John Swinburn

The remnants of something once beautiful. The residue of time, evidence of its harsh treatment of apathy and impudence.

We cannot realistically aspire to lofty ideals if we are unwilling to invest the hard work greatness requires.

Changing the world requires changing, first, ourselves. And that necessity is unreachable when one finally, in one’s later years, realizes transformational change can be successfully accomplished only in youth.

But youth is a period in which change is natural, gradual, almost imperceptible. Radical change, mind-altering change, requires the experience unavailable to youth.

That’s the paradox.

Reading some of my own writing in the evening gives me a brief respite from the chaos. The turbulence of the past eighteen months continues to twist my gut and make my neck and shoulders ache as if acidic poison fills the spaces between muscle cells. But I can escape with my own words. For example, I read a piece I wrote just over a year ago, near the end of September,  in which I invited readers (and myself) to ponder on the life experience of an ingredient in a recipe. More specifically, I suggested pondering on the experience of an ingredient that moved of its own volition. I recommended a shrimp. Reading that piece took away the anxiety that dogs me most days, thrusting me into a different vortex of turbulence.

That different vortex of turbulence is the one I’ve found fascinating my entire life: the nature of existence and experience. And I’ve found that certain things that have meaning to me can change my mood or my belief in the likelihood of an event occurring. Talismans. You know, like a rabbit’s foot. But in my case, it’s my pocket knife. Not just any pocket knife; only the one that reminds me of the one my father carried. I’ve written about that before, haven’t I? No need to bore my reader nor myself with another recollection. But my memory of my talisman makes me wonder: do other people (people like me who do typically believe only in the real world) assign meaning and power of some sort to inanimate objects? I bet I’m not alone. I bet I’m not alone in my deep embarrassment at admitting that fact, either.

Last night, when I wrote the temptation and promise I never fulfilled (I can be an absolute asshole, and I know it), I expected I’d be able to get over my juvenile attitudes for that post. But, apparently, I haven’t. So I’ll end this diatribe by saying something I really mean, with all my heart and soul and every fiber of my being:

I want nothing more in the world than for people to be compassionate and to act with compassion. Literally, that’s my final wish. That goodness will somehow flow over us like a wave and we will be compassionate and understanding and tolerant of every person, regardless of belief, experience, characteristic, or plan.

With this knife I hold so dear, I pledge myself to trying to live up to my expectations of myself. This is so damn hard. My final Facebook post may have been yesterday. And my final blog post may be today. We can never know, can we? Regardless, may we all dwell in compassion and peace. I care about what we’ve done to ourselves. I hope we can find the cure. And, by the way, I love you. I will continue to write what I think and feel. It’s the only way I can stop myself from using that treasured knife to slit someone’s throat, maybe my own.

Last night, I suspended my Facebook account, perhaps for the final time. Though I’ve ‘threatened’ to get off Facebook for quite some time, and have taken plenty of breaks, it feels different now. I’ve spent the last few days glued to the television and news feeds on Facebook, only to find more and more and more vitriol and venom and loathing and hate. And, on occasion, I was part of it. And I despise that I’ve allowed myself to become accustomed to that. Though it bothers me, deeply, I’ve grown accustomed to it. It has become part of the social threads that weave the fabric that encircles me, defining my shape; and I do not like the cloth that drapes my brain, telling the ugly story of who I am. I need time and space and distance to help me explore my own depths; or my own shallows. I need to breathe in purified air and listen to voices of humanists and philosophers and gentle souls who might guide me to a place of peace.

The problem of finding peace is this: the search for peace requires intellect. Intellect seems to have become a target for the scorn of people who neither have intellect nor any interest in acquiring it. And there it is again; even in my search for solace and peace, I am able to heap indignities on people who may simply not have the same capacity to understand as do I. Or, perhaps, maybe they have the capacity and it is I, instead, who lack the capacity for understanding their plight and their motives and their reasons to behave in ways I find appalling and oppressive.

