body. Not in the traditional sense of I am unhappy with its appearance, mind you, but in the fact that the mere possession of it disallows soul freedom. What is wanderlust but the soul’s desire to move? Would that make it soulular wanderlust? Can you just make up words like that? I suppose the proper way to say it might be: wanderlust of the soul, but somehow a made-up word and a real word juxtaposed like that gives you a certain sense of the meaning.
That’s a fairly clever metaphor, no? The soul is kind of a made-up thing in its way, as we are never fully capable of knowing it. Or, rather more specifically, we are never fully capable of knowing its purpose assuming, of course, that it exists—and I think that is the assumption we are working under here, but perhaps we ought to investigate a little bit. Now, for those who believe in an afterlife, it is perfectly obvious that there has to be soul because the physical reality of a person cannot make the journey to anywhere once it’s lying, decomposing in the ground. Of this we can be certain. So, there must be some kind of metaphysical reality we call a soul, otherwise there would be nothing to transport the life force to the other realm. Now, as to those who do not believe in an after life, there are a couple of options. If transmigration of soul is the belief, then we are once again left in a fairly obvious soul situation because there has to be something that migrates, yes?
As it turns out, something like eighty-four percent of the entire population of the world could be called “religious,” and religious usually implies the belief in at least a god or a kind of god and things bigger than oneself. This belief goes hand in hand with idea of a soul because it is impossible to believe in a god or gods or something and not believe in the soul, as the god would have nothing to work on in the subject if it did not exist. In other words, to affirm one category of unknowable things (i.e. god or the after life) is to affirm the existence of unknowable things, and it is therefore illogical to categorically affirm one section of unknowability while denying another. Some things are unknowable.
Given all of that, then for that eighty-four percent of the population, the soul exists absolutely. Now, the other sixteen would probably be non-religious or atheistic. Even of this number, there are those who would deny religion and affirm the soul—I guess I would toss myself into this category because humans are capable of nothing but screwing up the understanding of religion because of the needs of the body. Even of those who would deny the existence of god altogether, there is a number that would cop to spirituality—where there is a sense of something or other in the world that is…unknowable. The only real category of people who would probably deny that there is a soul and that it is concerned with matters which we cannot fully comprehend (namely death and the meaning of existence) is those who would deny the existence of god and a meaning of life. They would be, finally, a very minimal (I believe the term in physics is negligible) percentage of the entire population, and in their negligibility, they are probably wrong. Now, the majority of the world’s population is generally mixed when it comes to matters of taste, touch, sight, smell and hearing because these are very culturally defined things. I like moo goo gai pan because I like chicken and mushroom stir-fried together in a delicious sauce. But the problem with the senses is that they are so incredibly individualistic. The individual senses then are a subset of the category “feeling.” To feel.
But physical senses are inferior to metaphysical senses. For example, one of these metaphysical senses would be love. Love is composed of the five physical senses, and this sense of something or other. It is the combination of those feelings, and most of the time—especially as time wears on—the physical senses and the pleasure that the other causes in those senses decline and the feeling of love remains in tact. Feelings of friendships would fall into this category as well because we can see our friends and in that sight reach a certain kind of happiness. We can smell something foul and the feeling that goes along with it would be disgust.
In all of this then, the body is the weight that holds the soul down. I think it would be preferable to think of this metaphorically like a ship sitting in a harbor, where the weighing of the anchor is the start of the soul’s journey into the unknown. It is holding you to the physical pleasures of the things dry land and fellowship with other humans can bring.
So, why don’t we just set sail? If the body is a vessel for the soul, and vessels hold things, those things have to be put there, and the vessel, then, is really like the guy you hand your beer to and say, “hang onto this for a minute, I gotta hit the head.” He’s waiting for you to come back and reclaim your beer, or at the very least you have some responsibility for the beer, even if it’s to say, “Hey bruh, yeah, your beer’s over there behind the plant. It was my turn for beer pong.”
To return to a more sophisticated metaphor, the ship of the soul cannot leave the harbor until it has sufficient supplies or some outside force causes the anchor chain of the body to break.
But, then the question must be asked, to which do we attend? The matters of the physical are gratifying in their way. Good god if we were to talk about sex. The body loves the feelings of sex: sliding, slipping, breathing, dripping, sweating, touching, moving, and contracting. But is it worthy of as much investigation as the soul? Or is it, rather, what we would probably more likely term a distraction from the investigation into this sense of higher things.
