On Sundays.

It was the Sunday after the last Speech and Debate tournament that I had judged. As I was leaving to go to Carmel Mountain Plaza in pursuit, as always, of my career, and in devotion to my writing and my dreams, my mother tried to dissuade me, but the sense of energy I had about me she could see would not be assuaged.

Within minutes, and as I prepared restlessly to leave, I overheard her in the computer room, Skyping with my grandfather, loudly and bitterly, and I was possessed of the usual anxiety with which I greet my mother. “… maybe it’s a kind of psychotherapy for him.”

What does that imply? “Psychotherapy” means “He is sick. All that he does is mere neuroticism and purposeless. He needs psychiatric help, yet we would not spare money for him to go to the only credible authority in dream interpretation he can find because he is so far-gone that we do not trust his own authority [despite the hours he has spent chronicling ninety of his dreams in an ardent ritual of devotion to Jungian psychology].”

But what strikes me most is that she has the nerve to gossip(!) within earshot of me rather than turning ninety degrees and opening to door to say, “What does this mean to you? Why is Joyce important? What do YOU find to be the categorical imperative for the human life?”

But why should I bother to become upset? She knows nothing of Work. I could gain nothing from the task of barging in and asking her to have a sense of decency. Were I possessed of the naive hope that she knew ANYTHING of Work, I might even venture a guess as to the possibility that she knows more about my life than I do, to the point that such blatantly shallow behavior, so out-rightly symptomatic of her ongoing existential failure, would be justified. Yet such a leap into Absurdity and Hope is a heinous committing of the Black Swan fallacy. One might call to attention that she is my provider: that I sleep under her roof*, that she pays the bills, and that she knows much more of Work from “years of experience” than I do. Yet all of these sand-castles wash away with a single wave: None of these claims amount to more than abstraction in my frontal lobe. However minute the possibility, for all that I know, she may have been laid off from her job, and I would not notice the difference. The sophist will claim that that itself is an instance of the Black Swan fallacy, yet in this case it is indispensable as an argument for this reason: The very fact that this possibility EXISTS brings back home the IMMEDIATE fact of the present situation, just as charging any naive Hope with the label of Black Swan attains the same end. That end is consistent: An Absurdist must rely entirely upon the evidence of his experience and NOT the imagination with which he is conditioned out of guilt by his peers. AT THAT INSTANT, Mother was not working, and even if she is working right now as I write this, and WORK is available to her as a BEING, it was not available to her AT THAT MOMENT, whereas it WAS available to me, as my imminent goal and intent within sight. SO, at that moment, SHE KNEW NOTHING OF WORK, and I did.

I can thus suspend any consideration as to the hypothetical. I pass no longer any judgment upon her for the quality of her occupation. I need not determine whether what she does at her job is Work or Labor. I need not complain about her treatment of me, because I have seen it to be irrational, and I accept it as a part of the Absurd, hopelessly and heroically. One cannot call oneself a WORKER unless one is in the PROCESS OF WORK. The moment that one stops, one no longer knows anything of Work. Imagine my disgust at having arrived at the plaza to find myself mired in the collective lethargy of people DOING NOTHING, vegetating, and committing every infraction the Zen Buddhists might surmise: Allowing the day to go to waste, becoming flabby, and taking the glory of the morning for granted.

I was told that I would do that, too, if I had had to work for forty hours in a day. Yet Sanity would thus necessitate that I not only refuse that sort of lifestyle but combat it at every corner. No Work that I have ever done was so available to me routinely as a whore. Art is a love affair and it is the gentle raising of children, ardent and demanding that with every day one confront the absurd mystery of its unveiling. It is something I accept the entire community’s support in. Yet I am told, so naive to have asked, that Art is a CHILDISH impulse to be stifled! Ought a Mother to stifle her love for her child? The first step out of the homely narcissism of dependency is commitment to a cause that UNNERVES one! And THAT is what Work is! Not labour in service of some end-goal, as my mother has seen fit to treat it in the past.

I recall the day that I first heard that song by the Black Eyed Peas: “I Gotta Feeling.” I wondered, Ought I to enjoy it? because I knew the context in which the song had been justified: An anthem for people to “celebrate” at the end of a long week of work and to “lose their minds”.

And I can only think back to the Monks and Nuns at Deer Park Monastery. Every Day, they worked, because what was important was NOT the fruit of their labour, but the Work Itself. I recall a nun admonishing against laziness, saying that it is a day wasted.

Yet people here seem to be content to work like mules six days a week and to “go crazy” (and become mad) on the Day of Rest. So the Christian tradition pales in my eyes to the Buddhist tradition, because it is an act of hypocrisy. I can take no credit for ANY work the MINUTE that I become lazy and flabby. Yet people SET ASIDE A DAY OF THE WEEK, every WEEK, to be entitled and to sacrifice that ALERTNESS which is the Absolute and the Categorical Imperative for the Buddhists! Is that Constant Vigilance NOT, as has been said time and time again, the price of FREEDOM? Is this NOT why I so seldom see people debating politics in the streets, re-inventing their minds so that the Collective Consciousness remains a bursting bouquet of opportunity and progress?? It is no wonder that Democracy is dead within this country. Society itself seems to be heading towards Fascism.

*Except when I spent an entire week-end at UCSD, sleeping roughly four hours in toto, composing music for the Global Game Jam, or the instances wherein I stay up from Dusk until Dawn writing, living off of McDonald’s coffee and the alms and kindness of strangers and acquaintances, wherein my biggest hassle is her eventual coming to pester me and the pressure me beyond all decency, when I am all ready tired, to return to my bed and to justify her calling me a “parasite” by my very consent to be dependent[, though everything within THAT ACTUAL MOMENT does not even justify her pestering].

Dm.A.A.

 

Post-scriptum: While it may be true that, IDEALLY, I would not pass judgement upon my Mother and she would not pass judgement upon me, my indignation herein is NOT ONLY merited in self-defense because she has overstepped and thus made [temporarily and theoretically] void that theoretical boundary, but I have also proven that at no point do I overstep that boundary and pass judgement upon her. The issue of her own occupation is never addressed, because shedding Hope means that I forego any but the most tentative guesses as to what her work-day entails. All that I do is in self-defense. The Universal of Work, if it is a Universal, is available to me at that moment, as it is available for her to see, yet it is not available to her at that moment, as it is available for me to see, for the act of gossip is a lazy action and not an act of discipline. Furthermore, even were “work” not to refer to a Universal but to a Specific detail, then I would be totally justified in my statements, because to say “she knows nothing of work” would be merely to say, in abbreviation, “she knows nothing of MY work”.