Virtue

… as I child I heard these words by Immanuel Kant from my late Dad over and over again …’you must act in a way that if everybody did it your thinking and deeds could be the foundations of a Universal Law’ he was not much of a philosopher but coming from the idols’ home town it was duty that he quoted from Groundworks of the Metaphysics of Moral big words for a young child and I’m not sure that my father understood the meaningful words for he was a soldier who commanded and obeyed saw the outskirts of Moscow in the war and the destruction of ethical values much later the idiom ‘imagine there is a war and nobody takes part in it’ took on the importance of rebellion to its conclusion of passive resistance and my beloved mother asked me with love and admiration in her eyes ‘why do you always make it so difficult for yourself by speaking the truth’ a concern of barely veiled encouragement for the adolescent young soul who barely out of nappies truly believed he would conquer an adult world by doing only what felt right as long as long as he bore all the consequences later the student revolution proposed in all its rawness that where right becomes wrong opposition becomes duty as the only logical culmination so I naïve and resolved fought with Sisyphus’ boulder in my strong will rolled it in front of religion’s grotto to imprison dogma and false ideology embraced the shadows in Plato’s cave and grazed rationale and intuition while my mates played robbers and coppers I secretly smoked a peace pipe impersonated Diogenes and proudly declared ‘yes stand out of my sunlight’ when Alexander asked if there was anything he could do for the Ionian man I would rather live in a barrel of hope than in a false palace based on convention who wants to be mediocre when normality is a mainstream statistical concept according to which good standard variations result in the false claim of deviance ‘there are no problems but only solutions’ rang in my ears like a broken record in which Wagnerian darkness had to be expelled with punk rock and Nirvana and yet introjections cost me dearly when the music became my own swan sang a cacophony of buried emotions because a father warrior was far too broken to teach how to feel instead of following ‘do as I say’ recommendation for life in which performance and achievements were subject to counting one’s toll inner child became feeble and resembled a Nietzsche on psychotropic steroids a muscle man with nowhere to go but to succumb into mere oblivion and void surely if everyone committed suicide the planet would be a much better habitat but the rat in myself refused to abandon a sinking ship and called for a life raft sent a few flares into the sky and grasped some driftwood from a distant shore when the solution was nowhere to be found any longer at the bottom of a bottle my Dad’s anecdote of a doctor is ‘an alcoholic is one who drinks more than I’ opened flood gates of shattered glass in my tumbler and I found an antidote of love kindness and compassion for others from friends and for my own Self we can't select our family and their well-meant intentions but are able to chose what virtue is when to surrender and aim to forego a cycle of utter destruction ‘as long as you put your feet under my table’ what if there are no more tables Epicure’s garden is not a feast of sex drugs and rock but a humble symphony in which intelligent conversations are foundations of beauty and common sense how I wish that my father had been able to talk and listen but then I give thanks to the wall he erected which I am now able to deconstruct one step at a time 14th November 2020