The Nap 2007. Acrylic on paper, 21 x 25"
I believe that being an artist/stay-at-home dad and husband for a couple of decades has made it easier for me to give up the ghost and welcome the arrival of old age. I have not always seen this as a gift, as I now do. Many of my peers will struggle through, right up until retirement, until the hour power releases them from its neurotic grip, and then it might be too late for tight minds to unwind leftie-loosie. Curmudgeons aren’t born, they are made. Modern society is the factory that churns out new artificial trends each day, and we dutifully hoard them. For those who can’t/won’t keep up (little children, artists, poets, and the elderly), there is persuasive (forced) adaption or reluctant acceptance in store for the rest of their lives. The young adapt, the artists and poets fight (some of them do anyway), and the elderly cling to routine as opaque ghosts holding up the line to nowhere. Their stubbornness might give the appearance of a “fight”, but I think many are just pissed off at themselves for being hoodwinked into managing a repetition 40+ hours a week for fifty years of their lives.
But I really don’t know.
I am still not at peace with the vision of death, nor have I got on the path to “right living”. I am in limbo, a waiting, that makes me feel awkward and uneasy. The modern term for this is “anxiety”, and it’s the catchword of a psychological vicious circle. People who live and teach and breathe the air of anxiety, give lessons to control it. For example, analysts provide an ear for the neurotic to talk freely to another neurotic. The analyst orders chicken fries at Burger King®, and puts his kids in the best affordable daycare (while he practices being an analyst). If he cannot steer himself onto the path of “right living”, what chance does the patient have? Likewise, yoga offers effective relaxation techniques, but no yogi worth his salt would ever ride in a car. So who’s teaching yoga?
Sadly, there is no school of “right living”. Existentialists claim that the diploma and degree is already earned and awaits for our selves to grant it. They say realize freedom. Camus and Sartre would be nobodies today (like yogis) if they took their own advice, rather than partake in the struggle for immortality, producing intricate abstractions of meaninglessness. Their egos were no different than today’s middle manager in the company of capitalism. Nietzsche said “all joys want eternity”. I say “all sorrow seeks immortality”. That means Nietzsche was a very unhappy, neurotic philosopher. I think any person alive or dead, whose name we have heard of, has never reached enlightenment. Why listen to the wise men and women who seek their names in print? They’re just lying to you for fame. A deep truth I get from those who chose celebrity is that they failed to live a life worth living. I think enlightenment is obtainable for some of the best losers of contemporary society. The winners didn’t take their freedom. They took stuff instead.
I don’t think I am on a path to enlightenment, though I do get glimpses of sweet contentment (“right living”) when I stop longer than usual to observe bird behavior, or wonder at a bright orange pie pumpkin in tact in the compost after a long winter. A desire arises for purposeful laziness and promises to lay back in the lounge chair and make the most of doing nothing in a day. As I ascend to meaningless, I pray my world becomes more natural. It might not be a true path to enlightenment, but I find comfort in knowing that purposeful do-nothingness will help ease my quest to become as inert as the path. It would be great to achieve death without so much fear and trembling.
Pine Tree and Pumpkin 2021. Acrylic on wood panel, 30 x 40"
For the time being I take naps to lighten my guilt load for gaining the world and wasting my life as a neurotic. Sometimes they’re “awake” naps, where I just sit and do nothing but look, listen, smell, and touch. I don’t taste because that’s taking, and we take enough already. In fact, in my lifetime I have taken more stuff than all my ancestors (before my grandparents) put together, going back 200,000 years. That’s no good. At least by napping more often, I’ll waste less of what I already have too much of.
The nap life isn’t attainable for everyone. I can choose do nothing because I have gained the privilege to. Until people figure out how to collectively outlaw the human-made abstraction of money, there will remain wide gulfs between the haves and have nots, the nappers and workaholics, the contented and the harangued. I have cleared one path to naphood (there are many) by pairing up with a willing partner who also sensed the waste of striving, and the inherent value of nap taking. She provides for my naps, and my life too.
A test to check your freedom. Take a nap today at 1:30 p.m. (No cheating for those who work graveyard shifts.) Step outside, find a bench or some cushiony grass, and close your eyes. Sleep deep enough to visit dreamland, and let only the natural causes wake you back up to the real world.
Did your supervisor see? Are you in trouble? Did you explain that you were trying to save the world and reach enlightenment all in one nap? Did you get written up, fired, mocked, ruined, destitute, homeless, spouseless, childless—all for one nap out of time, on work time, the bosses’ dime? There is no freedom anywhere where a nap cannot be taken when a nap is desired. When it comes to universal napping rights, the United States sucks just like Finland and New Spain. No one is free who cannot willfully take a nap at any moment in their lifetimes.
