Something a girlfriend said to me blew my ship of state out of the water last night. Her statement was simple. I was bemoaning something, you know, not growling but whining, like a pup, about a life-road impediment, a ball of wax created out of very sticky jealousies. My bemoaning took the form of a weakly uttered, “What the hell is IT all about?” to which the girlfriend replied, “Nothing.”
Holy Christ, that word, “nothing,” hit me like a damn two-by-four upside my head. Bingo! A light bulb temporarily replaced the full moon that travels above me my whole life. Duh! I felt like a fool. Of course, she’s right. It’s nothing. Everything's nothing. NADA! My only religion. I struck myself in the forehead with the palm of my hand. I slammed myself down Benny Hinn-style by my own Holy Spirit, my Gestalt, I should say, that being and nothingness that resides firmly within me, so help me Jean Paul Sartre.
How could I have forgotten Jean Paul Sartre? Hemingway complained that after Jean Paul and his mistress, Simone de Beauvoir, stayed with him and Mary at the Finca in Cuba, the sheets they’d slept on had to be thrown out because they were dirtied with blood. I just threw that in; I like to throw in little acidy asides about the famous I’ve forgotten and just remembered.
The Daily Growler is all about “remembrance.” Even like Marcel Proust, I write in bed most of the day now. As remembered by a fictional character in a fictional post that proclaims itself to be like a blotter on the wet ink of what has passed us by and what will continue to pass us by as we travel on in the wrong direction. Cynical and passionate, The Daily Growler sticks its heathen tongue out at planners, lawmakers, soothsayers, judges, salesmen, bible-thumping demons, philosophers, bad writers, inane celebrities, lollygaggers, fingerpoppers, and Julie-flippers. They’re all the same in Growler thinking, whether growling wolf or growling Gonzo or growling 5,000 lb. gorilla.
Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, defines “temporary” as: “Lasting for a limited time.” Ohhhh, it makes chills run down my wolf spine; the hairs on my neck are bristling like crazy.
In a sermon on nuclear weapons he gave in NYC’s St. John the Divine Cathedral—New York City’s never-finished Episcopalian temple, Kurt Vonnegut made a startling statement; one so simply obvious it like slaps you right in the face like a mother correcting an errant child. Vonnegut said he visited the Galapagos Islands and while there he saw he said what Darwin had seen when he visited there and began developing his theories of evolution after noticing how many different kinds of finches there were on those ancient islands.
http://www.rit.edu/~rhrsbi/GalapagosPages/DarwinFinch.html
In evolution, Vonnegut said, nature could simply take all the time in the world to make the necessary changes for its survival, for its continuence in the continuing continuum, what we call the Universe. Man, on the other hand, is running out of time and in return his own existence. In the long run, man cannot outsurvive nature. Dig? Comprende Vd? Seems pretty damn simple to me. And though I don’t believe in permanence, not even in what seems a perpetually evolving universe, in terms of manmade time, yes, I can stoutly say it is a matter of temporary man existing in a permanent universe. Man is limited by time. Man is a temporary being. Whoaaaa! Does this mean I’m capitulating over into big old pig-jowled Jerry “With the Blowing Up Heart” Falwell’s fold of ignoramuses? Absolutely not. It simply means I am remembering Hemingway’s rewriting of “The Lord’s Prayer”: “Our Nada which art in Nada, hallowed would be thy Nada….”
We are temporary and every thing we do is temporary, including our wars.
My girlfriend, and she is a brilliant woman, too, was absolutely right. I’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about since what I’m worrying about is nothing in terms of what all of this mankind existence means, “absolutely NOTHING,” it is, as old John Paul Sartre said, simply BEING IN NOTHINGNESS.
Existentialism attempts to describe our desire to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. Unfortunately, life might be without inherent meaning (existential atheists) or it might be without a meaning we can understand (existential theists). Either way, the human desires for logic and immortality are futile. We are forced to define our own meanings, knowing they might be temporary. In this existence...Existentialism, of course; and there it was in the Existential Primer. What a wonderful site.
http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/
"...the human desires for logic and immortality are futile." Powerful stuff, but, dammit, true. True for a wolf; true for a human.
It's all about INDIVIDUALISM afterall. Only through individualism can we make our lives worthwhile; otherwise, it's all pure futility.
thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler
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