On The Beach

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A hang-up again. My mind had been wandering. Philosophical speculations. I swore and jerked the line. It came up with a starfish attached. i removed the starfish, put on fresh bait, gave my full attention to fishing. Alone on the ocean in a small kayak, one indulged in daydreams at one's peril.

Stop!

Stop thinking, commenting, interpreting, asking questions.

But the chatter of my accursed talk machine continued to interfere with my simple awareness. The idiot wanted to know the meaning of things.

What is the sense and significance of life on the earth in general and of human life in particular?

Gurdjieff's great question.

A calypso from the Books of Bokonon drifted through my head.

Tiger got to hunt
Bird got to fly
Man got to sit and wonder,
..."Why, why, why?'
Tiger got to sleep
Bird got to land
Man got to tell himself he understand.

The itch to interpret. The mania for meaning. They concealed the real world as clothes conceal the body of a woman. If you're a lover you want the woman, not the clothes. You want her warm, naked, as she really is.

The naked truth.

Sense and significance?
What is the sense and significance of these white sea anemones who steal my rigs? What is the sense of these pelicans that look like pterodactyls, of Little Orphan Alfie the lost gray whale, of the rocks, of the ocean, of the earth, of the galaxy, of this elderly hominid paddling around in a kayak of fiberglass and resin trying to catch himself a few fish dinners?

They have no sense. They have no significance. They simply are. The itch to interpret is a sickness of the mind. It merely obscures the here and now with a fog of speculation.

Energy, matter, life, mind. The pyramid of Being. At the level of mind the cosmic process becomes conscious of itself. It becomes a witness. I am a witness, here on this ocean. I can see some way into the past, a little into the future. I can see a great deal of the present if I don't ask questions about sense and significance.

Those who insist on asking such questions must invent their own answers. They can believe anything they wish to believe.

Another Bokonon calypso trickled through my head:

I wanted all things
To seem to make some sense,
So we could all be happy, yes,
Instead of tense.
And I made up lies
So that they all fit nice,
And I mode this sad world
A par-a-dise.

Kurt Vonnegut-who had Invented both Bokonon and Bokononism-should really have taken the religion seriously. He could have come to California, where the appetite for new religions is insatiable, and founded the First Bokononist Church. Bokononism made far more sense than a lot of the far out religions that bloomed under the California sun.

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