In my view, if there is anything of value in religion it is this: religion (at its best) articulates goodness and defines behaviors that express goodness. The underlying stories that suggest that decency arises from one ore more deities matter far less than the expression of and the utterance of what constitutes, and defines the value of, decency.  Again, in my view, the far more crucial and fundamental message of religion is the requisite behaviors that constitute humanity, rather than the beliefs that predicate religion. When I hear evangelical preachers suggesting that the literal interpretation of the Bible is the only path to salvation, I feel a strong inclination to euthanize them. Not because I think they are bad people, but because I think they are grooming others to be bad people. I know that’s a nasty thought; but I’m trying to be honest here. And I understand, too, that my words across paragraphs argue against the precepts presented in others. I acknowledge that dichotomy of my thought processes. I wish I knew. I think I do. But I don’t.

Here, in a nutshell, are my beliefs about society and our responsibilities for humanity. You need not read them now; you have important things to do like feed yourself and clean yourself and sleep and walk miles and miles and miles into the woods. These beliefs might take you (and me, for that matter) years to comprehend. And comprehension may never come. But here goes:

Okay, I’ll pause to replay an edited post of one I made on another of my blogs years ago:

I suppose it’s possible that we’re all living lives of mass hysteria. Nothing is real. It’s all imagined. The daily drudgery, the surprise birthday parties, the unexpected attraction to happily married women who return the favor. It’s all fantasy, hiding the reality buried deep under the dry, gritty sand.

I listened tonight to “Take This Waltz,” a Leonard Cohen classic, and I wonder why it seems true and final.

Take this waltz, take this waltz, it’s yours now, it’s all that there is.
With its very own breath of brandy and death, dragging its tail in the sea.
My mouth on the dew of your thighs.
I yield to the flood of your beauty, my cheap violin and my cross.

The thing, the unexpected yet utterly unsurprising thing is that it’s all fantasy. It’s all artificial. It’s all built from plastic made especially to assuage the bewilderment of the ones among us who question the legitimacy of the corporate elite. We are products of our imaginations, either smooth and elegant or crusty and brittle, inelegant remnants of people who never should have been.

But here we are, back at the beginning. I am off Facebook for at least awhile to try to recapture whatever might be left of my sanity and my decency. The vitriol on Facebook makes me want to euthanize half the population (plus 50%), so following my Facebook friends is dangerously unhealthy.

Forgive this manic-depressive post; that’s who I am, dear reader. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the ugly beast beneath my geezer face. And long hair. And earring. Am I attempting to regain a youth I do not recall? That’s a question for another lifetime. Or maybe later in this one.

A man I never met, but saw perform once, has died. Leonard Cohen, the man whose poetry and music molded me like no other, is dead. Believe me, I do not worship celebrities; I scoff at hearing of people who cry or otherwise emote over the death of movie stars and the like. But tonight, on hearing of Leonard Cohen’s death, I cried. I wept. My wife tried to console me, but I could only continue weeping, wishing I had been his friend.

I wish I could have spoken with him about life and love and death and remembrance and disease and hatred and acceptance and a thousand other topics. When I listened to his music or read his poetry or prose, I felt like the man understood me like no one ever has. I felt like I lived through his words. My emotions were practice for the way he described them with his words. He was a genius, a man who understood emotion better than anyone understands language or art or mathematics.

Tonight, especially tonight, I am grieving for the loss of a man I will always consider the mentor and guide I never met. Leonard Cohen, your life meant so very much. It meant more to me than you, or anyone, will ever know. I survived thoughts of suicide because of you, my friend. Your words were never dark to me. They were light in the form of love.

Imagine a set of conjoined twins. One has physical and behavioral problems that require constant therapy. The other, consumed by full-on psychosis, is a very real threat to his twin and to the nurses that tend to him; keeping sharp objects out of his grasp is necessary to protect his sister’s life and to ensure the nurses aren’t stabbed or sliced or otherwise injured or killed. Surgery to separate the twins will surely result in the death of one of them. The doctors and the parents must decide which one will live and which will die. But the father wants to save the demonic twin, while the mother wants the other one to survive. So, ultimately, it’s up to the surgeon to determine which twin will be given the opportunity to thrive and which will succumb to the scalpel. That decision will have implications far beyond the obvious. The surviving twin’s impact on others must be considered. How will the survivor influence people with whom he/she interacts? And what of his/her progeny?

