Working Man Blues

You can never go home again

I enjoy this day of no labor and incredible leisure by staying close to this apartment dwelling my domicile since the 12th day of June after waking to my wife no longer living at 8AM. No longer a home and not quite an artists studio this not-home, my domicile, shall be unaffordable by a token amount of money missing. $150 overall cash flow each month to pay one bill I am forced to pay and cannot afford but shall not to pay having changed debit cards. My wife insisted on a new I-Phone upon leaving 30 days of Hospitalization and surgery. We bought one for her. She hated it after 3 months. Wanted another phone. I had another phone she did not like. We kept the I-phone due to the contract. Contract evidently involves me. I contemplate leaving this contract by stealth. I will speak to my bank. I am doubtful.

So as a Realist I apply for jobs. As a Realist of this town seeking work each year living here and now and zen lucky until the job crashes and burns. The last legit gig 2018/19 and then comes absurd Covid and now the aftermath. I read obsessively to keep from self murder and for 60 years it has worked but these truth claims about job market is bull shit. I see on LinkedIn - which I visit due to severe mental illness - now and then 500 humans applying for same gig. Indeed does not tell me nor ask for money. CraigsList is bogus as well. Most times unless ya got ducats these job boards are as bad as the hiring services of the 70’s when I first crawled into the job market for frilthy lucre then around 1977 deciding being an Artiste with a non-conformist life to be superior.

And it is. Michael Caine was talking of course about the coin of the realm when he quipped “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. Being Rich is better.” I do not speak of this coin. I am rich; and yet, impoverished by Roman death pitiless stony eyed cruel which made a desolation and called it “The Home of Peace.” Symbols are how grim Fate acts.

A book is a symbol. A thinker too. Existence is filled with this pointing the finger at the Moon and all expecting instead a LECTURE or EDIFYING SERMON. That can be ignored by all. This pointing finger cannot.

I sometimes amuse myself as a SMARTER camera.

I read to learn. I know so little and what I say I know - this is also quite suspect.

Send in my Private Detective. The private eye will photograph my snap shot in memory. Stegiel in 1977 you said—and Stegiel in 2023 you said a different thing.

An image reminds me years later my taste changes. Wordsworth is my favorite example. I disliked him from 1974-2014. In fact I always praised and admired Coleridge by contrast. One poem in 1974! This was enough. Too absurd, too mawkish We Are Seven. Then in 2014 I read https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/prospectus-1

A Jungian I read, Wolfgang Giegerich has his perspective influenced by the traditional depth psychologies -Freud, and Jung, and more recently James Hillman’s archetypal psychology. Unlike both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Giegerich argues that the methodology of the empirical sciences is an inadequate basis for the study of psychology. Rather, he draws on the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, the notion of the dialectical movement of consciousness from G. W. F. Hegel, and like Jung, he uses various transformational ideas from medieval alchemy. Additionally, in contrast to modern academic psychology and to the various schools of psychotherapy, Giegerich argues for a shift in focus from the individual, whose very definition has changed radically throughout history, to a focus on the cultural mind, evolving zeitgeist, or as he prefers, “the soul,” which is what ultimately gives rise to the changing understandings of what it means to be an ‘individual’. It is this movement of soul or a culture's mode of being-in-the-world, which when viewed within a historical context, is the primary interest.

Accordingly, in Giegerich's theory, the idea of soul does not function as some kind of objective or empirical substrate producing psychological phenomena. Rather it is the logical structure of thought as which any phenomena, viewed psychologically, exist. As Giegerich states, “There is no such thing as a soul that produces psychological phenomena. The phenomena have nothing behind them. They have everything they need within themselves, even their own origin, their author or subject. ‘The soul’ in my parlance thus does not refer to something real outside of, distinct from, and in addition to psychological phenomenology, but is no more than a still mythologizing, personifying, façon de parler, an expression for the inner soul quality, depth, and internal infinity, of the phenomena themselves as well as for their internal ‘teleology’.”

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

Jean Cocteau

https://ko-fi.com/thejournaloflingeringsanity