Hunter’s journal

Robert Hunter turns 65 today.

Thank you for today’s journal entry, RH, and happy birthday. As always, you provide rich food for thought. I don’t agree with every word of it, but I am never unappreciative of your perspective. We’re all getting older with you, and we’re all trying to make contact through that “prevailing noise.” Your words have always cut through the drivel, and you have made better use of vagueness than just about anyone I read and hear.

6.23.06

Before I Wake – notes on turning 65

Ours was no chance alliance. Events conspired to make it what it was and not otherwise. The path by which it materialized is closed now, eroded by rain, flash flood, hurricane and revised memory. The path that is not closed is still in process and so cannot be defined. It will become its own definition. Who will walk it is a mystery, but it will be no chance alliance.

Hope cannot cut through the prevailing noise of this era, we must sustain what remains of that ephemerality from the ashes of the 60’s, a generation whose dreams were dashed and did not recover. There is never success, there are only efforts.

Since the new path cannot be defined, it cannot be attacked, ridiculed, turned back on itself and scuttled by those who resent its glaring and unforgivable unusualness. The desire of adversaries will be to prove that, despite its unusualness, it is very usual indeed. The usual makes inevitable inroads into the unusual since its force is unrelenting. But first it must be defined.

The unusual emerges from unpredictable quarters, thrives awhile, makes mistakes, innocent and otherwise, similar to its predecessors, and suffers an eventual descent into usualness, thereby surrendering its uniqueness, more often than not pleading economic necessity. Which is not untrue.

Meanwhile, vagueness is the protection of the path to come. There’s no bull’s-eye on that target until it becomes solid enough to be decorated with one. Are there any identifying marks? “Adequate conceptions in whose possession true felicity consists,” advises Spinoza.

What will cause its destruction? Notoriety. Defined into prominence, it will be consequently defined out of existence, surviving only in a much altered form if at all. But there is a thread of continuity between all such paths: an identifiable sense of hope.

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