It’s hardly surprising that so many guys become anxious for a place at Uni. Three or four years later they can leave there with a scroll attesting to their acquired knowledge. By that means they can almost guarantee themselves a place in ‘the system’. A mortgage will probably soon follow.
But what is this arid knowledge – the utterings, one suspects, of so many lifeless lectures – compared to the knowledge of lived experience?
Backing up for a moment, let’s not forget that, as guys, one of the issues we live with on a day-to-day basis is that we’re Alone. We’re responsible for our own shit – good or bad. This suggests that the closer we are to any particular moment in our Life, the better we are able to assess what’s important, and Real,
and what is merely Appearance or the latest spewings of a man-made machine.
On this basis you can’t beat ‘lived experience’. By living it, you automatically ingest the Thinking, the Feeling and the Sensing – what I think of as our Receiving Station – that was
inherent within it. All the areas of your ‘knowing’ has had the opportunity to soak up the essence.
Coupled with this is the thought I’ve had about the sheer barrage of knowledge that is tossed at me every day. These range from moments of intimacy, when my cock twitches or tears come into my eyes, to the latest drivellings from a guy trying to sell me something I can happily live without.
Increasingly, I’m disconcerted that what I know – know in the sense of being sure of – seems to be generated from my ‘below’ – the place of Sensing (two inches below my navel, I’ve been assured by an acquaintance blessed with greater wisdom than I) – rather than my ‘above’ – my brain, with its constant need for dictionaries, encyclopaedias, erudite books by eminent scholars, seeking to make sense of some aspect of human culture, plus an old guy in Halifax called Arthur who is particularly gifted with making understandable explanations around the time of the Full Moon.
Perhaps I should add at this point that these personal revelations are strictly confidential as one guy to whom I mentioned them a couple of years ago – ex-Oxford and a PhD – having stared at me in horror for several seconds, backed out of my presence asserting that if all knowledge I was absolutely sure of came from my ‘below’ rather than my ‘above’, I was clearly a creature attuned to the accursed influence of Dionysus rather than that of the worthy Apollo. He then fled leaving me to suffer with this newly acquired information of what a misguided rotter I was.
For the next few days I began looking in the mirror, over-anxious to observe any sudden appearances of horns, tufts of hair, red glows in my eyes, or anything that might indicate my infernal condition to the outside world.
However, I soon lost interest. It says in the Guide that it’s easy to be deluded these days by what you actually see. Appearance doesn’t provide the reassurance it once did – false tits and all that.
And thinking back to my experience with the highly educated Oxford guy, it’s interesting that when mentioning the worthy Apollo, he found it equally necessary to make reference to the dastardly Dionysus – obviously a case of two sides of the same coin. This is probably why the Ancient Greeks were so keen on seeking Balance as a major element in their lives….
….my point here being that if a guy’s life experience is heavily dependant upon his brain (and with it, the Thinking process) at the expense of the other areas, he’s probably lopsided, at least as to what his Receiving Station can absorb.
As the silent movie star Charlie Chaplin remarked; the tragedy of most guys is that ‘they think too much and feel too little’.