https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/post/entry-4-yes-say-the-jolly-monks-coming

Ah, and so, dear Cellist, laughing-eyed, kind--we come to the heart of the matter. For while all this is true, and all the perennial darkness of our days gloams over, still this: 

Yes. 

My goal above goals is just this Yes. To cultivate Yes-ness. To say Yes to all things. Not in some tepid bypassing of true darkness and misery, but in spite of and (here, Mystery) somehow because of them. This, the Nietzschean dispensation. This, the inspired madness of every Kerouacian hero. This, the final ecstatic exclaim of Molly Bloom in bedded (g)nostic glory. This, the daimon of every Dionysian maenad and initiate crying "Evoe!" to the open night. This, the stuff of bonfires and gladness--but also, yes, the dogged blear-eyed affirmation needed in all awakenings to the cold cold drear day one more day. The acceptance and, nay, indeed, assertion of what is as is, and to all Is and I AM: Yes. The commitment to rise, and rise again, and find, in rising, every scrap of blessing in the cold earth imaginable. This, the straw for "sucking the marrow out of life." Yes. Yes to all, to everything. Yes: my dawning catechism.

But how is this done? Hard wisdom. A notion only chipped off in discovery from the massive marble of experience relatively recently. For the Stone Tablets of the Hebrews gave us "Thou Shalt Nots" and the Church's doctrines "Mea Culpas" and "Nay, verily's"; even the bliss-eyed Buddha only "Dukkha! Dukkha is life! And desire its cause." And, sure, all these hard insights in their place and time. But the odd enlightenment I seek is only "Yes!" Yes Yes to the whole world. To slay the god of gravity, as Nietzsche said, and dance, not over abysses, but over vast vistas and open roads and even the immense expanse of ineffable space within my psyche. To look on love and sorrow and say "Yes yes, well there it is." To look on laughter and the joyous crackling exhalations of exuberant honking men in overalls squealing on saxophones at swirling fans and say "Yes!" to them, and thus Yes to life. And Yes, likewise, on the dark dimensionless loneliness of my own inner cosmos as it circles in uncertain turns and gyres before immensities of beauty opened up unaudienced but to my eyes, and say "Ah, yes. Ah Yes. This too. And yes, all this, forever." To be Faust forfeiting daily his fool's bet--to invert it with old dry Mephistopheles and say "My soul, if I don't wish every moment to stay. My very ghost, if I don't weep for all moments to linger, as if the very Insight, as if Transcendence glorified in every tip and stipule of the leaves, as if this Now were not all Nows, and Now was not Eternity." Ah! Yes! Yes Yes to the Spirit of Negation. Yes, to the Spirit of Gravity. Yes yes yes, to all paleness, and all desiccating brittle time. Yes to all and everything--yours, dear Cellist, Yes; and mine...

www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/post/entry…nks-coming

Entry 4: Yes! say the jolly monks coming...

Dear Cellist,

...Yes yes, all this is true. True, but not all. For, besides this most immediate occasion for my own individual withdrawing into miniature living--into sparse comforts and spartan needs--there remains, unchanged, what has always been the case, for all of us: the new reality--dogged and demanding, ominous and invariable, like a storm impending...

Storm clouds, friend. Looming darkness up ahead, hulking its goliath span, foreboding, brutal; a long far gray haze bringing midday darkness, and the unseen lightnings; bulked up thunder in the distant belly architectures of its lumbering mass... I tremble when I think...

For now, we sit. But even now, beneath its creeping shadow, everything ornately beautiful in the organic tendrils of Earth's elderly weather withers. The once vast networks of connections fray. Enshadowed, the species die. The rich array of nature's copious bounty: bungled--beaten into ruin under plastic boots and our stupidity. Millions and millions and millions of beings and sentience: forever decimated in a hidden holocaust--for syrups and toys, syrups and toys! Eradicated for cheap fat in Teflon frying pans, frying enslaved gizzards, tortured to the beak in long dark huts across the once wild plains of Great America. Brutal, bungled world. Stupid, stupid idiocy! Stupid, stupid and ugly. And for what? 

Convenience moving things. Convenience, God of everything. Idol of our brutishness, and the sick sleek stupid ignorance with which we move, and fat ourselves, and grow large on cushioned couches, and buy more houses, and rape in oafish ruin everything of any value, and laugh at screens...

The rest at https://www.brendangrahamdempsey.com/post/entry-3-flood

Brendan Graham Dempsey