I could type away at jobs held, but the long list wouldn’t lend understanding. So, this’ll be longer yet. Story-in-outline.
Testimonial-form.
To wit:
My son cringes when asked what I do for a living. He’s not at all disparaging of blue-collar work or of me, it’s that the job description and (on meeting me) “reality” are so at odds.
(Only a few years ago I learnt):
The way I look at it now is by way of a medical journal article I forgot to save (by Grace, I believe) describing the way children learn to read the expressions of others. Body Language. An area of the brain so dedicated. That window didn’t open for me. Nose already in a book, perhaps. 80% is a low reckoning of importance physical versus verbal.
(The rest of this is retrospective understanding from that missing puzzle piece having clicked into place).
What it does is to leave one alone. Always. Family included. Always guessing based on predictions. Trust, is an aspect, not a guarantee.
Not in the least is the handicap conducive to career. Not a shortcut. One no more knows WHAT to do (inadequate feedback), than he does HOW to do it (same). Personal feelings don’t get one anywhere on their own.
Those so affected (it is cited) do not live past age thirty. An exception for prison exists. Few even make it into their mid-twenties. (Oddball even among my own). Loneliness such that I couldn’t hate another enough to wish it’s infliction.
If it weren’t for an insatiable hunger to “know” (read), and to “share” (art; music, in main), there’d have been no reason to stick around. (With bitterness one comes to know there’s no worse four letter word than H-O-P-E). That pair — and birth to a family where manners & consideration were paramount — are as close as I come to a string of knowing self. Leave one out and I’d have been gone a very long time ago.
One does not take this handicap in stride. Compensation is just better guesses. Adulthood is then a series of missteps as others emotions go fully hidden. The small cues don’t register. Ambition, reasonable-looks and some brains aren’t enough. Neither is discipline nor character-reference.
Drink, was a window that for a time opened and gave relief.
Then, it didn’t.
Had I at that age understood the nature of the disability, . . why bother any longer?
By Grace, alone, . . .
Think women difficult? Meeting them? Sincerely, you have no idea. Only words, work. Even if one is talented in words and their use by virtue of damned hard work, when words are not forthcoming via manners on her part, . . what’s possible, dies.
The point would be that with necessary subtlety comes impenetrable fog. Whenever something in life is important, you are mostly SOL.
Yet,
Marrying at 40 gave me a 16-yr old stepson whose grace was to take me seriously. My sharp edges were worn (that in his favor).
Gave him a copy of John Fowles’ novel, The Magus, and the 1960s recording of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in Mahlers, Das Lied von der Erde, to see what he’d do with them.
To not total surprise he read, he listened.
I’d bypassed the 1940s college-graduates of my parents generation in reading and such before that age. But the mind — weaponized — is not ones friend however fast one can accelerate. One lives in hurt too often, and a maturing intellect WILL use what’s available.
One of my high school teachers thought it pretty funny I could debate a class of fifty with both hands tied, legs shackled and then gagged, to boot. Just enough of them with better tools than me that shouldn’t have been. They lacked necessary literacy, not brains.
Reading (itself) doesn’t confer smarts. It does give one an idea of the range of things, though, when one is diligent over decades. Not much is new. Just the interpretation (appreciation in art is much this; more to a piece than we’d suspected. Old, made new. And, more).
This boy came to love me well enough to take my name once off to college A surprise, this, as unexpected. A gift not imagined.
Telling him how his professors thought was no trick when one has them pinned like an insect. (Once there were higher standards). Despite my fumbles, he understood my sincerity. Partial blindness and deafness aren’t the determinant. Once he discovered that the content mattered to him, so did he see all of my efforts to date — on his behalf — had mattered.
That was a life-changing moment. The twenty-some years since is with another in whom I find a reflection close enough that, if I find it interesting (subjective merit) so will he. Likewise for him, he says.
Not always, and never perfectly, of course. Now, it’s only due (thank God) to decades “more” in tracking game that I can stay a step ahead if it seems important.
