I need an inner life regardless of what the Head Prefect at Gino’s says, and sometimes when things get too much at Gino’s, I go and ‘hang out’ in the rear courtyard at Breaks Café, where hardly anyone goes, to turn inwards, for a while, and see, if maybe, I can write something.
The soul has its own peculiar concerns, demands and necessities as Carl Jung said. And one of those peculiar necessities is an inner life. And it is like a walled garden at Breaks(and there was once a name for places like this, a ‘temenos’, or an enclosure or precinct, somehow set apart from the profane world where someone could go and contemplate things).
And sometimes I need to wander out of the profane world and take refuge in the walled garden and contemplate things. Like where do songs come from and how does music work? And about what the soul wants? And I also have to think about the tremendous mystery of life which is so much greater than ourselves. And I have found it is best not to speak about any of these things, or about the soul and its mysteries in the modern secular world.
Anyway, I can only handle so much of the Trump Towers and the Kardashians and the great shopping malls of the modern world, before I get a nervous twitch and start to recite whole verses of Rumi out aloud. And only so much of the secular materialism that is dominating everything before I get an overwhelming urge to take the turn inwards. And only so much of the modern marketplace go and sit in the walled ‘temenos’ at Breaks, for a while.
And we seem to have become more steeped in competitive materialism, than even we would like to admit. And success has become quite literal. And I am not even sure if the person with the most toys wins. And it is all so ýang’, when you think about it, the relentless climb upwards towards the thoroughly visible success(and masculine and heroic and in its intent). And sometimes I need something a little more ýin’, and a little more inward.
Anyway, ‘Welcome to the Machine’ from Pink Floyd still swirls around in my head. And there are too many machine metaphors in the modern machine world for me. And it’s the functionalism that gets me the most((which has its own particular style and taste, some of it handed down from the factory or the assembly line). And I seem to be more interested in the soul and its imagination and its poetic basis of the mind than with a cold efficiency.