Kidneys

Just got the call that my step father is in the hospital again in serious but stable condition. "It could go either way." Kidney infection -- dialysis. He's one of the few people I care about. Not that anyone would know it. But I am disrupted. Disassociated as I am from myself and my humanity, my feelings, when I have them, come upon me out of no where. So I will have just finished talking to people, and stand off to the side, and I am near weeping. No one notices of course. So it's okay.

Being a profound intellectual as I am, my brilliant mind wanders over a vast panorama of disciplines, sociology being not least of them. So the other night I was forming amazing insights that only I am capable of, dealing with prostitution. It's a phenomenon of which I have been aware, but have never really pondered. One of the costs of my genius seems to be a presiding melancholia, and in such a state I understood why men go to prostitutes. It's not something I have ever considered -- but I recognize it, like drug-use, as an anodyne for existential desperation. It's not sex. It's not pleasure -- neither drugs nor this other. It's a quest for meaning ... as I say, existential. Perhaps I'll address drugs some other time. As for meaningless sex in the pursuit of meaning, the key is intimacy.

We pair up. If memory serves, it's the first observation ever made of mankind. It is not good for man to be alone. Even those who are eunuchs by nature -- though sexless, in the sense of drive -- are not companionless. We need air, and food, and survivable environs, and we need meaning. And meaning seems to be inseparable from other people. A solitary life is meaningless.

The anguish some feel at the thought of their own mortality is assuaged in the comfort of their progeny. Somehow I will live on. For religionists, they almost always have some commandment in their traditions to do good works in the world. Always it is through other people that we find our own meaning. Even the sadist couches his fantasies or his monstrosities as a relationship with some victim. Even Satan's great sin, pride, is a relativity, a context, a comparison, a relationship. Even God is not a singularity. He is a Trinity, out of necessity. Nothing exists, alone.

So when we think of love, as a high or highest calling, well, that's because it is the most intimate, the most other-oriented of affects. Just as wisdom and evil are so very close to each other, so love and hate are the right side and the left of the same thing. A thing is so very important to us, that we feel the passion of love, or hate. Passion. What is more powerful, than passion.

I feel like I've abandoned my step father. Nutrition could have saved his health, not to say his life. It was working a few years ago. But he wouldn't have it, and degenerated. A choice then, and an act of free will. And I have learned that I can't save anyone. My travails, granted to me through God's condign will, taught me that. Nevertheless, it feels like, and is, a kind of abandonment.

I'm not the man I could have been. Something happened. And I was not strong enough to pass through those fires, and remain sane. See? We need to be saved, again and again.


J