Who I am today is much to his credit.
The better man.
By Grace . . . .
I don’t leave out his mother, my ex-wife. Living with someone like me is itself a lonely journey as I don’t know to stir things around when it’s called for. Despite that I know things aren’t right.
The energy of one’s thirties having dissipated before I’d met them (I’d today groan to learn there was yet ANOTHER series, Great Classics of the Western World, taking up ten linear feet of shelf space. At 28 I’d have thought I’d found King Solomon’s Mine), I had resigned myself to no longer finding someone to discuss things of interest. Or Art. Where words matter not at all.
Marriage off the table. No career, you say? Can’t make that promise, can you?. Thus, no children either.
What point, then, to all this lonely work? (It was).
By Grace alone, gentlemen . . .
Especially as today I have no qualms in understanding that I was otherwise destined to be one of those who today are the kind of arsehole who (I’ll be kind, though it’s unfelt) lost their way. Pulled the ladder up behind them. Devil take the hindmost
Grace
(Back off to a longer focus):
In my experience those thinking themselves well-read have 60-80 books under their belt. Not thousands. I wouldn’t have stood out in 1940s America in this regard.
Television ended literacy well and for good.
Top 2% IQ isn’t remarkable either. The gulf existing between that and the top .01% is greater than that which one must cross to commune with the legally-cretinous.
As s truck driver (pretty beat up, physically) I’m glad to time by myself. Thoughts can unfold at their own speed.
Finally put together a Spotify music playlist he’s long requested to engender familiarity with American music as art 1949-1962 if immerse himself he does.
As that’s what it takes. Spirit comes forth as the atoms of the room themselves change configuration. New ears take time.
What it is to be American, in full bloom.
Depth and Breadth were still in evidence.
Dynamic Range.
Hearts, Hands, & Voices.
1). Naught is closer to the heart than music.
2). “Dynamic Range”, is practically the definition of Western Music.
3). Alone, it can make the case for Western cultural superiority.
Creativity
And on that, the Enemy goes silent you get close to what he’d much rather you not ken. Offers no categories. Erases, by providing no media or historical supports beyond damning with faint praise. (Fuck you, assholes). Whither the Romans? (Music erased)
(Ending)
The summation, then, of this thread title post reply is the one you already know:
It’s by the Heart with which He entrusted us that we are to act.
The thread is, “did you get here by train or by plane?” I’m afraid that not CV, nor resume or even tax records would tell you how I made it this far.
How, and What, aren’t Why.
This world we inhabit, the idea of the movie, The Matrix, is popular explanator for the children-in-adulthood of today: “Are you red-pilled, or blue-pilled?”
The older version is in Plato’s, Allegory of the Cave. “Reality” is naught but shadows cast on the walls. Simulation.
I lately like better what I learnt as a thirteen-year old communicant.
From, The Shorter Catechism. First entry:
Q: What is the purpose of Man?
A: The purpose of Man is to glorify God.
Gentlemen, shall Creation flourish on your watch?
Or shall Destruction continue in its unceasing course?
It’s not just civilizational downfall occurring [faster]. A Dark Age, just ahead (as that implies a re-birth). Nor does it concern just this planet.
That unceasing course has momentum enough to launch itself skyward to start putting out the stars themselves. Forever
Till Creation itself vanishes.
No Beginning. Never happened.
Radio may not have long, but Time is not a barrier .
A shadow on the wall, it is. (The heart will know. Let it speak.)
Trust in Him.
All things, possible.
Thus, take an old song, and make it swing.
American: New wine. New wineskin.
Has it meaning for you: “America, the last hope of free men?”
Beneficiary, you are, of a thousand-years of instrumental & musical development. Make it known to you & yours.
I’d say, use this as example and apply it where you shall.
My father would have made simple the, “who are you?”, embodied in a thread asking about another’s history, time & music (his editing pencil, aloft, a symbolic single line drawn across all my lines above):
“We’ll have met on the Road to Emmaus”
.
