It was weekday morning in the middle of summer in the south. The clouds were dark and heavy this particular day and the sun was hidden somewhere in the ether which made it tolerable to be outside. I grabbed a book from the shelf by my front door and headed out to the park near my house.
As the gray day loomed, I sat on an old bench under a giant oak and started to read. Minutes later an older gentleman approached, stiff and shuffling along with a cane in his right hand and he had his pork pie hat down low, half-cocked over his left eye. He looked to be a man in his late seventies or so.
He came over and sat on the same bench I was on. I glanced over with my peripheral.
“Good morning,” he said.
“Morning sir.”
He took a deep breath and looked up at the sky as he reached for his cigars in his front shirt pocket. His green eyes were vibrant despite the years. He took a cigar out of the package and fired it up. The smoke billowed and swirled and whirled into the green leaves of the old oak tree we were sitting under.
He looked over at my book and asks, “what ya reading there, young man?”
I told him, “oh, just a book on the history of WW1.”
He nodded nonchalantly, “ahhhh, the so-called war to end all wars,” he says in a grumbling tone. “That’s the war, son, that brought us all to the abyss of total annihilation — hell, it was the beginning of the decline of Western civilization if you ask me. We’re at the tail end now, shit.”
He shook his head and took another puff of his cigar, paused for a minute and says, “I know history, son, I’ve studied it, I’ve taught it, hell, I’ve experienced some of it — let me tell ya, I’ve peeked around that dusty curtain of time and I’m not impressed.”
He looked over at a young couple holding hands walking down the path looking at their phones.
“Yeah, I see no heroes, all I see is mankind’s violent revolutions and otiose wars — and all we’re left with son, what we’re left with is nothing but a blood stained fuckin’ planet and the pretentious narratives of the victors’. It’s mostly rubbish.”
He glanced over at a crow that ascended down to a low hanging branch across the way.
“Hell,” he says, “what is history other than man’s pathetic attempt to transcend his own physical fate.”
A brief cough, smoke seeped thru his yellow teeth, he goes on…
“Since the dawn of civilization, man hasn’t been able to accept his creatureliness, his animal nature — he denies it, thinks he’s something special in the animal kingdom, thinks he’s some type of god because of the uniqueness of his own self-awareness and rational capabilities. But the truth is — man is just an impotent little animal who tries to coerce the world to comply with his own little urges and desires. Shit, it’s a sad bunch we are, never accepting our own mortality, always yearning for some fuckin’ guarantee of the infinite. It’s funny isn’t son, how most of us never really live but we want our lives to continue forever? Seems we deny life today to try to get a little more of it tomorrow.”
He leaned over to one ass cheek and pulled a small flask out of his back pocket and took a quick swig, then looked me in the eyes.
“Son,” he said, “I know history and I’m not impressed.”
He shook his head briefly, “Ahhhh shit, son, I’m sorry I interrupted your reading. Don’t mind this old man, I like to get on my soapbox sometimes.”
I told him that I didn’t mind.
The wind picked up and he took another toke from the cigar, another pull from the flask, shook his head once again, then, with a peevish voice says, “the world is so fuckin’ divided, ain’t it son?”
Absolutely, I told him. He went on…
“In this strange era of the internet, people feel like they have to take a stance on something, anything, everything. They throw themselves into little ideological teams and posture their little conditioned positions and they all seem to be consumed like self-righteous idiots by their disagreements rather than finding common ground. Hell, these days we tend to look at one another as fuckin’ enemies rather than brothers and sisters. We forgot how to love and how to be decent to each other.”
I told him that I agreed with him. And then I asked him his opinion on the root cause of the rampant division we see today. He replied:
“Oh fuck…nationalism, party politics, organized religion, shit, these things that divide us so greatly exist merely in the abstract — ya know what I’m saying, son? ” I nod hesitantly, “these things aren’t real — they’re just rigid ass belief systems but we give our uncritical allegiance to ’em because they offer us a sense of belonging, they make us feel bigger than we really are which is why we cling so fuckin’ sadly to the symbols offered up by them — they serve as an antidote to our existential terror.”
I nod, he pauses for a minute, reaches over and hands me his flask while gazing up at the tree. I take a pull and felt the burn deep in the gut immediately.
“What do you mean ‘symbols offered up by them?’” I ask him with a slight grimace to my face from the residual burn.
