Our lives are formed of the ebb and flow of knowledge. This is not static knowledge, but that which courses, for understanding never stands still. It is the kind of knowing which keeps moving, shifty and restless, threading its way in a torrent through the mind. The act of reading drives me crazy: it's like a thunderstorm when ideas pour down by the bucketful around me. I love the inundation, the sleek streaming texture of words and phrases. I stretch out my arms and gallop madly through this deluge, celebrating its ferocity and my puniness. I seek the contrast between my grasping need and the vast generous impartiality of ideas; I need the reassurance and the madness. I cannot keep much of the power which comes pouring down, but this isn't for want of trying - usually I'm out there with my big foolish mouth wide open, snatching at the droplets with my tongue.
      Afterwards I feel washed out, exhausted, a little bemused. I can sense new paths in my thoughts like riverbeds. The soil there is still damp, sated; it is a conduit which waits for me to try and fill it, to chase those bursts of illusive, flash-flooding intuition. The few gleaming droplets I do grab hold of refract, shattering light like sunshine after a storm. Their beauty gleams and sparkles off every facet of my life. Sometimes they trace a pattern of shadows of which I have been ignorant; they outline the dark spots inside of me which I could not directly perceive. These holes are too blank and empty to register, otherwise: I avoid them; I would never go near them if not led there by a book or another's ideas.

      Work is the key, I think, to my own particular most recent shower of illumination. Jeeze, that flurry was so fierce it almost swept me off my metaphorical feet! It blew me right away from the path I was traveling, shocked me into orbit, left me dangling and wondering which way to spin.
      I was traveling that path because of work. My job took me all over, translating articles from one language to another, calming and equivocating and interpreting the meanings of sentences as well as their sounds. I found myself stating the same plaint over and over again, arguing with science and scientists and authors and a few rare humans. The job took me away from my "family ties", pitiable though they are; away from Rahula, my fetter, away from a sordid apartment and unwashed dishes and dying goldfish. (I forgot to feed the fish. Too busy feeding the two of us.) It ripped me away from the things I found unbearably mundane and forced me - no better - to face the foreign, the resistant, the unfamiliar; lodged me in cheap hotels spewing layman lectures to college townships. I didn't know whether I loved it or hated it. I needed the money to support a child I didn't understand and a lifestyle I couldn't define. I needed a release, a medium, a métier - but I couldn't stand the tension and quarreling and petty academic battles. That's the way I grew up, in an atmosphere of disillusionment; that's the way I was raising my son. The realization hit way too close to home.

      Big Greyhound bus. I sit here, brooding: I am sweaty, throbbing, disheveled. I am tired of watching all the fascinating people go by and even more tired of sharing a single sixty-mile-an-hour space with fifty of 'em. I have shut myself into my own little world, locked myself into a book where I am secure from tired eyes and rancid bodies. I define MY area through the embryonic bend of my knees, the curl of my spine; I have won unto myself a bubble between the space of two stifling seats, and here I intend to stay.
      I am reading Marx, and reacting deeply.

     "Labour is external to the worker, i.e. it does not belong to his essential being... In his work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labor. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it."