(All right, I feel it is pretty important here to make a small note about Existentialism, and that note is this: we’ll deal with you gazers, objectifiers, and god-deniers more fully later—thanks Sartre for giving me even more work to do)
But to deny the physical needs of the body is a preposterous notion as it is so very real and we can know it, which is comforting. The question goes back to spectrum and an understanding of what is actually necessary. Do we deny the things we can know to investigate the things we can’t?
Friday, June 20, 2008
Monday, June 9, 2008
A Note in
brief. There’s a thing, horizon-wise, that sits unfamiliar on my tongue, and believe me I can taste the sunset/rise. Without the horizon beckoning us, what would drive us to move and act and be and search and ponder and quietly contemplate and sip of the nectar of corporal reality and pass the day in wonderment?
I guess I’m thinking now that the horizon is not a point. It is not a piece of metaphysical punctuation, but rather the area where possibility opens up. The area. Length times width. The Horizon is composed of the earth, a line (albeit sometimes a blurry one) and the sky. The earth has a range. If you were another planet and staring, the line would be between the boundaries of Earth and space—same concept, different viewpoint? At any rate, it represents the space bounded by the finite on one side and the infinite on the other. Perhaps it could be said it’s the infinite number of finite possibilities that we can reach. Another way to put it would be to say that the earth is real in it’s finite boundaries and the sky/space would be imaginary in it’s infinite state, so the horizon, that line, would be the possibility of a finite number of infinite realities.
So we wonder about possibility. “Into the Mystic!” Van Morrison you have a way of showing right up on time. And we find that those who are interested in the horizon are those who are seekers, failed-seekers some of them (thank you, Dr. T), but seekers nonetheless. I love questioners. Those people who are never satisfied with facts. You find out facts in search of something else. In business you find out the numbers so you can watch trends and come to a more complete understanding of what your business experiences on a daily basis in order to help supplement and develop in the most appropriate ways. In science you study the wing patterns of butterflies to discover compartment specific gene effects. In math you play with numbers to give humanity some way to understand how there are some things you can predict and figure out by knowing first principles. At any rate, these are all folks seeking to help humanity, in one way or another.
But there is a kind of corollary here, in that if you are not actually seeking what you want, you will eventually fall into that failed-seeker category mentioned above. I want to do this, but I’m doing this. Why am I doing this? I so want to be there. But I am here. Complacency, comfort, and regulatory patterns kick in after a while and we learn how to live by repeatedly doing what we are.
If touching the horizon were a betting man’s game, the odds would be 1:∞, from total possibility to infinite possibility. And yet there is possibility, so the question is: how do we activate this possibility to experience infinity?
(I just realized that you can't see my little infinity symbol in the ratio above...sorry, I couldn't find a way to fix it :-(
Go looking for the horizon, I guess. It’s bound to be somewhere isn’t it? Maybe you won’t even know you were there until you have a moment to sit under a tree and look back at the way you came. But you were there, weren’t you? If only briefly…
I guess I’m thinking now that the horizon is not a point. It is not a piece of metaphysical punctuation, but rather the area where possibility opens up. The area. Length times width. The Horizon is composed of the earth, a line (albeit sometimes a blurry one) and the sky. The earth has a range. If you were another planet and staring, the line would be between the boundaries of Earth and space—same concept, different viewpoint? At any rate, it represents the space bounded by the finite on one side and the infinite on the other. Perhaps it could be said it’s the infinite number of finite possibilities that we can reach. Another way to put it would be to say that the earth is real in it’s finite boundaries and the sky/space would be imaginary in it’s infinite state, so the horizon, that line, would be the possibility of a finite number of infinite realities.
So we wonder about possibility. “Into the Mystic!” Van Morrison you have a way of showing right up on time. And we find that those who are interested in the horizon are those who are seekers, failed-seekers some of them (thank you, Dr. T), but seekers nonetheless. I love questioners. Those people who are never satisfied with facts. You find out facts in search of something else. In business you find out the numbers so you can watch trends and come to a more complete understanding of what your business experiences on a daily basis in order to help supplement and develop in the most appropriate ways. In science you study the wing patterns of butterflies to discover compartment specific gene effects. In math you play with numbers to give humanity some way to understand how there are some things you can predict and figure out by knowing first principles. At any rate, these are all folks seeking to help humanity, in one way or another.
