Yes, it’s still raining here. Sideways.
Across the city, above the pelting on the windows, you can hear ambulance and firetruck sirens signaling the recurrent collisions of skidding vehicles driven by people who refuse to accept the physics of wet weather driving.
On the East Coast it’s summer already – 80 degrees, cherry blossoms frying on the sidewalk. Lawnmowers and air conditioners churning away.
One could be envious, I suppose. But life’s too short to waste in idle envy. Paradise is a state of mind. You can be there anytime, as most sublimely demonstrated in a classic sequence in “Office Space.”
But the dream of faraway paradise has long lured humans into reckless over-reaching. Sometimes these crazy expeditions have born fruit – Gauguin gained something besides syphilis when he abandoned his family and the Paris art world to go to Tahiti. Yet although the move inspired some of his best known works, the island haven didn’t turn out to be the answer to his problems. Instead it left him more haunted than ever by unanswerable questions.
One of the most vexing aspects of the human condition is our inability as a species to be satisfied with what we have. The quest for more, or better, or at the very least, different conditions, has led us both to greatness and to horrific tragedy. If there is a heaven, will the creatures in it be satisfied eternally? Even Mick Jagger, assuming he gets in?
Well, I’m not expecting to find out. But I am trying to work on my own attitude – aiming for a little more gratitude and a lot less envy. I used to think it would be heavenly to live in Tahiti. These days, my idea of paradise has taken on a more domestic flavor. Something along the lines of Omar Khayyam’s The Rubaiyat:
“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread – and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness –
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
Or, in my case, a six-pack on the porch, a piece of pie, and you picking your guitar. ‘Nuff said.
Yes, if we could ‘just’ go back to the Farm, or Woodstock, or wherever…the 6-pack on the porch w/a guitar picker close by sounds good. Looking out my front door at the Lewiston hills ‘gets it’ for me: Stendhal syndrome, Stendhal’s syndrome, hyperkulturemia, or Florence syndrome is a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with IMMENSE BEAUTY IN THE NATURAL WORLD. < that's the way I see it. We are where and what we are! Whee…….