Indulgence

Flotsam on the Lethe (a borrowed title)

Wallace Stevens
... Everything we say
Of the past is description without place, a cast

Of the imagination, made in sound;

...What we say of the future must portend,
Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be
Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

There's something to be said about life the way we know it and comparing it to life the way it was and then to life the way we want it to be and life the way we imagine it could be. Why does it seem like we are so powerless? Why does it seem like we have no control over what happens to us? I remember a title of a story written by someone in my school org, The Malate Literary Folio. The title of his short fiction was Flotsam on the Lethe. Wonderful title, really. Remnants of some destroyed vessel, floating on the Greek river in Hades where one begins to forget his old life as he enters the realm of the dead.

Isn't that romantic, in some ways? The tendency is to float in this world, struck by wave after wave on the sea of forgetting, slowly forgetting who we are and what we are meant to do.

Sometimes I end up talking with people younger than me and I wonder how they could go through life without any real desire to do something. Some people I've spoken to just want to make money. Their lives are focused outside their realm of work and they make that distinction very clear. I want the line of my life and work to be blurry, to be intersecting and crossing over. I want my work to be a part of my life. What I do in the world is also what I will leave behind. These people who live their lives just wanting to make money and then enjoying themselves after, in the outside realm of their job, they are alien to me. I want what I do to be something I'm proud of.

But here we are, flotsam on the Lethe, submitting to the rigors of the everyday. Allowing ourselves to be thrown from one place to the next and just letting it all push us away from that which we want to do. We were given wings, God damn it! Let's use `em and fly.

posted by wanggo @ 11:39 AM