Stoic Poetry

October 19, 2019 | Dear Eric, I write these words now almost twenty years to the day since I completed my story of you and Joe-Bob, sharing the impact of your living and dying upon my own life. Your example, in fact, derailed my life; as I am confident I would be a quite different person now if not for the experience of knowing you both, and watching you live and choose to exit life together on account of principles which you held and which I could not then understand—which perhaps I still do not understand. Just as I do not understand the principles which others also hold dear, such as the religious, who hold values which sometimes rest upon a foundation of something they call faith. This approach of belief and values based on faith is alien to me, and seems lazy, and dull, and an easy way out of the harder challenge of attempting to understand. Just as the structure of reality which you and Joe-Bob maintained as real was—and remains—alien to me. And yet, like the religious, you had set-up an entire plan and project of your lives together based on that alien reality which you maintained as real. This was the thing which struck me then... The idea of building a life model upon which we might base our living and apply value and meaning to our decisions and actions. Such as the decision you made to follow Joe-Bob into death, a decision founded upon principles which—regardless of what I might think—provided both of you with a sense of meaning to your lives…and your deaths. Your lives had purpose. You had a reason to live and to die even. You had something larger than yourselves to strive for. And this is what others also seem to gain from their own endeavors at organizing their lives around a plan, and perhaps a story, and maybe even a fairytale which may do no more than comfort and seemingly keep the believer safe from the night. The night which is real. The night which must always come—and against which we might build a fortress of comfort, despite the fortress not being real, or of much substance, or of much truth. For the fortress need not last any longer than us. The vain fortress is welcome to fail after we are gone. Our stories need last no longer than there is someone to remember and relate the tale.

And so, after the death of my friends I decided to set out to create and tell a story of my own. A story which must be based on truth. A story founded on what I take to be real. My story would tolerate no comforting nonsense—as I’d prefer the dark and the night and the cold, if this be true, to any artificial light, or day or warmth which may be false, and which might only distract and keep back the night and the sound of the howling out there further than I might ever have courage to go. I resolved then to not keep back the dark, and to go—alone—into the dark, and to not take any light, or flame, or anything of comfort, and to stay longer there than perhaps I should, and then to come back and consider, set down and tell the story of what I’d found—or hadn’t. A story which I maintain as true. A story of my Going Alone. And of The Good Life I now attempt to live.

Full blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/a-plan-of-life-and-death

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October 18, 2019 | Dear Eric, Why bother waking if only to then rest with our eyes wide open? Are there not better ways to improve the world than as an inanimate living corpse; reclining and at ease while daylight surges overhead and necessity demands a helping hand? Sure, we need our rest. But is it not better to sleep long and full by night to then rise and engage long and full by day? I'm not suggesting we never rest—but only that rest be found in its proper season and in such a way as to be in harmony with nature and the judicious and modest use of our time.

I did not rise this morning for ease or leisure, but to spite my lack of ease or leisure.

And what if I've no chance of leisure, despite my fatigue or sense of having earned a rest? Well, what then better way to couple resolve with the fact of necessity, or our current circumstance, to then form virtue of worthy action, words and outlook? Such a blessing to work when we must, despite our desire to rest when necessary work must yet be done.

Full blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/up-before-dawn

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October 17, 2019 | Dear Eric, It's not possible to ever fully return from a solitary venture into the deep desert. The mountains, yes. The sea, maybe - unless we go very far off-shore, and, of course, alone. But the desert, far off road, alone and past the point we neither see nor hear the others. No, we can't ever fully return from such adventure. Something of us always remains out there. Well, the something lost isn't really out there, it's simply removed from us and lost the moment it goes away. The something evaporates away into space like water spilt upon hot sand which we think sinks in to the place, but which really simply disappears before our eyes

and is gone as vapor. That's what happens to some part of us way out there alone in the desert. We become less. There's less of us ever to move forward. And nothing comes in to replace what is lost—it is lost forever. And such a blessing is the absence. I can hardly share with you the experience. You'd have to lose it for yourself to really know.

Full blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/becoming-a-nihilist

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October 16, 2019 | Dear Eric, To the best of my knowledge, you never once went truly alone into the wild. But that's no surprise, as few ever do. For Going Alone is something our species rarely does. No wonder perhaps we then take ourselves so seriously... No wonder we sometimes sense warmth radiating from the cold.

