Comes the Rain Again

Nothing is on my mind.

The lack of a lack of rain is beginning to make me insane, again.

I wrote two new posts today but do not know whether to post them. They are a little racy.

Maybe I will post them anyway.

One contains a poem I wrote about having a girl some years ago and also admits a thing or two I might prefer to keep hidden; the other is my anti-war song from 2006 that nobody liked.

Gabriel told me I should not post the first one, therefore, I think I may.

I like having content.

I wish I liked being content.

That is a reference to another thing I've been up to, which is reading Erich Fromm. His book, To Have or To Be? introduces this idea of There are two modes of existence, the Being mode (not us) and the Having mode (us). In one section, he illustrates the differences between Being and Having in various areas of life: Conversing, Reading, Remembering, Exercising Authority, etc. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

On Reading:

[In the having mode,] the school aims to give each student a certain amount of "cultural property," and at the end of their schooling certifies the students as having at least the minimum amount. ... The difference between various levels of education from high school
to graduate school is mainly in the amount of cultural property that is acquired, which corresponds roughly to the amount of material property the students may be expected to own in later life.

On Faith:

Faith, in the having mode, is the possession of an answer for which one has no rational proof. It consists of formulations created by others, which one accepts because one submits to those others ... It relieves one of the hard task of thinking for oneself and making decisions.

On Love:

Can one have love? If we could, love would need to be a thing, a substance that one can have, own, possess. The truth is, there is no such thing as "love." ... In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity. It implies caring for, knowing, responding, affirming, enjoying: the person, the tree, the painting, the idea. It means bringing to life, increasing his/her/its aliveness. ...

When love is experienced in the mode of having it implies confining, imprisoning, or controlling the object one "loves." It is strangling, deadening, suffocating, killing, not life-giving. What people call love is mostly a misuse of the word, in order to hide the reality of their not loving.

What are we to make of all of this? Tiles to add to the mosaic called "A Framework for Interpreting Reality (Incomplete)," perhaps; or fanciful ideas that would be nice if they were true; or fanciful ideas deserving of actualization. I like the discussion of love in particular, and think it is a very nice corollary to the thoughts I expressed in the last post, that Jim felt were so Jay-like. I think I need to let this marinate in my subconscious before I can find any conclusion.