But there is a kind of corollary here, in that if you are not actually seeking what you want, you will eventually fall into that failed-seeker category mentioned above. I want to do this, but I’m doing this. Why am I doing this? I so want to be there. But I am here. Complacency, comfort, and regulatory patterns kick in after a while and we learn how to live by repeatedly doing what we are.
If touching the horizon were a betting man’s game, the odds would be 1:∞, from total possibility to infinite possibility. And yet there is possibility, so the question is: how do we activate this possibility to experience infinity?
(I just realized that you can't see my little infinity symbol in the ratio above...sorry, I couldn't find a way to fix it :-(
Go looking for the horizon, I guess. It’s bound to be somewhere isn’t it? Maybe you won’t even know you were there until you have a moment to sit under a tree and look back at the way you came. But you were there, weren’t you? If only briefly…
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Old Sayings of Quality and
quantity. How much have you lived? That’s a loaded question. It can be answered in so many ways. I guess the traditional way would probably to measure in years. This is a very business-like way to look at our existences, however, and it just does not seem to sit quite right in my heart. The things I feel about existence are not measurable in numbers. That’s why I am not a good American.
Something I have discovered in the last year is that the true driver of America is business. I don’t mean in the traditional capitalistic experience, although it now makes sense why there are so many people in the world that have a righteous indignation about the way one particular country deals with the world. We look at things in terms of business. It is not just that we are trying to make a buck and stay afloat, we actually think about things in terms of business: the numbers reveal the success.
The problem is, of course, that they are right. Numerically deciding worth is almost completely valid. If you were to set a goal for somebody, and they reached that goal, would you be proud of them? Absolutely. The problem with business is that somebody else is always making the goals. Presidents, CEOs, and Board Members do not even set goals. It’s the culture that sets the goals, because even presidents, CEOs, and Board Members all what to be as good as that guy across the street who started his congruous company a year after I did. That now becomes the goal. I want what he’s got. It’s really got nothing to do with him particularly; however, if we think about capitalism as competition drives capital, that other guys only has to exist. That’s his only job.
But we have all seen it, when two rival businesses get out of hand and start battling each other outside the lines of business. This is the really unsettling part because it is the business mentality that has gotten into their understanding of existence. They truly feel that what they need is more than what they’ve got, but their investment to get it involves so many other things that there is no way to keep track of them and it winds up being a very inhuman standard of human interaction. No matter how compassionate or people-oriented the culture of your business may or may not be, it is eventually about putting money in the register, the year-end reports, the weekly sales goals, the sales volume by department, the conversion rate, the average customer investment and (the big daddy of them all) profit.
I want to be very clear, here, and say that this is painting of big business overall, and this is not to say that within many of these companies there are not managers and directors and supervisors that feel it is a part of their investment to truly attempt to foster working relationships with the part-time staff and truly invest in them. Truly. But these guys don’t usually last all that long because it is an understood part of business that the part-time staff has the highest turnover, and that’s just the way it is. The longer you can keep them, the better, obviously, but the fact remains that you can train almost anybody to do that job or the equivalent of that job in what amounts to a grand total of a couple of days.
It gets a little bit hairier in the next steps.
This is largely because the complexity of the responsibility increases and becomes less about the tasks and more about the maintenance of the business. The tasks on any given salesfloor are not complicated. As nuanced as you want your tasks, you could probably teach a monkey to do most of these things. That’s a little bit harsh, but I’m afraid it’s true. Even when you have to deal with the human element, you can give your part-time monkey staff the skills to handle what most of the humans will throw at you.
Training people to take over a higher-complexity, less-task-oriented, business-watching position is more complicated. But even here you can train people to understand it. I’m so convinced of the ape’s ability to handle complex tasks, that were apes able to speak and read, they could do these tasks as well.
The goal of business is to make money. Anything else that happens outside of that is meant to help the business make money. Contributions to charities – good publicity. Social development – happier employees equals elevated efficiency. Careers and benefits – employees locked in for the long haul and it is easier to not have to train a new monkey.
I am not trying to pass judgment on business because there is a place for it in society. People have been in business for a long time. It is a necessary thing for the successful functioning of any society. What I worry about is the effect that the mindset of business has on the culture of an entire country when it becomes the only mindset. You can only get your music heard if it appeals to a mass of people and somebody can make money off of your efforts. You can only get a book published if it is accessible to the general reading public, especially if you have not ever had anything published previously. Somebody has to profit off of this goddamn it (tometimes I wonder why MS Word allows the word goddamn to go un-underlined whereas helluva will consistently get the underline until you tell the dictionary differently), and that had better be profit of the cold-hard electronic kind.
