No Direction Home...

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce, Ulysses)

How does it feel
to be without a home,
with no direction home...?
Bob Dylan

...sadness didn’t really kick in ‘til the necessary stop back at the old house...the overwhelming sense of need to say goodbye...(unwilling nostalgia jostling with an equally painful desire to have it all done with and move on)...though the house is still there, certainly, though nobody lives there anymore, and, in fact, I’ll be need to be back, probably a lot, in the months to come, to go through stuff, clean up, scrub the place clean of memories and home...

...and though it’s been a long time since it’s been my own address...(though junk mail with my name on it still comes, thanks to the boundless memories of schools, political parties, and non-profits...though now there's nobody to put it in a neat pile on my childhood bed)...it's the home that's always been back there, where mom and dad and then just mom still lived, until a few days ago, when we moved her in to the swanky retirement community with the river view most Manhattanites would kill for....a good and necessary change, definitely...but...

...dogs buried in the yard, traces of pot smoke doubtless lingering in the attic, growth marked in pencil on a wall, since painted over...the world of someone's long-gone childhood and adolescence...not that those exactly constitute a paradise lost...more like a nightmare from which I’ve been trying to awake for three decades...the comfortable old house a burden in more ways than one...and yet, the birthplace, nesting place, launching pad of dreams and hopes...that shit about as ephemeral as ephemeral gets and yet still anchored, there...

Fundamentally, not one thing exists,
So where is the dust to cling?
Hui-neng

...same as it ever was...
David Byrne

...though of course as any Zen monk or Talking Heads singer can tell ya, those anchors, any anchors, really, are ephemeral as it gets, too...that we all, really, have no direction home...perhaps even more so when we don’t realize it...and that realization is, if anything, a good one...even if it doesn’t always feel that way...

Not Exactly Dante...

Heaven is a place
where nothing ever happens
David Byrne

There’s an Opus comic strip with Opus the penguin sitting in a grassy field while Lola Granola does yoga poses nearby, and the two talk about heaven. According to Lola, everyone goes there. Opus, having clearly seen far too much of what passes for religion in our great American public sphere, incredulously asks about liberals, evolutionists, feminists, ACLU lawyers, Kennedy Democrats, French people, and manly women who don’t shave, receiving a yep for each. At last he asks with Jerry Falwell? and receives another yep. Goodness must he be annoyed, he says, to which Lola replies eternally.

A year or so ago, I was working through a lot of stuff, through, among other means, a lot of really intense personal writing. At one point, digging into the past, I started writing out the names of some people I knew a long time ago...and cursing them...damning them...it was a rush...it was cathartic...it felt good...left me kinda wired, though, incredibly edgy...so I started doing some yoga to try and mellow out...and then, not being the kind of advanced yogi who comes even close to stopping those endless waves the Yoga Sutras talk about from flowing in the brain (full disclosure: I thought up this post while lying in savasana in yoga class earlier today), I started thinking about other stuff...also from the past...times when I was mean...cruel...nasty...one or two incidents when I really should’ve had my ass good and kicked...and, not surprisingly, I started feeling really, really bummed out...seeing myself as every bit as damnable as anybody I’d been writing about...and realized that if you don’t want to hate yourself, you can’t hate anybody else either...it’s as simple as that. Jean Paul Sartre famously wrote Hell is other people, and I won’t try to argue with him (it wouldn’t be fair, anyway, with his advantage in being considerably smarter than I far outmatched by his disadvantage in being a whole hell of a lot more dead). However, thinking of Lola Granola and Jerry Falwell, I might wonder if Hell is, in fact, nothing other than hating other people....