Two weeks ago my youngest son approached me with my extended family’s collective case against my material apostasy. He was the negotiator elect, charged with bringing the Insane One who should have been the ascendant patriarch back to the community.
I was proud of him.
I felt pangs of guilt as I laughed at the reaching look on his face.
He even offered to pay my health insurance premiums and I declined, “I did not drop out to be a dependent, but to be independent.”
I thanked him after he was done failing to help me rejoin the lotus eaters in the Garden of Ishtar.
Three other conversations in the weeks between with women who see me as a kooky reactionary have brought me to this point, this realization that I have utterly failed in explaining materialism to materialists, at least in person and in nonfiction writing.
For instance my son thought he was arguing a higher cause, not a material one, when he insisted I should set aside my belief that socialism is wrong and get free government health care. As I fended off his arguments he said, “Dad, what if you have a heart attack?”
“I’ll die!”
“What if you don’t die and have an $80,000 hospital bill?”
“How can I have a hospital bill when I don’t go to the hospital?”
I said, “Look, when I ‘retired’ from making money to write I knew I was rolling the dice. I did it because I felt my body and mind failing and thought there would be nothing left to write with if I even made it to retirement age.”
This past Wednesday night I woke up late as I had been so excited by the delivery of Taboo You that I had stayed up writing. When the alarm went off at 9:45 I did not stir. Something woke me at 10:11. I had a large order to work and did not want to disappoint my boss, who has made my writing possible in many ways, through many acts of kindness, and honorable consideration.
Taking the bus through the city would result in me being too late on the floor in the morning and result in humiliation; dishonor; the breaching of my nonmaterial wall against the world.
I was dressed by 10:14 and out the door with coat, backpack, and newly acquired writer’s gut. I can sprint on flat or uphill fine. But running down hill for a mile and a half with work boots on is worse than when my coach made me run up and down stairs holding a medicine ball, because the medicine ball is now sewed into my belly!
Truthfully, I had been avoiding running since I have not had my heart checked by Doc in 14 months and I still have books to write. I tire easy, am old and weak, and have no confidence in my physical prowess—but I must catch that bus.
At the half mile mark my heart is pounding in my ears worse than it used to when I’d run 10 miles after having sex with Bessandra of the feline soul. This is a half mile in and a week out from the nearest approximation of sex I can recall, and I feel it. I am a mere fraction of the man I was ten years gone.
I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as I graciously let a car go by and thereby shamelessly stole a break. I thought to myself, “This could be it, dead in the road at the top of this last rise.”
I recalled how good Taboo You looked in the Man Cave Edition, the book I essentially wrote for my grandson, convinced as I was that I would not be there when he needed me in some decade to come.
I sprinted as hard as I could, the swing of my gut keeping counter time with the swing of my backpack in such a way as to slow me to true white man standards of locomotion. By the time I hit the bus stop I could taste the puke in my throat.
I had company; a large mentally handicapped black man in middle age who was additionally handicapped by a huge infusion of cheap alcohol. He looked at me checking my 10 year old flip phone as my chest heaved, and drawled plaintively, “Is the bus commin’ sir? Please tell me da bus commin’! I cain’t turn about to wave sir. Please hold da bus!”
The man had been relieving himself on the light pole and did not want to flash the lady driving the bus. It was not my bus, not the #55, but the #58, which would do for him, so I stepped out and flagged it down as the #58 drivers know not to stop for me by now and I did not want to deprive this man of his chance to board the last bus of the night.
As he boarded the bus and looked back over his shoulder at me, wondering why I too was not boarding, I thought to myself, “Yes, I made it and I’m alive. The #55 is always 3 minutes behind the #58.”
Ten minutes later, by which time I could have strolled to the stop, the young job-slacking braided hair dude who is late on whatever route he drives, pulls up with a grin, as I have become something of a pale-faced mascot to these young black bus drivers; the only white dude with teeth to use the MTA. By the time I boarded I was singing a different tune in my mind, “Really, I just about killed myself and pounded my sprained ankles and shin splints to pulp so that I could help that old drunk catch a bus?”