Digital money kills me, and has been killing me more and more lately. The fact that my enormous amounts of debt exist only in the fact that I can look at my accounts online and see what I owe is a difficult thing to juxtapose with the idea that it does not exist physically. Then again, it exists in the computer I am typing on. It exists in the diamonds I have bought. It exists in the groceries purchased and consumed long ago. But long after the physical things have gone, it exists in our hearts and our minds. Money has become so powerful that it does not even need to exist physically, the overwhelming reality of it exists so powerfully inside us—as a result of our cultural conditioning—that the ironic gap can never be bridged (i.e. because one side of the land does not have to exist). Sometimes it does exist, but it doesn’t have to.
Money has become too powerful to fight against.
Goddamnit I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread here, but then again, I think what I’m getting at is that quantifiable quantity does not equal quality. Two years of bartending experience does not mean that you are a good bartender. It means you have two years of experience. Having more money than somebody else does not make you better. Unquantifiable quantity does equal quality. Having money in your hand that you earned through a day of work that was involved in your desire to make yourself a better human being means something, no matter what quantity of money it is. Time spent in research and development of bartending skills will make you a better bartender. Qualified time, as it were, can be a successful measure, but time as a number cannot.
How much have you lived? Have you ever run around a hotel doing cartwheels down the hall and breaking onto the roof? No, there is a good chance you haven’t, because that is not qualified time to you. Have you ever wandered aimlessly because that is what you WANTED to do. That is a good investment of your time, and the quality of that time is unquantifiable in terms of the quality of interaction it will have on your existence.
Desire is natural. Desire for accumulation of things is not natural. I’ve got everything I want and still I want more.
I am in a struggle with the business-trained part of my head. It wants me to believe in that piece of the truth that the numbers reveal something. They do. But it’s what they reveal that is oftentimes skewed.
I guess I’m lost and don’t really know how to end this piece. Let’s call this a continuing struggle in my brain space, and there will be more business-minded cogitations into the meaning of existence to come.
But goddamn it I hope there’s not a helluva lot more.
Something I have discovered in the last year is that the true driver of America is business. I don’t mean in the traditional capitalistic experience, although it now makes sense why there are so many people in the world that have a righteous indignation about the way one particular country deals with the world. We look at things in terms of business. It is not just that we are trying to make a buck and stay afloat, we actually think about things in terms of business: the numbers reveal the success.
The problem is, of course, that they are right. Numerically deciding worth is almost completely valid. If you were to set a goal for somebody, and they reached that goal, would you be proud of them? Absolutely. The problem with business is that somebody else is always making the goals. Presidents, CEOs, and Board Members do not even set goals. It’s the culture that sets the goals, because even presidents, CEOs, and Board Members all what to be as good as that guy across the street who started his congruous company a year after I did. That now becomes the goal. I want what he’s got. It’s really got nothing to do with him particularly; however, if we think about capitalism as competition drives capital, that other guys only has to exist. That’s his only job.
But we have all seen it, when two rival businesses get out of hand and start battling each other outside the lines of business. This is the really unsettling part because it is the business mentality that has gotten into their understanding of existence. They truly feel that what they need is more than what they’ve got, but their investment to get it involves so many other things that there is no way to keep track of them and it winds up being a very inhuman standard of human interaction. No matter how compassionate or people-oriented the culture of your business may or may not be, it is eventually about putting money in the register, the year-end reports, the weekly sales goals, the sales volume by department, the conversion rate, the average customer investment and (the big daddy of them all) profit.
I want to be very clear, here, and say that this is painting of big business overall, and this is not to say that within many of these companies there are not managers and directors and supervisors that feel it is a part of their investment to truly attempt to foster working relationships with the part-time staff and truly invest in them. Truly. But these guys don’t usually last all that long because it is an understood part of business that the part-time staff has the highest turnover, and that’s just the way it is. The longer you can keep them, the better, obviously, but the fact remains that you can train almost anybody to do that job or the equivalent of that job in what amounts to a grand total of a couple of days.
It gets a little bit hairier in the next steps.
