After the storm.
One of the many reasons that I am moving to seek pastures new just a bit more quickly that one might think is that I'm aware that the level of effort, discipline and stress that I'm having to engage here would gain ten or a hundred times as much in a different context. I realized some time ago that half of the people think I'm a national socialist, and the other half think I'm a militant communist, and those two halves are made up of those of the opposite persuasion. I'm simply someone working within the context of Enlightenment thought who is having to impose a self-discipline far beyond everyday standards in order to keep in touch with the local civilization, as corrupt as it is. And I strongly suspect that ethnicity has a lot to do with this.
During the recent cold spell (wind chills of -10 F at times, apparently), I made it a point to spend a good portion of the evening at the quay by the frozen river, where the temperatures and wind are significantly more difficult than the inland areas. If one is going for it, as Gurdjieff says at one point, it is best to go all in, including the postage. And then a few hours of sleep -- I've learned that the body will wake itself when the cold gets too extreme, so I followed its promptings. This might not be the case for everyone, but it seems to work for me, and it is consistent with my general approach to difficult times. When this level of adversity first characterized my life, several years ago, I sometimes made a point of taking a quick daytime nap on the rocks in the park in a manner that required balance, even when sleeping. (Where the risk was bruising, not breakage.) When the soul is challenged to preserve itself in such circumstances, it learns to preserve itself in such circumstances.
But, as noted, they have me in a bit of a corner here. I'm trying to keep up the production of text, but these are the years of the floreat, and I'm using all of my energy just to survive.
And yet... Hic Rhodus, hic salta...
Last time I had to slog through a winter in this manner, Solzhenitsyn was my vade mecum. This winter, Platonov. In addition to the real reading. And an interesting old Hungarian novel just popped into my feed -- Sunflower. Travelling through southern Europe, I sometimes passed entire browned and dry fields of the crop, immense heads all bowed to the same direction, like a terra cotta army waiting resolutely for the world to come. Interesting -- a modern Ukranian curse from the war zone: "Put sunflower seeds in your pocket." [So that when you fall, they will flower.]
Johnny Appleseed was a Swedeborgian, as was the father of William and Henry James, who had a surprisingly strong influence on the "Metaphysical Club" crowd. The charismatic Irish merchant from the bottom of the hill among the Brahmins, but he had his faith, and he had it true. Casting the seed upon the earth.
There is a tension in the notion of having a seed; if it sprouts in the wrong time or place, the vegetative life that it finds simply becomes the mechanism of its own destruction. But a seed preserved in the cold, starry-silent, can await the time of its floreat from the safety of the firmness of its being.