Inspiration Can Come From Unlikely Places
I’m a super-unlikely fan for someone like Akira the Don. (If nothing else, I’m probably the oldest, crankiest and gotta be the least cool, by way far…) Before listening to his music--which I blame for nurturing a taste for lo-fi--I would’ve guessed we pretty much had zero in common. (Leaving out that I do really appreciate that beard...)
One of the things we share, though, is an interest in Marcus Aurelius. Over the last few years I’ve come back to the Roman emperor for inspiration during the turmoil. Akira the Don’s stylized take on them, which came out in early 2020 give the Meditations a fresh, quirky treatment.
I really like his Grateful to the Gods. Pre-COVID, it was a frequent AM play, as a way of trying to set a mental tone for the day. But I really started to appreciate it during the lock-down.
Give both Marcus and Akira a listen…
When I listen to it now, I mentally add “So don’t be that jackass” after the opening list of calumnies we visit on each other and periodically throughout Marcus’ warnings to himself.
The song is based on the first four passages in Meditations book 2. My copy is the 2020 edition with Donald Robertson’s introduction, which is based on an public domain 1862 translation by George Long. Akira uses a more colloquial and much more lyrical rephrasing, but the gist is the same.
Below are passages from this particular section, from the 2020 edition, with some thoughts for each.
“Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial.”
This is a great example of the Stoic idea of premeditatio malorum. “This is a means,” Seneca says, “for ensuring that nothing ever takes us by surprise.”
It’s easy to not want to have others foist their bad news or graceless behavior on us. At least for me, it has been harder to remember not to be that person to others, especially when I’m surprised.
“All these things happen to them because of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I...have seen that the nature of good is beautiful, and that the bad is ugly, and that the nature of they who does wrong is akin to me...it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of the divinity...”
We should not let being armored against the slings and arrows of the world make us arrogant. That which is good is beautiful, but we and those who may offend us are, after all, much the same. Can someone be ugly to us, when we are brothers or sisters on the most basic level?
“I can neither be injured by any of them, for no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my kinsman, nor hate him. For we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the tows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against on another then is contrary to nature and it is acting against one another to become frustrated and to turn away.”
When frustrated my first instinct is to turn away, literally and figuratively. Marcus’ reminder is that this, itself, is antisocial. If the situation does not let us cooperate in the literal sense, we should at least not be responsible for torpedoing the possibility of cooperation ourselves.
“Throw away your books; no longer distract yourself; it is not allowed.”
“But cast away your thirst for books, so that you may not die murmuring, but cheerfully, truly and from your heart thankful to the gods.”
Throwing or casting away books is not a natural idea for me, and I struggled with these. These verses are not anti-knowledge. Elsewhere in Meditations, Marcus talks about avoiding sophistry, and I think this is the same warning. Don’t over-intellectualize and get lost in things which pull us away from the real heart of things.
“Remember how long you have been putting off these things, and how often you have received an opportunity from the gods, and yet do not use it. You must now at last perceive of what universe you are a part...and that a limit of time is fixed for you, and if you do not use it for clearing away the clouds from your mind, it will go and you will go with it, and it will never return.”
I identify with this passage intensely. There is such potential, whether life lasts another day or another hundred years. But none of it will be realized without meaningful, sincere and persistent effort.
Coincidentally
Thanks to ever-helpful YouTube, I caught a random part of a live-stream by Krisha Das while looking for the You Tube address for Grateful to the Gods.
He was talking about how easy it is to miss the opportunity to cultivate a real bliss that transcends our everyday strivings and superficial experiences. I don’t know if cultivating bliss is part of, or could be part of, my life -- but I was struck about his suggestion that when we’re dissatisfied, we need to let go of whatever it is we’re dissatisfied with lest it essentially drag us down and away from more transcendent goals.
This fits, I think, with the idea Marcus talks about here -- although from a very different point of view. It’s fascinating to see how some ideas recur time and again, widely separated in space and time. There must be something universal in the tendency to get wrapped up in the moment and lose sight of the larger or bigger or more important goals.
I swung back by for a few minutes at the end of the live-stream, and caught another reminder of the universal nature of these things: Das, American devotee of Hindu spirituality noting that we all benefit when we can walk in the footsteps of the greats who have gone before us.
Truer words never said.
Whatever the tradition, whatever our origins, that is something to treasure and remember.