Moralizers

Everyone knows a moralizer: the loud denouncer of an appetite, sure of the tribunal, delighted by the sentence. Zarathustra's diagnosis is that the denouncing is itself a pleasure, and a cruel one: starve a desire and it does not die, it bites. Clancy Martin has met the type, in AA meetings and in Buddhist circles, and he speaks as a recovering alcoholic who got free, he says, only when he stopped legislating his own desires. Then comes The Friend, on why nobody gets clear of their own head alone, and the friend Martin names, unprompted, is closer to this recording than you would guess.