sex, grog and socrates

I've lost my mojo. I see the signs.

I look out of my window at the swaying leaves--and see them form a huge nasty face. I blink once and the face turns into a green leafy skull. I blink twice and it morphs into a Shakespeare-like baldhead. 

There are many possible explanations for this weirdness. I could be:

1.  deranged (although it doesn't run in the family)

2.  hallucinating (although I'm not stoned)

3.  hexed (that's the only acceptable option)

Or, it might be the end of the world as we know it and I have been chosen as the harbinger of its doom. That certainly sounds epic! The huge sneering face and the skull go well as omens of Armageddon. But for the life of me--I can't work out how Shakespeare's bald head figures in an impending apocalypse!

No. 

I could just be wacko. Gone mental in the blink of an eye. It's not as far-fetched as one might think. This afternoon, my colleagues and I were fooling around with Socrates' famous dictum: "The unexamined life is not worth living."  It roughly means that if we're going to spend our life lying down--never questioning the scheme of things, denying the existence of other views, letting our gray cells putrefy--then we might as well rot in a sensory deprivation tank. It won't matter how long or how short we live because we're already dead, anyway, by simply refusing to think. Thinking necessitates action, or at least a reaction (if not an idea). It becomes a basis for our choices, our feelings, our being. "I think therefore I am"--goes another renowned dictum (it's getting old--these famous dictums!). 

Hanging around our desks cluttered with mounds of tests yet to be marked, my friends and I suddenly toyed with the idea of being able to not think at all. Maybe, on that Wednesday afternoon with the darkening sky looming above us, we were simply tired of thinking and knowing too much--about pain, about change, about love and hate, about disappointments, about all the little blows that life deals to us puny humans all the time. People we love but who can't love us just as much; friends we trust who stab us in our backs; decisions we make which tear our lives in half; words which rush out of our mouths, thoughts which come out of our eyes that cause heartbreak and can never be recalled. Those blows which become magnified and stark and more agonizing when thinking minds struggle to make sense of them. What did The Mole say in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground?

"I swear to you gentlemen, that to be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness.” 

That's why sex is so addictive--it makes one mindlessly ecstatic for a time.

That's why getting plastered is appealing--it shifts one's brain on auto-pilot without blame.

That's why nerve-wracking noise is fantastic--it deadens all other senses and short-circuits all goddamned navel-gazing. 

However, much as we want to, we can't keep rolling in the hay all our lives, or slug in mosh pits just to escape the downside of thinking. Fillers are called such because they fill some cracks quickly and keep the whole wall from crashing down--for a time. We can't have a whole wall built with fillers, just as we can't live a whole life bent on painless escape. To live is to self-realize and there can be no living otherwise.

So then maybe when we see Shakespeare's bald mug forming in the treetops, it's not a prelude to the loony tunes or some psychosomatic tripping, after all. It just means we've been Socratesing and Descartesing so much our own mind is freaking out on us. It means  we need our mojo back. It means we need an R & R. It means--

If all you ever do is business you don't like

Sex and drugs and rock and roll

Is very good indeed

(Ian Dury & The Blockheads)

...  or maybe not!  :)