23 June 2008

Letter 2.16

The desk, at one time, was kind of fun to build, spending a few hours on it in the afternoon; but now it's becoming a burden and I'd druther be done with it. But the epoxy is insufficient to glue it together, and locally made carpentry glue is altogether unsatisfactory -- besides being very smelly, it doesn't have much stickum in it. I want to finish up these projects -- desk, book, kuti, etc. – by the end of the year and leave next year free for my practice without all this objective work, which is a real brake on the subjective work.

No, no wild baseball celebrations to report here. Just -- if it's Reportable – calmness -- gradually (subjectively) developing, purely an infernal affair, having little to do with the surroundings -- and with it an increasingly clear perception that other affairs serve only the purpose of preventing this calmness and subsequent clarity. Once a certain degree of the latter is achieved, such 'celebrations' would be seen as self-anesthetizing, and would, in being seen, hardly be 'celebrated'. But most of us love our stimulations, excitements, intensities (which are inflations of ourselves) too much to allow such clarity to occur -- so, a wild to-do for any reason at all, and, if no reason comes along, we will manufacture a reason (baseball, rioting over racial injustices, campus rioting over a change of season), keep the blinkers firmly in place. But – such things concern me not at all, and what I write about them now is more with the intent of filling up a letter when there's nothing to say than it is with criticizing them (after all, it's what most people want -- let them have it -- so long as I'm not forced to participate), and I find I no longer have very much capacity for complaining about anything at all, let alone about the normal state of the world. And that, I think, is not for the worst.

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