This is largely because the complexity of the responsibility increases and becomes less about the tasks and more about the maintenance of the business. The tasks on any given salesfloor are not complicated. As nuanced as you want your tasks, you could probably teach a monkey to do most of these things. That’s a little bit harsh, but I’m afraid it’s true. Even when you have to deal with the human element, you can give your part-time monkey staff the skills to handle what most of the humans will throw at you.
Training people to take over a higher-complexity, less-task-oriented, business-watching position is more complicated. But even here you can train people to understand it. I’m so convinced of the ape’s ability to handle complex tasks, that were apes able to speak and read, they could do these tasks as well.
The goal of business is to make money. Anything else that happens outside of that is meant to help the business make money. Contributions to charities – good publicity. Social development – happier employees equals elevated efficiency. Careers and benefits – employees locked in for the long haul and it is easier to not have to train a new monkey.
I am not trying to pass judgment on business because there is a place for it in society. People have been in business for a long time. It is a necessary thing for the successful functioning of any society. What I worry about is the effect that the mindset of business has on the culture of an entire country when it becomes the only mindset. You can only get your music heard if it appeals to a mass of people and somebody can make money off of your efforts. You can only get a book published if it is accessible to the general reading public, especially if you have not ever had anything published previously. Somebody has to profit off of this goddamn it (tometimes I wonder why MS Word allows the word goddamn to go un-underlined whereas helluva will consistently get the underline until you tell the dictionary differently), and that had better be profit of the cold-hard electronic kind.
Digital money kills me, and has been killing me more and more lately. The fact that my enormous amounts of debt exist only in the fact that I can look at my accounts online and see what I owe is a difficult thing to juxtapose with the idea that it does not exist physically. Then again, it exists in the computer I am typing on. It exists in the diamonds I have bought. It exists in the groceries purchased and consumed long ago. But long after the physical things have gone, it exists in our hearts and our minds. Money has become so powerful that it does not even need to exist physically, the overwhelming reality of it exists so powerfully inside us—as a result of our cultural conditioning—that the ironic gap can never be bridged (i.e. because one side of the land does not have to exist). Sometimes it does exist, but it doesn’t have to.
Money has become too powerful to fight against.
Goddamnit I’m afraid I’ve lost the thread here, but then again, I think what I’m getting at is that quantifiable quantity does not equal quality. Two years of bartending experience does not mean that you are a good bartender. It means you have two years of experience. Having more money than somebody else does not make you better. Unquantifiable quantity does equal quality. Having money in your hand that you earned through a day of work that was involved in your desire to make yourself a better human being means something, no matter what quantity of money it is. Time spent in research and development of bartending skills will make you a better bartender. Qualified time, as it were, can be a successful measure, but time as a number cannot.
How much have you lived? Have you ever run around a hotel doing cartwheels down the hall and breaking onto the roof? No, there is a good chance you haven’t, because that is not qualified time to you. Have you ever wandered aimlessly because that is what you WANTED to do. That is a good investment of your time, and the quality of that time is unquantifiable in terms of the quality of interaction it will have on your existence.
Desire is natural. Desire for accumulation of things is not natural. I’ve got everything I want and still I want more.
I am in a struggle with the business-trained part of my head. It wants me to believe in that piece of the truth that the numbers reveal something. They do. But it’s what they reveal that is oftentimes skewed.
I guess I’m lost and don’t really know how to end this piece. Let’s call this a continuing struggle in my brain space, and there will be more business-minded cogitations into the meaning of existence to come.
But goddamn it I hope there’s not a helluva lot more.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
My Whole World is
change. And changed, and changing. I have oftentimes wondered, previously in my life, how things seem to change so rapidly. My mind naturally turns toward history, and I can’t help but reflect on the last two years of my life, and good god one helluva lot has happened. For example, I have decided that helluva is a word, and screw Microsoft Word. Perhaps it’s because I am trying desperately to be very conscious of my decisions, but the problem I have encountered is that when you are aware of your decisions—even the smallest ones like deciding to say “screw Microsoft Word”—you became very aware of the fallout.
I think differently now. My mind has constructed whole new channels of flow. In a lot of ways I can only be grateful for the way I can somehow see the neurons firing along new paths, because it means that I am still developing new areas of my brain. This means a lot to me. I have tended to downplay the fact that within the last two years I have begun and completed a Master’s degree. Only in my recent reflections have I come to realize just how important this time was to my life/existence development. There was, essentially, either a consistent disinterest in what it was I was studying on the part of people around me, or a consistent desire to keep it hidden on the part of me. My very first semester of class sent my brain spiraling down paths it had not encountered before, and I am still struggling with some of the basic concepts I learned in that first four months. One of my classes consisted of something like sixteen women and me. I think I could have gone two ways with this. First, I could have tried to “represent the male perspective” consistently in class, to the point where I would have probably just caused contention and ill will—which would have stunted my growth, I think. Instead, I decided to learn from all of their perspectives, and get to know a new way to see the world.
