destruct.  Granville Hicks said about Malcolm Lowry, “Self destruction is the final ecstasy of power.”  I believe it about Lowry, human culture, and all of mankind.  Freud spoke elegantly about Thanatos, the Greek impersonation of the death lure.

“It is in sadism, where the death instinct twists the erotic aim in its own sense and yet at the same time fully satisfies the erotic urge that we succeed in obtaining the clearest insight into its nature and its relation to Eros.  But even where it emerges without any sexual purpose, in the blindest fury of destructiveness, we cannot fail to recognize that the satisfaction of the instinct is accompanied by an extraordinarily high degree of narcissistic enjoyment owing to its presenting the ego with a fulfillment of the latter’s old wishes for omnipotence.” [1]

In other words, the desire to destroy is irrevocably linked to man’s desire to control Eros, to impose his will upon all his perceived enemies, including himself.

I’ve watched hundreds of people destroy themselves trying to be great.  If they hadn’t been attracted to delusions of grandeur which permeates so many of our people today they would have been good regular people making a living in the Trades, sales, transportation, administration, teaching, political activism, banking, etc..  Once they took the leap, they lost their compass.  They resorted to alcohol, drugs, sex, extreme beliefs and murder to keep their unrealistic dreams alive.  They all seemed to have one thing in common:  they hated themselves.  “Surely, I’m not just this,” they said.  They untied themselves and unleashed their creative potential without practicing, studying, going to school, or, at least, testing themselves against others.  If they did and happened to win an award, or recognition of some kind, they often turned into the two-headed monster – the fucked-up talent which, in the West, has been appearing quite regularly since the 1960s.  Many of these truly talented people killed themselves.  In the world of writing, the names are legendary.  The most recent self-inflicted tragedy (that I’m aware of) was David Foster Wallace.  I don’t know much about his particular situation, but I’ve known many writers who never developed solid psychological foundations.  Seen through such an unbalanced lens they looked at their own work (once it was completed) and thought it a fraud.  They couldn’t find distance from their preoccupations.  It seemed they were playing an all or nothing game.  All is obviously unattainable.

Well, one might say yes, society is built on certain assumptions – the best will most often rise to the occasion or do what it takes to survive and prosper.  I believe but rejection always results in rebellion sometimes positive, mostly negative.  Rejection fertilizes the human soul so anger and despair may grow.

My heroes and heroines are those who leave their good thoughts behind for us to ponder.  That’s all.  Life is difficult enough for everyone: geniuses, regulars and pawns alike.

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[1] “Civilization and its Discontents,” p.117-18 in the 2005 W.W. Norton & Co. edition.

The Scrim of Euphoria

A lot of times people attempt to restrict their emotional thinking.  Envy, jealousy, hate and love can be embarrassing and in our own eyes tend to diminish us, but they are only moments on a wheel, which in a larger context enable us to survive and integrate.  Emotions contain no more truth than an ice cream sundae. 

Under the guise of professionalism and order we limit our interaction with ourselves, our neighbors and even our friends.  In the public sphere, from radio, t.v. and public speaking, we are an abomination of sameness.  There is very little diversity in our public sphere –  certainly not representative of our nation’s people.  It’s a practical matter, the owners say.  We can’t have differing kinds of voices.  Consistency and repetition are necessary to establish the brand.  We must have stability.  Stability is the enemy of creativity.  A meaningless slogan, but if you look into current media it’s as if there were no humans behind the format, or behind the screen if you like.  From the right to the left, the people who present the radio, t.v. and movie events literally have no idea of the effect of their content.  They themselves can no longer hear what they say.  They have been brainwashed by their belief in bullshit – as long as it sells, baby.  

The Sensitive Suffer

The sensitive suffer (Van Gogh, Modigliani); the strong sensitives prosper (Matisse, Picasso), and how finally their differing backgrounds mold them.

The sensitives are driven by an obsession with anguish; the sensitive strong by a balance found within, an ability to control conflicting emotions.  The sensitives who burn (learn) so quickly, for their forboding of early death drives them to know, move quickly through the forms of their time.  An older artist teaches us to be patient, to breathe, to control the craft.


Torture ticking inside of us a brace flapping gently up and down – a kind of mouse trap.  A form of torture can be found in our search for the human soul.  What happens in near-death experiences (caused by a lack of oxygen to the brain) allows the residue or remnants of deeply imprinted experiences to unfold before our dying eyes:  down we go into our privacy barely breathing.  The isolation is the fear and then without warning we see what has been absorbed by the soul – the essence of us – beyond the protective armor.  


Death haunts our kingdom.  How sadly we walk our well-worn beloved paths.