All the times, after all, all the same

Been reading The Miracle of Mindfulness, by Thich Nhat Hanh, a book about meditation, and Buddhism to an extent, but most importantly, about the idea of living every moment of life with mindfulness - creating a harmony between your mind and body and your environment. (I will say right off that all this stuff is difficult to paraphrase, because it's abstract to begin with. Been having trouble understanding concepts myself, and that's no way to begin explaining things in writing, but... to hell with constraints, ya know?) The primary concept, which I believe is the reason Aaron got the book for me, revolves around the importance of living every moment, period. But beyond that, it gets tricky. I fully support the concept, and it's gotten me re-interested in meditation and other things, but I've got my reservations too.

From my personal standpoint, the live every moment dictum (which, when you break it down, is anything but a dictum - reservation #1) falls into two strains: the Buddhist perspective and the anarchist/situationist perspective (e.g. "Who wants a world in which the guarantee that we shall not die of starvation entails the risk of dying of boredom?" - Vaneigem; "You will end up dying of comfort;" etc.). (Incidentally, Henry Miller probably bridges the gap between the two most completely.) One of the main differences here is that Buddhists like Hanh advocate being mindful during all activities - washing the dishes, drinking tea, working for the man - while the anarchists essentially do as much to discredit or avoid the work aspect as possible.


(I keep typing "meditation" as "mediation," and it's funny, because they are almost opposites - meditation is about direct contact with your environment, and mediation is the intervention between the two. Still, there may be some cautioning irony here....)


It seems to me that most post-industrial jobs, in the form they currently inhabit (in other words, market capitalism), are either directly or indirectly harmful to the well-being of humanity. Directly harmful jobs are those that directly support Capital (retail, marketing, so much else) - which essentially keeps us all enslaved to an immaterial entity (money, credit, etc.) - and those that directly support the State, which regulates Capital and the power of the wealthy elite to the detriment of the rest of us. Indirectly harmful jobs, if they don't contribute directly to these institutions, often contribute to the deterioration of the worker him/herself mentally (through monotony, obedience, stifled creativity, etc.) and/or physically. My current job, an archival one, is a great example: I work for a state-sponsored department, but what we're doing does not support the State or Capital directly, and on the positive side, could theoretically be benefical to the natural environment. However: every day the mind-numbing work deadens me a little inside.


(Overdramatic? It may seem so, but take a step back and look at what these lives do to us. Children, the gleam will leave the father's eye. It's only blasphemy when you don't really believe it.)


The compromise for me, then, is, until a more clever sounding phrase comes up, the "supplement of creative absentmindedness." Exactly as it sounds: while working in an uninspired and uninspiring environment, your mind is elsewhere - on creative ideas, blissful memories, psychedelic dreams, etc. It's a way to make every moment your own without succumbing to the indoctrination of Capital or the State. With this particular job, it hit me a couple of weeks ago, after a majestic Sunday evening: Phil, Laura, Tania, and I went to Lake Travis for swimming and grilling. Had no charcoal and no utensils, but we collected wood and Phil started a fire, and we were off. Then, as the sun went down, scanning the horizon from inside the lake, a craggy fossilized landscape under purple sky, ghostly trees set up against it like in a Road Runner cartoon, inspiration hit and insulated itself in the cranium. Didn't even feel bad about going to work the next day. In the morning, I read something - might've even been Vaneigem - to stimulate the cranium a bit, and I was off... in the world, in my own world - as opposed to the world dominated by the dollar - where peacocks crow and everyone walks around with big yellow cell phones that are actually rotary phones ripped from the cord. Do the phones actually work, or are we all crazy? It doesn't really matter....

Thinking of a letter Kerouac wrote to Philip Whalen: "I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and dontgiveashit. I'm not a Buddhist anymore" (found on Wikipedia). But really, it's selective: why can't we be Buddhists some times and inspired decadents others?

Been working on this entry for a week now, because it seemed fitting to only write it while at work. But today, with every song piping from the muffled radio in the nearby cubicle sounding like "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips, I am done. Sufficiently, creatively, and passionately absentminded.