I’m unfortunately too attached to this idea of seeing things through others’ eyes. I write. I have decided that recently. I am a writer, and writing is what I do. It has to be my focus. It’s part of the reason that I find myself so consistently attempting to see things through other people’s eyes: it’s all character development to me. I wrote my thesis on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, whose main thrust was in the experiencing—at any level—the act, the event, the subject he was writing about. In a way, while Thompson’s writing often employs grotesque imagery and exaggeration—with a backdrop of paranoia—it rings with truth like no other writer of the time. We all know Tom Wolfe pulled some information from Thompson in the writing of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from Hell’s Angels. Thompson once told somebody that it didn’t really matter to him because the difference between Tom and him was that he was there.
I am writing a book. It is complicated. It is based on Ulysses by Joyce. It employs techniques similar to Thompson’s. It is largely incomprehensible to anybody but it’s author. In what we could equate to the Wandering Rocks episode, one chapter is snippets of people’s lives from around New York City. I like most of them, but there is one that rings false. It has rung thusly ever since I wrote the damn thing. In a lot of ways it is because I have absolutely no experience with the particular subject of that snippet—nothing beyond what I’ve seen in the movies, and I guess I never trust what I see in movies. But I think in the last two (and a half) years I have decided to experience things in a way I had never thought of experiencing things before.
It has created an objective/subjective split in my self that is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I feel like I learn more from each day when I can be inside a scene but acting for something outside of it: a sort of full-time Thompsonesque investigation of everything in the world. I am there, but at the same time I am not there. My desire for objectivity leaves me outside while maintaining corporal proximity ensures that I am intimately involved. While it provides outstanding fodder for the book and for the unquenchable thirst for analysis and examination that is my head, I find that the turn of the screw is my almost complete lack of subjectivity. I have become a character in my own story.
I feel a brain split that I can’t quite get a handle on. It’s like one part is sinking into the other, or one part is eating the other…I can’t quite tell which it is. I’d like to think that it is a healthy part consuming an ailing part and putting it out of it’s memory, but there is a part of me that is a little bit worried that one part is just sick, but it’s also contagious and has infect the healthy part of me.
Worrisome it is. I derive meaning from too much. Some things are meant to be experienced. They are build to be a subjective experience. You need to be so involved in them that there is no way to tell the story straight. That is where Thompson succeeds and I fail. Sometimes I move too far away, mentally, from where I am supposed to be involved. I have been feeling like I keep people more at arm’s length lately when it comes to my head. I usually divide humans up into their body, spirit, and mind. There is a way in which all three are connected. My body and my spirit are fair game, but there is a high security situation with my head. I have put the walls up that even a grenade launcher could not penetrate. You can’t come in. You’re not allowed. When you even get close I will launch an all-out attack on getting you away. I feel safe inside my head, the fortress of my mind. But I only feel safe when I’m alone inside there. I have used the word sociopathos to describe the kind of the thing I think I’m feeling. It may amount to a purely egotistical unwillingness to let myself go, my real self, the self inside my mind. But it could be that I’m protecting something. But what? The fabric of my mind, perhaps. The unfortunately fragile nature of my mind? Inside thick walls, is there simply a glass house? Have I realized this and raised defense levels?
Self-investigation can go too far. I write fiction. I write non-fiction. I write poetry. I write songs. They all fall under a certain sense of self-investigation as far as I’m concerned. Writing, thinking about change, thinking about history, thinking about action, thinking about non-action, thinking about music, thinking about love, thinking about existence, thinking about Aristotle, thinking about ethics, thinking about style, thinking about subjectivity, thinking about existentialism, thinking about the sun, thinking about the moon, thinking about rotation and revolution, thinking about drinking, thinking about smoking, thinking about cereal, thinking about milk, thinking about pasteurized processed cheese food products, thinking about the body, thinking about the spirit, and thinking about the mind can sometimes bee too much. I didn’t used to do this, you know.
