Be careful what you pretend to be because, in the end, you are what you pretend to be.

[jackshoegazer]

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

I know I posted about Kurt Vonnegut's passing earlier, but it was just an article.  I had to leave for work, so I didn't have time to really say anything.  I knew he was going to leave us after I read A Man Without a Country.  He lived a rich and full life, troubled and beautiful and we should all wish we lived so.  Breakfast of Champions saved or changed my life, I'm not sure which and if there is a difference, I don't know how to define it.

In the wake of Kurt's passing, I have seen many familiar and favorite quotes, mostly things he'd written or said about death and living.  However, I think my favorite is from Player Piano, and I think it's this that resonated with me and sort of pinpointed what I wanted to illuminate with my own writing.  "I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center... Big, undreamed-of things -- the people on the edge see them first.''

My literary forefathers have left me and gone on to the next new adventure.  Hunter S. Thompson, Robert Anton Wilson, and Kurt Vonnegut, the three authors who really inspired me to write, have all recently departed this weird, weird world and I imagine this is what it feels like when one's actual father dies - this overwhelming duty to grow up and stop fucking around, the realization that you can never be a child again, that no one will ever pick you up when you fall, no one else will protect you, shelter you, or battle away the evils of the world for you.  In a moment's notice, these are your own tasks.  You must be the rock.  You must be your own savior.

I suddenly feel like I have no more excuses.

Comments

[em-theory.livejournal.com]

HST, RAW, and KV are a trinity of sorts in my own history, too. There's something jingling in my brain about how they all died with such proximity right within the time when I've branched into reading blogs instead of books to feel connected with brave minds.

I resonate hard with what you've written above. A lot of this recent month of mine has been ponderance of fatherlessness, the lack of a mediator. I've not really grieved for any of these three, feeling like they joined the pool of unbound (insert your own word here), whatever feeds the wind and waves and random thoughts... with my own absent biological father. In a sense, they feel more accessible to me now than as humans with private desires.

This is an abstract point, the specifics of it are loaded with my own Working Delusions... but I agree with the surge toward self-sufficiency and responsibility, and feel while reading my friends list that maybe we've taken over some of that burden (previously bore by wise old farts) for each other.

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

Tim Leary said that the inly way he believed in reincarnation was that when people make an imprint in us, when their lives and ideas affect us, those people live on in us. I consider this on par with your view of their joining the unbound.

On a trip, the Universe (my name for it, call it what you like) told me that when you get right down to it, there is Something and Nothing. In Nothing, there is no time, space, matter, etc... and that for things to happen, for the purpose of the Universe's awakening, self-consciousness, whathaveyou, things in the Nothing have to come over to the Something to experience and learn and when it's learned or done what it has to do, it comes back to the Nothing to share what it gathered over here.

So when these men died, what they learned, what their souls/sparks/daemons/angels learned/did/collected are added to the Collective a.k.a. the Nothing.

Of course, ego-transcending things like psychedelics/meditation/etc allow transmission of what we've learned to the Nothing while still alive.

Off topic, I know, but it crossed my mind.

I've recently come to realize how stunted I am, since my biological father, while around (barely) never did what a father is supposed to do, and my mother was absent as well, so in some ways I never dealt with any of this have had to learn it all on my own, and thus I am behind on my work, and on the other hand, I suppose I never had the damage to undo, the projection to break. I guess I've always projected onto archetypes because I've never had the real people to attach to.

If that makes sense.

[em-theory.livejournal.com]

when RAW died, a little bit of me rejoiced, feeling like the entire world was a bit more RAW now.

My entire relationship with my father has been projection of archetype. He died before I turned three. A lot of the way I perceive Nature as a Benevolent, Conscious, Generous Force is homogenized with my Father-archetype. For some reason, Odin emerged as the resonant character and I now bear Muninn and soon Huginn to secure my emotions about him.

What do you mean when you mention being "behind on your work"?

[lagizma.livejournal.com]

I think you'd enjoy this comment about Kurt being "safe in heaven dead"
http://punkybrister69.livejournal.com/116191.html?thread=233951#t233951

[jackshoegazer.livejournal.com]

That's fun :)