Into the Ditch

The September Soliloquies

Photo: The blind leading the blind, by Pieter Breughel the elder. Museuo di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy.

What could be better than a terrifically executed northern renaissance painting to illustrate this little excursion into the ditch? Probably nothing. It's a grim painting, and it's not a small one (it's over 5 feet across.) One wonders who wanted to decorate a space with this; as the illustration of a folk parable, it almost certainly wasn't intended as decoration for a church altar.

Would you want this crew in the dining room with you? I don't think so. And yet we are all these people, almost all the time, aren't we? Someone wanted to remind themselves of that constantly.

After all these years, I still have a duty to readers to speak of work, which was the aim I set myself almost 18 years ago when I began this enterprise.

I’ve pursued this aim almost every day in one way or another for 18 years, which says something about how long any real aim should be pursued and how durable it out to be.

I haven't written much lately, so I’ve given myself the task of writing this little series of essays which I call the September Soliloquies. And I have come back to it again this morning to try once more to offer something honest and honorable. Of course it doesn't always work out.

One can never tell where efforts in the moment will lead. Perhaps even into the ditch.

I’m coming back this morning to this question of dwelling in the body. The question is related to the post that I recorded for The Morning Five this morning, which publishes today, for those who wish to listen to it in context.

I would say I make an effort to live in the present moment and act from it without prejudice, but that isn't quite true. I don't make an effort, because this particular state, of course, arrives quite naturally. To live in the present moment arises naturally from a complete sensation of the body — it is by and in the very nature of inhabiting sensation as an intelligence of its own.

So I don't try to be in the moment. Not at all. There is no struggle, no effort, no wish to be in the moment.