things to remember

some things i want to remember:

from franny and zooey: do it for the fat lady. i'm not sure if the idea of doing ones best for the suffering ones out there holds water, but i like the idea at least in the context of not hating the audience that laughs at the bad jokes, that doesn't get it, that eats peanuts unselfconsciously. i also loved the idea of having sympathy for people because they probably ended up doing the wrong thing. the TV producer wouldve been a first rate carpenter, and yoga teacher wouldve been completely fulfilled as a mathematician, etc. it argues against the unbridled, unreasonable belief that there is self determination, and, even more truthfully and alarmingly, that the self determination there is doesn't necessarily lead us down the right path. there are blind alleys in which we spend whole blind lives. and when i started rereading it as soon as i finished zooey i saw lane with new eyes, better eyes, kinder eyes and that made me glad. i hope i can have that outside of the book.

and right now i'm reading the doors of perception which is full of truths a bit too fantastical for my daily life, but they make one think. i now sometimes think about my reduction valve, that thing through which my mind reduces the real, non-symbolic original universe, the wonderful originals, so that i might think and function and essentially survive as a material being. i understand and appreciate and know the world only about as far as is necessary to get my daily bread and not get run over by a truck. but there is the real out there, and if you take something like mescalin you are dazzlingly aware of it, aware of the folds in your linen pants, of how the portraits are so much paint, of the petty symbolism of our language and sight when our reduction valve is busy reducing. and there's this truly marvelous passage describing how in the tibetan book of the dead the souls without bodies burn and writhe and practically explode from their closeness to unmitigated reality in all its sensory overload (maybe kind of like dying if you see a greek god naked, now that i think about it). and in that state, they cry out and flee headlong into the next mortal body or into hell or into fucking anywhere other than the intolerable brightness of a mind-at-large. he also has interesting things to say about schizophrenia which i'm pretty skeptical of.

looooong walk.