Words Of Wisdom

I was reading Cary Tennis' archives on Salon, and these are my favorite bits. I didn't save the exact pages from which I got these quotes, but that's OK. It's just a sampling...

<- The fact that you are a little crazy doesn't mean you have no rights.

Who is it who decides that our wishes are ridiculous or not ridiculous, anyway?

Our wishes, after all, are very close to feelings. Like feelings, they are not always rational. But they deserve respect.

<- Our churches have become the propaganda wings of political parties.

<- Why not simply accept that death will come to us all, and let it come when it comes? Why not recognize death as the one merciful thing that will bring us finally together. Why not see death as the final antidote to our crippling feeling of insufficiency. Finally, if we feel we have not been good enough for anything in life, at least we are good enough to die. At least death will embrace us as it embraces your mother and my uncle and my father-in-law and every other soul who has ever lived and ever will live.

<-You love each other and love is part madness. You love each other and are caught up in a mad dance of veils. Behind the veils that she waves in the air are her secrets, and thus her secret stories, and thus her sacred story, the one she cannot tell for fear it will lose its power of enchantment.

I suggest we more fully embrace the eros of interaction and the sweet honey of need.

I am trying to signal that at root love is madness; it is a contract not between people but between souls. It is different from your marriage. Your marriage is a contract between two people. But your love is a contract between two souls. Love is crazy because the souls want what they want and you don't have much to say about it.

Apparently in the marriage contract there is a clause in invisible ink that says we must sever all our ties and mute all our needs and close all the windows and become what we are not in order to protect the inviolable envelope of the marriage contract. But that is not always practical. There will be violations because we are who we are.

Many of us need more attention to feel more alive. Some of us need to stand in the spotlight and hear the applause. Some of us need a kind of intimacy we can only find outside the house. There is nothing wrong with wanting a fuller social life. There is nothing wrong with needing to be in the spotlight. There are ways to get that honestly. There are ways to get that by forming open friendships, and by performing, and in the fantasy realm.

What I say, at the risk of sounding like an idiot, is that love is naturally the realm of madness. You, your wife and I are all stark raving mad. Begin in madness. Accept everything. Trudge slowly under your great burdens toward some kind of rationality if you must. But accept that you may never get there. You may be perpetually trudging through madness toward some illusory land of Apollo. That's the way it is.

We are all mostly crazy. It's that simple.

<- It takes courage and strength not to repeat, because repetition feels like repair.

<- Opportunistic religiosity. People who revere authority will often turn to God, but if there is no God present, the doctor might do just fine.

"Opportunistic religiosity." Yeah, I need to give that one a think. Might make a good post.