PART FOUR

Round and Round I'm Whirl-a-ing

(1)

Ironically enough, during those days that I spent wandering through the cemetery and down country roads, picking up garbage and musing over those homeless ones who'd deserted their former lives because they had become too difficult to manage, I discovered that my own life was verging on a state of collapse.  A part-time job doesn't pay much.  The bills – or rather, I should say, the unpaid bills – were rapidly accumulating, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for me to make the requisite payments on my mounting debt.  The end result of which being that I was forced to quit my job at the factory.  I've started a new job now, a full-time job, at a convenience store, where I sell lottery tickets and cigarettes, snack foods and a few household goods.  I've also had to give up my car and, consequently, my little house on the hill at the edge of town.  Instead I've taken a small apartment at the town's center.  This town being economically depressed, its center is rather run-down and poky, inhabited mostly by members of the working class – or, in some cases, the non-working class.  No longer do I roam at my leisure, partly because I have less leisure available to me and partly because, in these neighborhoods, I find little of interest to occupy me.  I do still sit and look out my window sometimes, mostly to listen to the neighbors arguing, occasionally to witness them in a public brawl.  But I remain fundamentally the same now as I have always been:  alone.  Alone, and also sometimes lonely; also sometimes overcome with sexual longing or with the desire for companionship of like minds; and sometimes suffering from a great boredom with myself.

And yet, if I cannot deny those incompatibilities of personality and circumstance that keep me from making wider social contact, neither can I deny the inward pull that drives me, now more than ever, towards the center of myself; and which of these factors is the more responsible for my sense of isolation I cannot really say.  The inward pull I feel is, I believe, an energetic quality felt by all living things:  the desire for self-actualization which it represents is, after all, one of the fundamental motivating powers of life.  The only condition imposed upon it is that of time, and time's motion too is circular in character, though marked by a linear progression as well.  Thus does the the circle of life becomes a spiral, and nothing, myself included, can ever be said to be entirely self-contained or self-enclosed.  But I cannot help wondering as to the purpose of it all.  The constant evocation of the past that time's circularity elicits, not only via the memories stirred up by the replication of the seasons, but through the recurrence as well of actual events and relationships similar to those already experienced, must, I feel, happen for a reason.  Certain thematic strands seem to constantly reappear:  this person reminds us of another we once knew; one string of events reminds us of others which occurred in a past we thought we had dealt with and progressed beyond long ago.  Why?  Is it so that, this time, we can do things "right"?  And yet I have difficulty believing in such concepts as right and wrong, for our determination as to what these concepts really mean is constantly changing.  It seems to me that the recurrence of certain themes in our lives, as embodied by the people and events we encounter, has less to do with learning some moral lesson than it has to do with discovering how to be entirely "present" to experience.  It's true that guilty memories sometimes haunt us when we feel we have done "wrong," but to do "right," I think, requires adherence not so much to some arbitrary moral code as to being alive to each moment with as much clarity as we are able to call forth.  The more we are able to achieve this clarity, the more "right" our response to the moment becomes.  In this way, as we rediscover the past within the ever-changing present, we have the chance to recover a portion of the energy lost through the mistakes we've previously made because of our lack of clarity and insight.  And if our clarity and insight become great enough, our response will become morally "right" in that it is more profoundly appropriate to a given person or set of events.  At this point, perhaps, we may leave our regrets finally behind.  And, just as our earthly remains are left behind to feed the earth's soil, so too it may be that the remains of our past can be left behind, in the form of memories become empty husks devoid of life, to feed the cosmic firmaments of space and time.

ROUND AND ROUND I'M WHIRL-A-ING