The best of times the worst of times

[Mark Kohut]

'As you ramble on through life, brother/
whatever be your goal/
Keep your eye upon the donut/
and not upon the hole."
             ---verse on the wall of the Mayflower Coffee Shop & Diner,
downtown Pittsburgh, 1950s-early 60's.

Early life wisdom for me too...

On Fri, Sep 10, 2021 at 12:49 AM Raphael Saltwood <
PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com> wrote:

> Well, yeah, there’s that.
>
> But as my dad used to say, though I’m sure he didn’t make it up, “look at
> the donut, not the hole.”
>
> If you read Pynchon for sentens then sure. But I’ve tended to read him
> more for solas. I mean, yes, he does connect a lot of the dots to make it
> easier to understand how things are so messed up. But there’s those
> beautiful sentences (solas-giving sentences), there’s the cheerfulness of
> his Fools on the brinks of all the cliffs he depicts, there’s the limning
> of moods ne’er so well-expressed, the moments of grace, the camaraderie.
> The humor.
>
> But yeah. It’s like the Bible, in Sunday School and a million or more
> pulpits when they hit those Old Testament tales, and give us the example of
> David or Solomon to emulate. I mean they take one tiny little good thing
> they might have done and completely ignore the thousands of wives and
> concubines which must’ve cramped the style of lots of young Israelite dudes
> looking for love, the territorial expansionism which made them bad
> neighbors, the militarism which wasted so much human potential, so as to
> focus on a few Psalms the content of many of which is dubious or outright
> reprehensible…or make much of an expression of repentance and a belief in
> and acceptance of forgiveness, without any attempt that I can think of to
> make amends or change one’s ways
>
> …looking at the donut with a vengeance…
>
> And why?
> Accentuate the positive?
> IQ test - given the facts, see how many people see the implicit lessons
> (“that was what he did, but really, don’t you be like David, except in
> these carefully curated regards…”)?
>
> Robert Anton Wilson sez regarding division of labor in the individual
> mind: what the thinker thinks, the finder finds.
> Looking for the silver lining?
> Is the main thing about my life that I live in late capitalism and a bunch
> of clueless greed heads are running around doing weird shit that if they
> applied a smidgen of ethics, not to mention commonsense, they could improve
> things for everyone?
>
> Nah - hellz no! - that’s just part of the backdrop.
>
> Checks and balances are inevitable & if I look for the good maybe I can
> find a way to make a positive contribution that isn’t completely clueless.
> Meantime there’s all this other interesting stuff going on, much of which
> has nothing to do with that at all; or even if affected by the clueless
> greed heads there’s still parts that are a bit of all right.
>
> But yeah. Got to do one’s due diligence, move away from being part of the
> problem. Somehow.
>
> Anyway, in re stories -
> Me, I like a verbose explicit moral - but perhaps a panorama of (often,
> but not exclusively) ill effects and a clear (or at least findable)
> attribution of causes to human behaviors (and a panoply of natural laws
> that is still being plumbed, if you can plumb a panoply - like, I want a
> big shower head in my panoply and a Clivus Multrum a-and grey water for the
> garden…) serves the same purpose in fiction.
>
> In place of a simplistic lesson producing an edict that wouldn’t anyhow be
> obeyed (a storyteller doesn’t have recourse to compulsion the way the
> acknowledged legislators of the world have) - we’re given sadness to
> sympathize with, and something to like about even the bad guys.
>
> But yeah. Your point still resonates. It’s why those movies about the
> founding of Facebook or that portray Gates and Jobs don’t have much
> traction for me. They leave so much out.
>
> BE does some much better tinkering with that mythos, imho.
>
>
> Joseph Tracy wrote:
>
>
> Just wanted to mention that this was my most malign and satirically dark
> way of seeing the chums. To me the chums are about the role fiction plays
> in how we interpret history and culture. We have some beautiful fictions
> but it often seems our favorite story, no matter what cultural niche we
> occupy, is how we, the good guys, at great risk have challenged the dark
> forces and won a small or great  battle for all that we( whoever we are)
> hold dear. ( See the Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit.) Now the
> narratives have armies of computers,  mobile phones,  memers, twitterers
> and twits, mostly generating  distractions from the obvious cracks in a
> civilization undermined by its own greed.
>
>
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>