Given the difficult choice, which role would you choose: mother, father, or surgeon?

Another scenario for you. A mother has just given birth to sextuplets. Through the miracles of modern medicine and the new science of “assured prediction,” you are privy to knowledge that one of the six children (but you do not know which), if allowed to survive, will one day set off a nuclear device that will kill ten million people. The ONLY way that can be prevented is to kill all six babies before they reach their first birthday. What’s your choice (your only choice): kill five innocent babies and a future murderer or take responsibility for the future nuclear annihilation of ten million?

Let’s try another. You know of Hitler’s rise to power and its horrible consequences when you are taken back in time and space to 1924 Germany. With clear knowledge of what he would do in the future, you find yourself alone with him one evening. You have a loaded pistol. You could use it to kill Hitler or you could decline the opportunity; in either case, after making your decision, you would be transported, instantly, back to the present. Your terrible choice would be to either murder a man who had, as of that moment, done nothing sinister or choose to allow him to live, knowing he would be responsible for the deaths of six million Jews and countless others in the years to come.

Now, of course, we do not have the benefit of knowing the future outcome of decisions we make today. But we do have some historical perspective upon which to base our assessment of current events. The difficult aspect of our lives in such situations is determining whether something simply looks like history repeating itself or is, in fact, a replay of history.

My mood this morning is not much better than last night, but it has improved slightly. Last night, I was certain Donald Trump had killed and filleted the last vestiges of the American experiment and was preparing to boil them in kerosene before swallowing them with an acid chaser. This morning, I believe it’s still possible the bastard has not won over enough mean-spirited pigs to lay claim to the White House. Regardless, though, he and his followers have changed the face of America. They have ripped away the veneer of decency to reveal an ugly soul that cannot be fixed through the usual means. The only possible cure requires the cancer to be removed. That’s not done gently. Surgeons don’t ask cancer’s permission; they use devastating chemicals and sharp scalpels.  What, exactly, will that work entail? And who has the unmitigated gall and the amazing decency to do the dirty work of cleaning up after a cancer spill?

I have always considered myself somewhat ‘bohemian.’ But my unorthodox core, for virtually all my life until this very moment, has remained hidden beneath a shell, a cover designed to appear conventional.

Perhaps that’s a story I tell myself, though. It may be that I’ve only wished I were the rebellious iconoclast but, instead, behave as the nervous conformist I may have been from the start. It’s hard to know. It’s hard to know because I do not know what or who I am. I do not know whether I am narcissist or a misanthrope, an egotist or an ascetic. My view of the world is simply a reflection of the way others react to me; does that make me artificial? Am I alone in wondering whether I shape the world around me or the world around me shapes me? Or are there others? Are we all simply actors? Is the world really a stage? Do we behave and believe the way we do to satisfy our understanding of others’ expectations of us? If we were capable of stripping away those expectations, what would be left of us?

I remember wondering, when I was in my twenties, how my thoughts might have evolved had I developed and matured outside the sphere of face-to-face human influence. I wondered how my personality might have evolved, were the only external forces to which I had been exposed just information from books that I, alone, had to interpret and judge. My education in sociology and psychology and the liberal arts in general never satisfactorily answered my questions. Nor has anything since. I still wonder who I am, the real me. What do I believe? Why do I or don’t I believe something else? How would I treat people up and down the socio-economic ladder had I not been exposed to influences that molded who I am today?

These are the questions of a teenager still grappling with his identity, not the questions of a grown man who, ostensibly, has matured and should by now understand the world and his place in it. Am I unique in having failed to attain that level of understanding? Many days I think I am, indeed, among the unfortunate few who never found his place in the world and who, quite possibly, has no place in it. This is not a plaintive cry for understanding; it’s just my assessment of today’s reality for me. I don’t belong to any group, not really. Too many of my peculiarities disqualify me for membership in most groups, even those to which I might wish to belong.

This stream-of-consciousness post is going nowhere fast. I think it’s time to end it. My thoughts are only ideas. Nothing of substance, just disturbances caused by neural transmissions and the occasional misfire.