Retirees get all the naps they desire, but this doesn’t mean napping is accepted as a universal right. They still expect someone younger to come when they call, whether she’s the supermarket cashier, or the human voice on the Medicare hotline. They’re free to nap and bound to believe that abstaining from naps for 50 years earned them the right to drool on a pillow in the early afternoon. They too have privilege, it just came later than mine, and unfortunately with more aching bones and weakened stamina. Some allow regret to creep in and take over. “Youth is wasted on the young,” they say, and dream of 20 as the final days of joyous abandon before falling in lockstep on a 50 year long march to a freedom they already had and relinquished.
The youth aren’t young “in the head” any more or less than the 80 year old with a spring dream. I think the older generations are remembering (and pining for) more innocent times before the days of acclimation. Eventually, the gripping power of social conditioning coaxes the most radical young minds to believe that repetitive work through modernized, gainful employment is the one and only path to retirement.
And what a loaded word, “retirement”!
Land sakes, what are we retiring from? Wrong living? Is it healthy for a person to walk away from 50 years of volunteer routine? Did it take that long to find out the game not worth the candle? Sure, any regimen carried into old age will dim for certain habits and tasks, but a candle still makes light as long as there’s wax and a wick to burn. Isn’t retiring from a career another way of saying, (All right, I was pressured into a way of life that lasted 5 decades. I guess I had to pay to play never realizing that it hurt more to begin playing the game at seventy. Instead of traveling around the world or building my own house, I got Wednesday night Bridge and summer walks around the neighborhood on days my knees can take the weight.) Jesus, why did we wait so long to stop? How were our minds kept locked into patterns of living that many of us openly regret at retirement age? Shouldn’t the elderly be warning the young not to take the same path? To become gypsies instead? Cat burglars? Artists as part time wage workers sharing rent and groceries a decade at a time and seeing what happens? Or is retirement more like joining a private club of secret keepers. “Shhh. Don’t tell the kids that it wasn’t worth it. We know damn well that our younger bones could have made better use of time. No one should have had the power to use us at 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday. But we ran with it, week after month after year to finally arrive here. Don’t tell the kids what a waste of time that was, or we’ll have to face the truth that we botched the only life we ever had.”
So, a modern (productive) life begins at 20 and ends between the ages of 65 and 70 years. Then it’s back to where we began. That’s one helluva pause put on “gathering ye rosebuds”! Point to the young scholar taking a nap this afternoon using her journal or book on Zen as a hard pillow, and I’ll show you a future fringe artist, or bum. All non-human life, even perhaps the entire cosmos, will congratulate her decision to nap. Her own family, friends and mentors, however, will have all sorts of future ostracization-degradation scenarios planned for her, post graduation. No more napping, except on the weekends, until after the second partial.
We understand this phenomenon. Monkey-see-monkey do. It’s the life our parents led, and we’ll do it better as long as the economy plays nice. That is, continues to exploit expectantly.
Which is what the non-nappers of humanity do best.
I selfishly nap for me, though I’m aware of its benefits to the environment. More naps means less economy, which are fewer choices in the hair care aisle, and gradually, less chemicals coagulating in animal sperm. Napping won’t save us. It’s too late for that. Microplastics have already lured human sperm into the guiltless dreamworld of napping. No life, regardless of how small and temporary, wants to be even partly responsible for birthing innocence into dystopia. Sperm get this, so they’re napping for better things to come, even if it means abandoning any hope of enlightenment, and the discontinuation of a species.
I have friends retired and nearing retirement, and they’ve been napping for quite some time. I bet most of them do it better than me, when they can. I’ve been living retired-like for so long that I’ve molded the lifestyle into some kind of career clone which has held me back as forcefully as any traditional one might have. I’m a bore, living by the work clock of my wife, and always guilty if I veer off her path for even a second. If I appear to be having more fun painting or going for a walk, just wait until she sees me scrubbing the bathroom floor. I act as mendicant butler to her work day when I’m not doing this (writing) or making that (painting). Behavior born of Puritan roots and before that, probably Daddy issues going back a hundred generations. If I can’t provide, then dammit, I better be ready, willing, and able to suffer. When I retire I’ll probably be wary of the catnaps I am taking today, and drag my wife through all sorts of silly outings, like block parties and rock concerts.
I think the following witticism fits, but I don’t know why. I’ll think about it while I close my sleepy eyes this afternoon and pretend it’s a way on the path to enlightenment.
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
—H.L. Mencken
Lullaby Before Coffee 2016. Acrylic on canvas, 30 x 24"