Blog1.16.2021

 

 INTIMIDATIONS OF MORTALITY

"Historical situations vary; a man may be born a slave in a pagan society or a feudal lord or a proletarian.  What does not vary is the necessity for him to exist in the world, to be at work there, to be there in the midst of other people, and to be moral there."

Jean-Paul Sartre, Essays in Existentialism

 

Sartre's assertion clashes dramatically with Niccolo Machiavelli's ever useful arguments in The Prince, particularly the warning that "A man who wishes to make a vocation of being good at all times  will come to ruin among so many who are not good."

 

To avoid ruin, one must balance being good with being evil. " I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."  I no longer remember the author of this quotation which I found on a yellowing index card.  Neither you nor I need to know the author.  We do need to be about the work of avoiding ruin, avoiding the state of being the objects of a cognitive pandemic.  We must be prudent in our use of philosophical configurations as well as those poetry offers to us. Caution is all.  We must not be ignorant of what attaches  like COVID-19 and its progressive mutations.

 

William Wordsworth was less than cautious in the final lines of his poem "My Heart Leaps Up"

 

The Child is father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

 

These lines constitute the pericope for his "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," appearing as a sermonic epigraph.  I am not Romantic.  I choose not to have commerce with immortality.  Mortality is sufficient.  It might not occur to people that we should ask who is the Man's mother.  Don't play the dozens.  Play the thirteens.

 

January 6, 2021 led me to the brink of having pity for those who must live in the 21st century when I am dead.  They do not need my pity. Pity is a cheap, vulgar pseudo-virtue much like love that is all talk and no action.  The infamy of January 6 in our nation's capitol revealed the essential "whiteness of whiteness, "a pathology which precludes love in political arenas.  I do not cultivate hate, but I refuse to engage in meaningless conversations about healing and reconciliation, talk that distracts us from taking care of business.   The Earth is damaged beyond  human healing; in the United States of America, reconciliation is ultimately a very obscene joke. Healing and reconciliation manifest themselves in chaos. Get used to it. We need not fear going to Hell.  We inhabit Hell with varying degrees of misery and joy.  Amen.

 

Sartre was right in suggesting we are condemned to be at work in this world, at work in trying to mitigate the most debilitating aspects of Hell for the benefit of future generations.  Machiavelli was right in warning us about ruin. Whether we are old or young, it is absurd to think we can find an exit from the histories we create. Amen.

 

Jerry W. Ward, Jr.        1/16/2021 6:01:25 AM

 

 

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