      Marx isn't the only author prodding at me with such stimulus for thought. There's Freud, too. "As a path to happiness, work is not highly prized by men. They do not strive after it as they do after other possibilities of satisfaction. The great majority of people only work under the stress of necessity..." These dead white men are so totally in agreement with one another over this issue, and so absolutely in tune with the insight brewing inside of me, that they leave me gasping.
      Freud in particular examines with critical clarity the lot of humanity as a social species. He believes that man is ill-suited to civilization; he points out that life is fraught with pain and anguish. He says that we can never be completely, utterly happy, because the external environment and our own organic bodies will not cooperate with our dreams. And yet we must keep trying, keep struggling to find satisfaction! This reminds me of the Buddhism which fascinated me as a teenager; the seven-fold path to Enlightenment. The "right" way; the "right" livelihood. Maybe the "right work" whose demise (or nonexistence) Marx so savagely argues is is one which "belongs to the essential being". I think Gauthama Buddha would agree with that.
      Freud's doctrine sounds a bit like the seven-fold path: in the way of Buddhism, he claims that life consists of a hopeless quest for happiness - for Glück, luck, dukhka - and he believes that unhappiness comes to a man from the three sources of environment, fellow humans, and body. He lists three methods of dealing with the pains and hardships of life (Very methodical guy, is Freud...), these being deflection, substitution, and intoxication. One could regard these categories as the unapproachability of enlightenment, of absorbed satisfaction, the cold comfort of a muse; the distraction of art or beauty; and nepenthe or absinthe in the form of drugs, liquor, sleeping pills, or physical exhaustion. Work falls under the heading of deflection; the muse is supposedly able to make a being forget his mortal anguish.

      "One gains the most if one can sufficiently heighten the yield of pleasure from the sources of psychical and intellectual work.... A satisfaction of this kind, such as an artist's joy in creating, in giving his phantasies body, or a scientist's in solving problems or discovering truths, has a special quality..."

      I find the closest definition yet to Marx's condition that work "belong to [the] essential being" in Freud's statement that "Professional activity is a source of special satisfaction if it is a freely chosen one - if, that is to say...it makes possible the use of existing inclinations." Freud says that one can rid oneself of the psychic burden of innate "narcissistic, aggressive, or even erotic" tendencies by employing them within ones work; by demanding that they become productive rather than stifling them. "Narcissistic, aggressive, or even erotic" - and I am all of these. Narcissus, pretty flower.... So this is what Marx means by his "essential being" - that I must find a livelihood, a way of life, which speaks to who I am inside; which embraces and personifies me. I have to find a life's work, an activity which fits this artist-cum-academic, bourgeois-proletariat, monkish demimonde and the convoluted amalgam of masks behind which I hide.
      I think that any of the goals I've held in my past careers, any of the shifts I've worked or the standards I've born might fulfill me in this way. Given the opportunity, any of them could satisfy my spirit. I have simply neglected to demand from them this intimate fulfillment. If I'd given that little kick, the extra shove of adrenalin, the burst of affection, the intensity - they might have taken off. I have never played for high stakes; never expected to find true happiness right under my nose.
      Freud says I can't do it, that such happiness is unobtainable - that the best one can do is jump off this spinning wheel. Samsara. "The weak point of this method is that it is not applicable generally: it is accessible to only a few people. It presupposes the possession of special dispositions and gifts which are far from being common..." In Freud's eyes, job satisfaction is available only to Bill Gates and Leonardo da Vinci, to CEO's and geniuses but not to college burnouts and failed single mothers.
      Well, I think Freud is full of it! What does he know of my determination? Now I've learned from him, sucked out the marrow of his knowledge, slurped up all I can hold, I'm going to leave him behind. All I have to do is choose, make an active decision, pick a metier, vocation, avocation; consciously seek my mind's desire. I have to work for my chosen goal with all the intensity of my soul. If labour is life activity, life-engendering life - well then, I am going to live. I will select a language, or several - the musical motion of objects through space, through time, through endless shifting dimensions; conversations of equations, of calligraphic characters; sound understood as a physical phenomena or lived from the stage of a concert hall. I am going to be a mother, and an artist, and a creator.

      My son has promised to meet me at the bus stop with my friend, his father. I can see them standing stiffly side-by-side. They are so much alike that it is humorous: they suspect one another of the most bizarre of motives, of incentives, of characters. I love them both. I could begin now by learning to be a translator, a peacemaker, an easer of tensions. By learning to be what I am. I covet it all: the understanding, the fluency, the languages, the people - I want to be go-between, medium, interpreter. I will hunt down these illusive shadows; chase the raindrops, the tears, the laughter. I can float leaf boats on flood-waters and speak in tongues. I will seek a life's work.

      I will read, and run barefoot in the rain.