“Think about it son, let’s say, oh I don’t know, some asshole burns a flag –a $5 piece of fucking cloth”, he says, “and people lose their shit, and the reason they lose their shit and get jerked off balance is not because it’s a valuable object, no no, rather, the flag represents, in a strange way, themselves — it’s an extension of themselves, like an arm or a leg. They die a little when their little symbols of specialness are desecrated — they get deeply wounded when someone insults their God, or President, or leader. Same thing goes for people obsessed with money, or their car, or career, or gang, or army, or whatever. If the symbols people embed their life in becomes compromised in any way, they too become compromised.”
I started to ask him something but he cut in… “people are drugged and hypnotized by the symbols of their cultural belief system and they don’t even fuckin’ know it.”
“Where do you think this all stems from? Is there a way to change the paradigm per se?”… I managed to get in.
“Son, let me tell ya, we’re anxious and insecure and feeble-minded, we modern people are — we’ve severed ourselves from the sacred, we have unripe inner worlds, our brains are constantly stimulated by shit shit shit, we don’t know ourselves — that’s why we go about our days with such haste and menial business with our fuckin’ heads down and eyes closed.”
He takes a swig, grits his teeth, and continues…
“It’s a defense against being fully self-conscious, fully alive. People are in flight from themselves, shit, that’s why they invest so much of their goddamn soul into stupid shit like status, and mindless entertainment, and national politics, and material objects — stuff, stuff, stuff. People think they can buy their way to happiness or, even sadder — out of their own fuckin’ mortality.”
He looks up at the sky and shakes his head…
“They’re mad, I say, the whole goddamn world’s insane. Hell, Freud came to the same conclusion a century before, it’s not just me, son. He said it would get worse, and it has. Even the great Erich Fromm once said that just because millions of fuckin’ people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people fuckin’ sane. But they’re conditioned to think they are. That’s what’s goin’ on today.”
Why do you think that is — that people are so-called “insane” but I guess…remain “normal” in a functional kinda way?
“Well son, us so-called grown folks are undeveloped fuckin’ children who’ve been taught to look outside — look to so-called professionals and politicians and religious figures and gadgets to save us from ourselves. We hate freedom — it’s fuckin’ burdensome, which is why we clamor for power and wave flags and become prideful in things we belong to by accident — we haven’t learned to stand on our own damn powers. We look to the outside for someone to raise us above our natural destiny — shit, that’s how Hitler and Stalin were able to rally so much fuckin’ support for their evil ways — weak individuals, thinking they’re sane, surrendering themselves to an authoritative voice who promised them a goddamn world beyond their misery. ‘Sane’ people killing ‘sane’ people for insane reasons. Shit, it’s here in the United States and everywhere else, too. Man has defeated himself all through history merely because he’s given up his autonomy, his dignity.”
I sat the book on the bench and stared out beyond the vast field. The highway in the distance was coming alive and the world was moving along with a careless bustle.
“What do we do?” I ask him. “What must we as individuals do?”
“Awaken!” he replied without a blink.
“But we have to become unafraid of our depths to do so. Mankind is mortally frightened of what’s inside themselves. We build up ‘character’ to shield our inner depths from the world — and we conform to our insane society so as to achieve acceptance and uphold our narcissism. But true wisdom is in there deep in the corners of our soul. We have to get in there and find out who we are. This is the only way to awaken from our illusions and become aware of our reality — our true reality.”
He puts his cane to the sidewalk and pulls himself up with a grunt. Staring across the park he concluded:
“People must awaken fully to the truth of their own powers, son. We gotta embrace rather than run from the despair that’s inherent to our nature– we gotta take full responsibility for the accident of our lives. We must learn to develop a perceiving soul, and use our uniqueness to serve the higher good and we have to outgrow our childish fetish of idol worship — whether it’s our nation, our leader, our party, our lover or our fukin’ gadgets. We must learn to stand on our own powers or the villains among us will continue to dictate over our lives.”
He stares on down the brick path. “Well, son, I better get going. I’m sorry I interrupted your reading. Hell, maybe it’s me who’s crazy, I don’t know, ” he says with a chuckle.
I told him it was a pleasure to listen to him. He shook my hand and slowly made his way down the path, fading into the overcast day. I sat there for a while pondering what I just heard. The crow on the low hanging branch took flight. Finally, I got up, left the book right there on the bench and walked home.
Erik Rittenberry 