by Skald
"You can beat me, abuse me, insult me.... just don't bore me"
That's a rough paraphrase of a line by Clint Eastwood in HEARTBREAK RIDGE. It sums up my approach to life. Strip away the grander concepts I impose on my travels and that's what it comes down to. I can't tolerate boredom. I travel because travel keeps me interested. Travel challenges me. Travel unbalances me.
Travel facilitates learning. I have complained a great deal this last month. I've bemoaned the difficulties I've had in Japan. But better that than a predictable life of routine. I can tolerate abuse. I can tolerate loneliness. I can tolerate difficulty. I've endured dysentary, uncertainty, and pain. Those I can handle.
But not boredom. One day of boredom and I'm climbing the walls.
Timothy Leary was like me. He called us "novelty seekers". Biologist refer to us as "fast mutators". We seek conscious evolution. We are not like other people. If you are reading this site, chances are you are a fast mutating nomad too. Your worst nightmare is to be locked in an office 8 hours a day. Better a punch in the gut than a day of shuffling paper. That's how we think.
The problem is that the slow mutating security seekers are in the vast majority. The lawyers, accountants, and businessmen dominate. They love routine. They love standardization and quantification. Chaos scares the bejeezus out of them.
Risk is something that scares them... something they want to "manage". They can't imagine why people would seek it out.
Unfortunately, these bastards make life hard on us. Every year they regulate, regiment, and control the world a little more. Like an army of grey leeches they are slowly sucking the blood out of the world. SAFETY is their mantra. PROFIT is their God.
And so we inevitably must buck the system.. their system. Whether we do it quietly or loudly, we must break the rules. We break their drug laws. We break their work regulations. We ignore their social conventions. We leave the safe and the comfortable. We step onto the open road... We board a plane.....
We deliberately seek that which they shun: risk, challenge, difficulty, and the unknown.
We can endure anything... just don't bore us.
.........
2 comments:
To the Reader
A.J. - thought you might find this poem from one of the two main inspirations of the beats - along with Rimbaud.
An Ode to the Evil of Boredom
- Greg Hubbs
***
by Charles Baudelaire
Folly, error, sin and parsimony
Preoccupy our spirits and work on our bodies
Feeding our consciences
Like beggars nourishing their lice.
Our sins are stubborn, our repentance weak
We make ourselves pay handsomely for each confession
And happily rejoin the muddy path
Believing our base tears can wash away the stains.
On the pillow of evil, Satan Trismegistus
Cradles at length our enchanted soul
And the rich metal of our will
Is boiled away by that artful chemist.
It is the Devil who holds the threads that move us!
It is in hateful objects that we find peace;
Each day, one step further towards Hell
Without horror, through the stinking shadows.
Like a poor sinner who kisses and consumes
The tortured breast of an ancient whore,
We steal in passing a clandestine joy
We squeeze as strongly as a withered fruit.
Serried, seething, like a million ants
In our brains riots a Demon horde
And, when we breathe, Death in our lungs
Descends, a sightless river, with deaf moans.
If rape and poison, arson and the knife
Have not yet woven their pleasant designs
On the dull canvas of our lowly destinies
It is because our soul, alas, is not yet bold enough!
But among the jackals, panthers and chimerae
The monkeys, scorpions, vultures and the snakes
The monsters yelping, shouting, grunting, crawling
In the ill-famed menagerie of all our vices
Is one more ugly, evil, fouler than the rest
Making no grand gestures or great cries
Yet it would gladly lay waste to the earth
And with a yawn would swallow up the world
And it is Boredom! Eye laden with involuntary tears,
Dreaming of scaffolds, pulls upon its pipe
You know it, reader, this delicate monster
- Hypocrite reader, - my likeness, - my brother!
***
and
http://www.mag4.net/Rimbaud/poesies/Alchemy.html
Greg,
"And it is Boredom! Eye laden with involuntary tears,
Dreaming of scaffolds, pulls upon its pipe
You know it, reader, this delicate monster
- Hypocrite reader, - my likeness, - my brother!"
--Brilliant!!!! So to the Alchemy poems at the link you included. Ill be adding a link to that site to the writing section of Hobopoet. Thanks!
.............
AJ
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