I was happy though, this past Saturday afternoon, when I walked up to my son’s $50,000 car as he was leaving his digs in a suit on his way to pick me up for lunch, and his jaw dropped. “Dad, why’d you walk all the way here? I was coming to get you.”
“I just wanted to tell you that my EKG results came back fine.”
“What? What kind of EKG can you afford?”
“It was the stone age EKG; the mile and a half running of the half awake impeded fat man.”
He shook his head, “You know Dad, you can have a heart attack in your sleep!”
As I sat down in what felt like the cockpit of some otherworldly war machine I sighed, “After Wednesday night that sounds pretty damned good.”
Putting the M in Materialism
I realize that some of the brightest among my readers hold to beliefs and practices that they do not regard as materialistic. Since I use the term materialism in much of my writing I want to make certain that the reader understands what I am referencing. Since we live in a materialistic culture, living under a succession of materialistic religions and ideologies, most people define materialism as the primacy of property ownership in a person’s life. This is the type of definition of materialism—an addiction to acquiring and maintaining the possession of goods—that a materialistic person will cling to.
What do I, and other more prominent writers such as Melville, Evola, Wolfe, and Howard regard as materialism?
The material includes the body, of which the maternal aspect of human society is most vested in. When my son lobbied for my longevity in opposition to my principals, and I lobbied for my principals in opposition to my longevity, he was making the material, maternal, temporal case, while I was making the spiritual, masculine, transcendent case.
When you have sex for the purpose of experiencing physical pleasure—as I was guilty of with the goddess formed yet soulless Bessandra—you are engaged in materialism.
When you have sex for the purpose of procreation, you are engaged in materialism.
When you have sex in order to achieve a release from the physical world then you have escaped the material world, however fleetingly, and achieved a period of transcendence.
I will try one more angle to get this point across so that the material mind might grasp it.
When two people discuss—as they did recently in a car outside of the gate to my bustling plantation—the cultural dislocation in postmodern America and arrive at an agreed upon interpretation of the present social order as the shell of a lie bound to lead to human suffering of the kind that this very social order was put into place to abolish, one feels free and at peace, and the other feels embittered and in turmoil.
The person who is embittered and tormented upon arriving at a clear understanding is so tormented for the very reason that he envisions himself as a creature of this material world and cannot stand to see it in its ugly clarity. He has fallen victim—thus far—to the classic curse of H.P. Lovecraft, “To have the misfortune to correlate the contents of his own mind.”
The person who feels free and at peace upon arriving at a clear view of the material, has, in that moment, achieved transcendence; not necessarily some hallowed state linking him to a creator deity, but a simple rising of the conscious mind above the squalor of minds dedicated to the material order.
If this makes no sense to you, then you are probably a materialist.
Since I am the Lord of Quotations, I will share with you some quotations pertinent to your existence.
Hawkeye: My father warned me about you...
Cora Munro: [interupting] Your Father?
Hawkeye: Chingachgook, he warned me about people like you.
Cora Munro: Oh, did he?
Hawkeye: He said "Do not try to understand them".
Cora Munro: What?
Hawkeye: Yes, and, "do not try to make them understand you. That is because they are a breed apart and make no sense".
“Last of the Mohicans”, 1992.
“Some men aren’t looking for anything logical. They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
- Alfred – “Batman Begins”, 2005.
- “So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” - Matthew 6:31-34 (NIV)
Of course this begs the question of why your son rebelled and joined the materialist branch of the family.
“How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child! Away! Away!”
King Lear, William Shakespeare, 1605.
I would say that Glenn's choice was not a rebellion but an agreement to disagree. He used to help me coach boxing, and was involved in the stick fighting as a participant. I recall at 13 he had a punch like a man. Then one day, he said, "Dad, I don't want to train any more."
I said, "That's fine. It's your choice. But I want to know why."
He answered, "I've gotten to the point that getting any better is going to require a lot of sweat and pain, and I'm not interested in either one of those."
A year later he was sitting in the third row at an event when I was launched out of the ring by a side kick and I landed at his feet in a heap of flattened folding chairs. At that point he seemed satisfied with his decision.
Those were some super quotes Jeremy.
Thanks