Beauty is a monster, but it's still worth the search

Let the beauty you seek be what you do. -Rumi

Left to my own devices, I am a baboon wandering the wilderness. I would rather be either 1) at my desk writing or 2) on a barstool drinking than engaged in any other activity.  These two truths about me have been constant for roughly 20 years. I don't expect either of those things to change any time soon.  Both of those predilections have led me have both a ceaseless need to wander and a deep-rooted desire for love and stability. If all of these things seem to be contradictions, then you are correct. This is nothing more than a condensed explanation of the human condition. In spite of our desire to be utterly, drudgingly consistent through and through, human beings are driven by natural and contradictory needs.

A man who does not recognize he is beast with a thin veneer of manufactured civility is lying to himself. I've come around to the idea over the last few years that even admitting this falls short of enough. It's not enough to simply identify the beast. If the focus of a life is to embrace beauty, to seek enlightenment, to live as one with a higher ethic and moral conscious -- indeed, to eventually return to God -- a man has to, to a certain degree, accept and embrace the beast. If we accept Keats' poetic dictum: Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty'*, we must also accept that beauty is not always a comforting or comfortable thing. Beauty can be terrifying.

The weight on the other end of the fulcrum are my obligations -- to those I love, to those who love me, and to that short list of people whose opinions matter.

Lately I've been writing about the Grand Experiment -- my attempt to both hold down a job and pursue Beauty.  Like every other round of the Grand Experiment, this last round ended in failure. I allowed myself to get absorbed into the work I was doing, scribbling along the way, but ultimately I was chasing something other beauty, other than art. Something other. When this happens, the beast that is me gets surly. My temper -- which I have managed to meticulously starve and bury in the back of my psyche -- starts to taste the air.

I've decided to stop trying to restrain my temper as much as work it like hot steel. It's not so much that I want to fly off the handle, but I want to stop feeling guilty because I sometimes do. Anger, like any other emotion, can have justified roots. Anger, like any other impulse, will be misused and abused if I don't get used to it.





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* "Ode to a Grecian Urn"
 
If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
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Notes on the Grand Experiment: nothing but a twisted ankle will get me down...

 In forgiving an injury be somewhat ceremonious, lest your magnanimity be construed as indifference. - Ambrose Bierce

Buster Keaton, Steamboat Bill, Jr., (1928)

Somewhere between trying to forget that I hate washing dishes and trying to remember that I do, in fact, like cheese*, I've been remiss in my writing and podcasting duties. Catering, maybe more so than any other job I've had (other than teaching) is more than a job. It is a universe entirely unto itself. It operates on its own time and at it's own speed regardless of and in spite of what speed the Earth is spinning on its axis. It reminds me a lot of life in theater, too, except for the absence of wrap parties. It's driven by a chaotic energy** that doesn't quit and it requires a certain steel backbone and a particular emotional acquiescence in order to enter it.

As it happens, I am a dishwasher. Being a dishwasher requires a respect for the absurd futility of life.

It also helps to be fast.

One of the things that helps, other than I get to listen to loud music and being nice is considered more of a liability than an asset in a working kitchen, is that I keep the image of Sisyphus firmly in my mind. No matter how many hotel pans I wash, there will always be more. No matter how many times in any given work day I wash the 3 foot tall mixing bowl that the bakery uses to mix batter and the hot side uses to make mashed potatoes, it will always come back and will always need to be washed. No matter how many times I wash cutting boards...

you get the idea.

It never stops. Not really. The goal isn't so much to finish as it is to get things looking like everything isn't one dirty sauce pan away from collapsing under the weight of the gravitational chaos the entire catering cosmos is built upon.

Of course, it would happen during what  is probably the busiest week of the last half of the year that I fall and twist my ankle. I didn't even fall at work, though I'm sure a few of the people I work with have been surprised that hasn't happened. No. I fell in my driveway Because life is basically absurd and futile and it never stops.

Well, Dear Readers, there's always tomorrow. And I'm scheduled for a double. Thank God for over the counter painkillers.


If you like what you're reading here, I have work for sale on my amazon author page:
www.amazon.com/author/mickparsons

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*I wash so much cheese sauce in any given week. On the other side of nearly being broken of my love for cheese, they make maybe the best Kentucky Hotbrown I've ever eaten.
**Working in a busy catering kitchen is pretty much like signing yourself into an insane asylum. Just take your medicine and enjoy the ride.