My lung isn't healed completely and the long trip drains me but adrenaline and excitement and soon I've stopped listening to my body. I pay for it and sleep 18 hours over the next 36, that and I'm reading, Kafka on the Shore, Murakami. Sputnik Sweetheart is a much better novel.
Mirka gave me perspective on Murakami that I didn't think about. She has a cautious optimism regarding Murakami that since our discussion have influenced how I perceive Murakami. For instance, before our discussion I was determined that I should make a pilgrimage to Japan and meet the writer who could write metaphors never before uncovered by humans, to after our discussion...well, now that you mention it, this does seem to have a pattern to it that could be formulaic and premeditated.
The stories have all been written, it is difficult to be original. Being Genuine is easy, once you've grown tired of trying to control your path and recognize that all you have to do is hop on board, like a train, then the story can be told in this newfound freedom.
I'm done with Murakami tho, but not because I'm disillusioned, I just need to move on. Rilke, in Letters to a Young Poet, says to read and examine what about the writing you admire and follow this path no matter what you read. I'm reading some canonized stuff that I have to get ready to teach. I'm going to trace my own experience in testing this hypothesis with notes and reflections and try to design my curriculum on my own practices I use in order to understand these texts.
Jason has given me some great reads lately. Every time I go to Prague, which has been frequently, he gives me something that blows my mind and gets me rollin'.
In Slovakia it is cheap. Round trip train ticket, in a sleeping cabin with first rate service, 75 eu, four night stay in a pretty nice hotel, 70 eu, food expenses for the same duration, less than hundred eu, including drinks. I was told by two people that my Slovak is good...you have to know me to know how hilarious that statement is.
The waitress I had was a gem. She was the waitress. The waitress, from morning to closing, and she was very good, I bet she does well in tips, which would be saying something because tips are insignificant and provides little if any motivation to be a good waiter or waitress. She is flying in the face of convention by being so good.
Jason, who's family I was "vacationing," with went to PSU with me, and we both postulate that we probably went to PCC Sylvania together but we never had occasion to meet. Having him and Mirka and their entourage of family has been a blessing. I'm lucky to have them so close and they put up with me and seem happy about it.
We get into some pretty wild conversations at times, there's an ebb and flow. For instance, the Murakami discussion was enlightening and a perspective on the other side of the spectrum or see-saw, I tend to rush headlong into things I like initially with abandon, like I said, I was ready to make a pilgrimage and all that carries with it. Another one was about discipline.
I was telling Jason that I thought the discipline that comes along with religion, when it meant something to "the people," kept the world in check. Even if the powers-that-be didn't adhere to them, the people did, hence "opium of the people," thing. But, in retrospect consciousness is expanding, opening, bursting, breaking, it's been let go from the reins.
He said, "You can't go back."
And I know this. "It's not going back, it's coming around, not a circle, they cannot touch on the go around. It's more like a spiral..."
I don't know if it's spiraling out or in toward a fine point, but half of half of half, and so on, the result provides no insights.
By now one of the kids has to go pishy-pishy and Jason and Mirka and Janna if she is there, are moving as a unit. It's beautiful to watch, Mirka seems to know Jason in some ways better than he does himself. She rolls her eyes sometimes without actually rolling them. They love and care for their kids and it is so clear, they are angels.
"Religion is hypocritical," he says.
"It is, but so what?" I ask, but he is glib and too quick to dismiss the question as a legitimate one. Why does it matter if it's hypocritical? if it serves a higher aspiration for existence? This is exactly what Marx predicted and it wasn't about communism, it was about capitalism. We've gotten there, it's slave and master, that's all there is now.
"Look," I try to organize..."We've already ran from religion. We did that when we became amoralists and chased the dollar, became full-on capitalists. We renounce religion or at least replace it with this new endeavor, the dollar. Then we get to a place were corruption is no longer a conspiracy but a way of life and figured into the budget. Well, a little cap on this, like discipline, rules to follow and live up to, to remind you to seek higher land."
"Who's going to make the rules? I have my rules, I don't want someone else making up my rules."
"That's the problem man," I am flailing my hands upward and jabbing the sky with pointed fingertips. "We make our own rules and then before you know it you're so far out of bounds that you forgot where you started."
The girls see a "crocodile," swing, you'd have to see it, it would take too many words to describe something that the essence is....the kids jump up and down and clap and laugh and rush toward it with incredible jubilance. Jason swings them and they laugh and look like they're having the time of their lives.
I say to him, "Sometimes I feel like adhering to something that is outside of my own sphere, is more beneficial, provides me more insight into who I am and what I'm capable of..." I pause and I realize how I must resemble the guy who takes the blue or red pill, in The Matrix, the one where he wants to go back in and pretend that he doesn't know the truth and be happy.
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