Master of the House

This morning, what with the sunny hush that has descended upon this little city, with but a few car sounds reminding me of onwards, elsewhere, I decided to make a commitment to beginning this blog post honestly. Or maybe I am inspired to honesty because I saw the film My Dinner with Andre this weekend, and was struck by the part where Andre describes Grotowski giving up theatre because everyone was already performing so well in their own lives, already looking so much the stereotypical part. It may be a public service to reveal where the clay has cracked.
In the past few days, questions of livelihood and even righteous indignation seem to have found my address and have attempted to bang on my door. But to be truly hospitable is to sometimes offer such comers a big slice of silence. I do not want to let them in!
And we all know that in times of difficulty, it is best to keep one's mouth shut, as even well-wishers are tempted to dole out that sickly-sweet treacle of, everything will turn out fine - which, by the way, I believe is true, it's just that I think that particular message is a deeply personal one.
And while I began, at least in the second paragraph, with an admission, claiming to be honest, my admission is one that I do not take to heart, because experience teaches that obnoxious guests are but phantoms - from the φαντάζω family. Like ten days ago, the dentured, silver-permed woman who cleans my building couldn't help herself from squawking about how her account was overdrawn and how she needed an advance payment. This week, she announced her family was off to holiday. How much, I thought, her roller-coaster resembled my own, when I had been undecided.
But one year, I decided not to worry for a year: the question is, and is always, do we want to roll about in our misery? Or do we prefer to stand up, like a 'man?
Difficulty, never at peace, whirls around and seeks out one's address (and who knows the insidious ways in which it is procured) and huffs and puffs like in a child's tale. Tales inhabited by creatures as well as people, because, for example, to be too dogged is to be the dog.

After I watched Dinner with Andre, I wandered through other youtube links to find Q&A sessions with a yogi who I have not read up on. One video was entitled, "Why Do Desires Go Unfulfilled After Working So Hard?" One illustration the yogi gave in his answer was of a man who fell into a septic tank. Up to his shoulders in filth, he began to cry for help, but everyone said, oh, it's that fool again. So, he cried out, "Fire, fire!" but when the fire crew came, they saw there was no fire and asked indignantly who had called them. "Lower your ladder," the filthy man cried, so they did, and when they reprimanded him for calling them when there was no fire, he replied, "But if I hadn't, you wouldn't have come, to help me out," a message the yogi said demonstrated knowing the right thing to do.
But I think that sometimes the right thing to do is accepting, acceptance of oneself, and also not expecting a tit-for-tat relationship with the universe. Meaning that if one works so hard, one isn't to expect immediately visible results. In other words, I think that the question of that lecture is problematic.
This post contains a paradox. Of the attempt toward honesty, and an attempt to speak, but of the admission that silence is sometimes the best medicine. By silence, I also mean, just letting things be, letting the tension of the unresolved play its strange song. The uninvited guests will eventually leave when they see they are not being entertained: when they see they cannot entertain themselves by provoking their host.

Brush. Magazine.