There are campfires

All across this plain

Cold lights, warm with life

Inviting living

Friendship and love

Away from the darkness beyond

I understand, the darkness beyond is indeed a terrible thing. There is nothing very welcoming in deep night. There are few happy stories to bring back from very pure solitude; only close calls with danger and death and fearful tales of strange sights and noises and ideas. So, why then would anyone ever step even once away from the ring of fire that is the centerpiece of their living? Why leave the others behind for any reason other than to briefly move away in order to relieve oneself behind a bush, wondering while so doing if there are eyes in the dark looking back, and considering briefly our vulnerability out there away from the crowd. So, we then dart back quickly when our work is done and take our place again huddled close to the others with our hands held near the flame. Shouldn't this fire be warmer? Why does the flame somehow produce more light than heat? Where's the warmth? Where is the REAL warmth?

But there's talk around the fire, a seemingly incessant warm chatter. There's the heat, perhaps...it's the energy of noisy show and attention and the draw of distraction and trust and deceit and success and failure and the whole lot and production of our living that burns hot. All of this is the source of a sort of warmth we mistake for the fire, which still burns less warm than natural heat should. For should not nature offer us more? Shouldn't the natural world speak plainly of all the dear things we maintain as true: friendship, community, love, peace and forever? How can the flame which we, and our predecessors, kindled and maintain be as cold as the nighttime darkness beyond? This cannot be. I won't have it. I simply will not. I maintain otherwise and sustain my claim with the posture and attitude of certainty. And I back up my position with the substance of faith.

"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Hebrews 11:1

I don't understand those other things... Those things you keep bringing up about the seeming cold within the flame. Won't you stop talking of that, please. Let's get on with the community discussion. Let's hear the day's news? And what about those Dodgers! Never mind about the flame... What of it? I told you already, I have faith. I don't need any better answer than that. Huddle close to me won't you. I'm cold.

Full blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/away-from-the-fire

My website: https://goingalone.org

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October 15, 2019 | Dear Yumiko, Without costumes, and two weeks too soon, we haunted together yesterday the scene and setting of one of our past lives; a place we each once took for granted, or even gave little or no thought to, though it was the setting of our home and our lives then; a pass-through city where we lived a few years in pursuit of another life; a younger life, a less deliberate life of immediacy and excess and searching. We left that place together two-decades back with a fortune and memories, and returned yesterday with only a fortune of memories and something more...a "story" and perhaps some maturity to help us see past the immediacy and excess and searching which once blinded us to whatever current life we could not then live for the fact of our incessant gaze towards something else. That something else is now largely forgotten—not given up, but forgotten - or maybe simply realized as not true, or anything worth being sought. That's it. The old dream—the old dream of youth—was discovered to be quite shallow and almost empty; a straw figure and caricature of how we once thought life should be...must be...the only way we then really knew.

And so, we returned yesterday together like old soldiers returning home from a twenty-years war. We walked side-by-side—leading and carrying our small dogs—through the city gates we recognized, and right up through the boulevard into the community of our past neglect. Everything is mostly the same... Though there are new faces to be sure. Faces which were children or which did not exist the last time we were here. Faces which themselves may now see the old dream which we once sought as real. It's still there, clearly, the old dream... Or maybe it's nowhere? Maybe it's only a figment of youth? We are blind to that dream now it seems, though we remember it, and we spoke of it—like the memory of being terribly ill, the fever and the pain and the inability to sleep or rest or to ever feel good or even to know any real peace. Walking these streets together yesterday I could remember all this and more, including the drive and determination—as well as the dawning upset of falsity and illusion—which I once wore like an expensive coat everywhere I went, like a feign reality of determined satisfaction I might somehow make real if I only showed it outwardly for all the world to see. Or maybe the sense was more like smoke-tinted glasses, casting a strange, dark hue upon everything I saw, adding some sense of distance and disconnect to all that was immediate and now. That's it, I think... I could not easily see now then for my want and desire of a future I thought should be true. That want is no more. That desire is passed. I've been to that future and I know better what it is and what it is not. That future was given up for the present—not fully yet, of course, we can probably never achieve that great feat—but mostly. Yeah. Mostly... And this has made a difference. The streets of our past therefore looked the same, as they hardly changed, though we now no longer simply see past them as we did twenty-years back, as we now no longer desire to live someplace imagined, and only wish to live in the place which is real. And so, we haunted together the streets of our past life—though now we are no longer ghosts.

Full blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/haunting-a-past-life

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October 14, 2019 | Dear Eric, What did you wonder over as you walked quietly to your death? I like to imagine you thought of the egg-laying hen which lived out back of your home in Eureka. Joe Bob was gone, and you knew you'd see him soon... All the people in your life were settled with the truth—as unsettling as it was—and you needn't worry any more about us. Your estate... What of it? Not even a thought. But that chicken out back in your yard...the egg-laying hen you both loved; she's one you would have thought over. I hope you found her a new home in time... If not, then you would certainly have been thinking chicken on your way to die.

"Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.” - Henry David Thoreau

But it's our stuff, and our busyness about it all which helps keep back the dark. Not the true dark, we can't so easily forget that; but the immediate darkness, the faint black all around which might remind us that we are alone in this night despite the candles each of us carry and protect. Slight flames, guttering in the desert winds, winds that always somehow blow into the deeper depths of the wastes; blowing in the direction we'd better not go; blowing to where the black is more natural and settled and less easily persuaded to move or to be set aside. It's the stuff we collect and possess which seems to guard us from this wind. And it's our busyness about this stuff which distracts us from what is coming, and what has already come, and what was here yesterday and always. It's the stuff and our attendance which helps us to remember the fantasy that we are not truly alone.

I had a thief break-in and relieve me of possessions I hardly knew I didn't need. I'm grateful for what he didn't leave behind.

And so, we build our shelter and linger within to protect our little flame; and we acquire things and place them all about to fortify our claims to now and forever. We might even utterly surround our candle with stuff enough that the flame seems truly safe from the wind, and we can fool ourselves that it will not go out. What a game that... Living as though the wind cannot get in. Living while peeking outside through the very cracks and chinks which betray our flame's vulnerability. The wind WILL get in. It's in now, even. How much better, and more honest, and more to the point, would it be to step outside the shelter, or let the structure blow away; to then stand in the wind with just our cupped hand protecting the little flame. How much more honest a life could we possibly live and endure. And such a living...

Blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/thinking-chicken

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October 13, 2019 | Dear Eric, I expect you discovered Stoic principles without knowing they were such, as ideas like these are natural to anyone who honestly consults their reason while life pushes back.

And life does always push back... Like gravity it pushes back, always in the direction of down - where down is towards disorder and dissolution and death. Though we can resist this draw for a time; life pushes—or pulls rather—always down towards fact over fancy and change leading to everything one day at an end of all order. It's that end which is the fact—and the thing we make up stories against to go away. Our own end to be sure. We make the fearful thing go away by masking the famine of death with a feast of authentic love suggesting a banquet of forever.

Temperance, apathy and an awareness of death: such are the ingredients of a still and quite mind of peace. Like eating dry salt crackers in a desert when nothing could be better.

Go away, death! I will remain—forever—despite your arrival. Come take my wife, or my child or my friend, and they too will go on...because I say so. Come take me also and I will live on as well. I'm forever don't you know..? Don't you? So, death takes the wife, and the child and myself. And my story is forgotten like the rest. My forever becomes like the nothing it was before the dream was proclaimed eternal. Just sounds in a void. A few utterances in the sunshine before the light goes out. It's thoughts like this that demand a more honest assessment and truth. It's such thinking which stills the tongue and shuts the mouth and softens the eyes which gaze at our now living wife and child and at all we have. It's the testimony of reason which demands our humble withdrawal from before the awesome theater of night and day and the swimming course of moments moving through indifference. We withdraw our reckless speech and protest and sit instead wherever we can - this rock will do - and summon our family to sit with us. We ask about their day with sincerity while the sky blazes above our heads with too numerous stars to comprehend, all singing entropy like a discordant chorus of fact. Just gazing up once should blind forever the vanity of any one who is wise. And so, we go on through our remaining days. Each day better than the last - come what may—though also quieter too. For what use is there in speech and action or consumption when only the quiet remembers the truth. And so, we are quiet. And so, we remember the truth.

This is The Good Life—quiet, remembrance of the truth.

Blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/quiet-remembrance-of-the-truth

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October 12, 2019 | Dear Eric, Would you ever have not taken your own life? Though I do not believe in fate, I'm convinced you had no real choice but to die when you did. Sure, it was your choice—yet you could have made no other. This is because free will is an illusion...

I could not do otherwise now than to type these words. My desire, opportunity and motive all drive me to do so. This pecking at the keyboard now is precisely what I must do now, though I believe this action was my choice. But now that I know I am not truly free, that the universe mindlessly requires my every decision and action exactly as I make it, I can therefore choose to exercise my motive will in the direction of improved and better actions, which strangely, I had no other real option to pursue. This game of feign control - of deciding, and then doing, and then deciding and doing again, until I'm dead - is the illusion I call my free life, and the false thing I call my independence. It's only that I cannot see very far past my seeming immediate self-management that I gain the false sense that I have some real control. I do not. I am just a result and consequence of thirteen-billion years of action and reaction and action again...on and on through time, like waves crossing a vast sea in every direction and lifting water here and there for brief moments at a time. A leaf floating upon such a sea is never free of the sea which supports and maintains it, and the consequent energies which come together to push and pull and animate its existence. And I too am never free of the great sea of everything from which I came, and now am, and will soon no longer be.

I was, am and never will be free. None of us is free. We're all leaves upon a tossing sea.

Blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/leaves-upon-the-sea

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October 11, 2019 | Dear Eric, I think we all desire to do well. And by this I mean to not just get by, but to complete our work to the level of satisfaction of a job well done. Only, so often we can't see or remember this aim for the distraction and folly of intemperate living. We get lost along a meandering pathway of unworthy answered emotions; feelings which we hear and hastily hearken to like breadcrumbs carelessly followed into a dark wood; followed and consumed one-by-one until we look up, disoriented and confused, suddenly wanting the safe home we can no longer see, and striking out recklessly in the first direction our panicked mind suggests. It's then when we fail to do well. It's then when we suffer the consequence of our folly in not minding the way; of not looking carefully at the next breadcrumb before us before taking another measured step into the weeds, of not asking ourselves after the worth of such an endeavor, of not providing oversight of our want to consume and to possess and to satisfy the base desire to have.

I did not wake today to simply act and re-act

But to do well the things which are well

And to mind the things which are not

When I assess the next breadcrumb as worthwhile; only then will I proceed...slowly...to attend, engage and possibly possess or even consume the object of my determined will. But not without first lifting my head to look ahead at where I am going, not without noting where my next steps may take me, and looking back at where I've just been and considering where I wish to be overall. And if the breadcrumb is shrouded in shadows such that I cannot clearly know where these new steps will lead, then I will engage reason to reflect upon the merit and risk of such a venture—what good or bad may come of going into the dark after such a thing? And if my ruling faculty does then sanction the journey, I may next need to attend my fears, which perhaps plead with me to cower behind current secure ways: "Please, don't go! Don't bring us with you... We'd rather remain here. That thing you perceive in the darkness there—let someone else attend to it. Stay here with us. Stay—or think—just what we now know, and what is now safe, the reassuring certainty of our current certitude." I'll listen to my fears. And I'll give us an honest hearing. But then I'll turn and go—and drag the fearful me along into the dark should the better me decide the darkness a better place to go, and the place where all of me can best do our necessary work. All of me is going into the dark, for good or bad, and for the sake of right.

Full blog post URL: https://www.goingalone.org/post/a-job-well-done

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October 10, 2019 | Dear Eric, You not only knew the exact place and time of your death but you indeed even walked there. You went alone. I wonder how quickly you walked to your knowing end...

Imagine every day the place of your contrived death. And then picture each step on an inexorable path to that end. Note how the steps slow and become measured. That's a way to walk and live—knowing always where we are indeed headed. With a little luck we'll never arrive at that imagined place. Though we will always one day at last arrive.

Does anyone walk quickly to the gallows? Perhaps some will move fast, wishing the deed over and the suffering of knowing done. But we're all walking to the gallows always, only we don't often know how near the end. And so, we forget the journey's inexorable end, and we walk with some ease of abandon. We walk as though we are free, and not chained to a ox-cart moving senselessly beyond our will. And we even run sometimes - like a child at the seashore dashing forward to chase the retreating waves. And then we're caught all at once in the swirling, cold waters of the returning maddened sea, wondering what happened as our last breath fails and the lights flicker out. That's one way to live and then die; to charge headlong through life towards interest, neglecting the fact of the coming end, until the fact is here. Would such a death be a willing death? Could we go willfully to such an end? Or would we die grasping back at the sands and our people upon the shore while drowning down into the deep?

Another way is to deny the end. To accept or even make up some tale of forever after life is done; an imagined sequel to enjoy and share with loved ones and the select few who know better than to doubt. And so, we bow and pray and console one-another to pass the days, and grieve the loss of those who go before, who we hope to see again someplace better than here. And thus, we live our lives telling stories of tomorrow, and tales of forever - dying at last in blissful terror and remembrance of what we hope might not be true.

And then there is the Stoic way. To walk a knowing journey of the gallows end. To neither delay nor hasten our movement along a winding path with a determined end. To rest well and soon at nightfall, and then rise early next day to start again. To neither smother truth with intemperance, nor ignore with groundless dreams of forever. To issue recognition of our own mortality through measured control of our speech; neither talking in excess nor through superfluous words or much volume or show of knowledge or foresight, but just enough to address well whatever issue is at hand or counsel has been sought. And to share company with others in such a way as to be present and engaged and pleasant without either excess attendance or attention being given or drawn at any time - but to be like a balanced scale resting at ease in equanimity in a crowded marketplace; engaged at times towards useful ends while otherwise simply being. And so, the days will pass; living at once and always in a day. Never expecting tomorrow, while yet preparing for another day. And then the gallows are here... And our footsteps hardly falter... There's a slight push upon our arm as we breathe again, and then step upon the scaffold.

Full Blog post: https://www.goingalone.org/post/prepared-to-arrive

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