It’s been a very long time since I’ve read The Razor’s Edge. Watching the movie, we only get a vague if prescient set of directions, and the narrow and winding path, they say, leads off to the very far east.<\/p>\n
I diffidently followed the directions off and on for a time. I marinated in the words of Alan Watts, made copies of the cassettes, even practiced the walking meditation deep in the ricier parts of San Francisco herself; Tassajara.<\/p>\n
But I’m a child of the Empire, and the Empire is not yet currently again China, or Tibet or Taiwan.<\/p>\n
In this Empire, we work, for money, and whether we get it or not it defines Success. Even for ourselves if we’re not very careful, and I was not anywhere near as careful as I should have been.<\/p>\n
These past few lost days have been entirely mine, and by most standard measures I’ve wasted them. <\/p>\n
Alongside watching the path of Larry Darrell as told by Maugham, I continued to wander the pathless landscape of cinema from the silents up through Noir. I fell off the edge in the seventies, balming my numb self with the fragments of the story of Kwai Chang Caine. <\/p>\n
Famously, Caine only fought when he had to, and then he fought with intention and great practiced skill, as defensively as possible, inflicting the least amount of harm necessary, even when that meant killing. In one classic moment, he simply holds up the blade of a plow, and the man who is trying to brutally hit him instead breaks his gunfighting hand against the steel; sword into plowshare as it were.<\/p>\n
But more compelling still to me was noticing how Caine in his own travels throughout the American West carefully avoided money.<\/p>\n
He worked little and when he did it was in usually only in exchange for food rather than coin. <\/p>\n
It’s only a movie of course, and not really even that, but cinema’s idiot child television, and while the morality remains on that plane, there are still lessons to be drawn.<\/p>\n
I’m meditating in that direction. <\/p>\n
As Spring breaks, my soul cries out to me, to find a way to live apart from all of it always.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s been a very long time since I’ve read The Razor’s Edge. Watching the movie, we only get a vague if prescient set of directions, and the narrow and winding path, they say, leads off to the very far east. I diffidently followed the directions off and on for a time. I marinated in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2244"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2246,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2244\/revisions\/2246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vairtere.com\/spill\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}