I think differently now. My mind has constructed whole new channels of flow. In a lot of ways I can only be grateful for the way I can somehow see the neurons firing along new paths, because it means that I am still developing new areas of my brain. This means a lot to me. I have tended to downplay the fact that within the last two years I have begun and completed a Master’s degree. Only in my recent reflections have I come to realize just how important this time was to my life/existence development. There was, essentially, either a consistent disinterest in what it was I was studying on the part of people around me, or a consistent desire to keep it hidden on the part of me. My very first semester of class sent my brain spiraling down paths it had not encountered before, and I am still struggling with some of the basic concepts I learned in that first four months. One of my classes consisted of something like sixteen women and me. I think I could have gone two ways with this. First, I could have tried to “represent the male perspective” consistently in class, to the point where I would have probably just caused contention and ill will—which would have stunted my growth, I think. Instead, I decided to learn from all of their perspectives, and get to know a new way to see the world.
I’m unfortunately too attached to this idea of seeing things through others’ eyes. I write. I have decided that recently. I am a writer, and writing is what I do. It has to be my focus. It’s part of the reason that I find myself so consistently attempting to see things through other people’s eyes: it’s all character development to me. I wrote my thesis on Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, whose main thrust was in the experiencing—at any level—the act, the event, the subject he was writing about. In a way, while Thompson’s writing often employs grotesque imagery and exaggeration—with a backdrop of paranoia—it rings with truth like no other writer of the time. We all know Tom Wolfe pulled some information from Thompson in the writing of the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from Hell’s Angels. Thompson once told somebody that it didn’t really matter to him because the difference between Tom and him was that he was there.
I am writing a book. It is complicated. It is based on Ulysses by Joyce. It employs techniques similar to Thompson’s. It is largely incomprehensible to anybody but it’s author. In what we could equate to the Wandering Rocks episode, one chapter is snippets of people’s lives from around New York City. I like most of them, but there is one that rings false. It has rung thusly ever since I wrote the damn thing. In a lot of ways it is because I have absolutely no experience with the particular subject of that snippet—nothing beyond what I’ve seen in the movies, and I guess I never trust what I see in movies. But I think in the last two (and a half) years I have decided to experience things in a way I had never thought of experiencing things before.
It has created an objective/subjective split in my self that is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, I feel like I learn more from each day when I can be inside a scene but acting for something outside of it: a sort of full-time Thompsonesque investigation of everything in the world. I am there, but at the same time I am not there. My desire for objectivity leaves me outside while maintaining corporal proximity ensures that I am intimately involved. While it provides outstanding fodder for the book and for the unquenchable thirst for analysis and examination that is my head, I find that the turn of the screw is my almost complete lack of subjectivity. I have become a character in my own story.
I feel a brain split that I can’t quite get a handle on. It’s like one part is sinking into the other, or one part is eating the other…I can’t quite tell which it is. I’d like to think that it is a healthy part consuming an ailing part and putting it out of it’s memory, but there is a part of me that is a little bit worried that one part is just sick, but it’s also contagious and has infect the healthy part of me.
Worrisome it is. I derive meaning from too much. Some things are meant to be experienced. They are build to be a subjective experience. You need to be so involved in them that there is no way to tell the story straight. That is where Thompson succeeds and I fail. Sometimes I move too far away, mentally, from where I am supposed to be involved. I have been feeling like I keep people more at arm’s length lately when it comes to my head. I usually divide humans up into their body, spirit, and mind. There is a way in which all three are connected. My body and my spirit are fair game, but there is a high security situation with my head. I have put the walls up that even a grenade launcher could not penetrate. You can’t come in. You’re not allowed. When you even get close I will launch an all-out attack on getting you away. I feel safe inside my head, the fortress of my mind. But I only feel safe when I’m alone inside there. I have used the word sociopathos to describe the kind of the thing I think I’m feeling. It may amount to a purely egotistical unwillingness to let myself go, my real self, the self inside my mind. But it could be that I’m protecting something. But what? The fabric of my mind, perhaps. The unfortunately fragile nature of my mind? Inside thick walls, is there simply a glass house? Have I realized this and raised defense levels?
Self-investigation can go too far. I write fiction. I write non-fiction. I write poetry. I write songs. They all fall under a certain sense of self-investigation as far as I’m concerned. Writing, thinking about change, thinking about history, thinking about action, thinking about non-action, thinking about music, thinking about love, thinking about existence, thinking about Aristotle, thinking about ethics, thinking about style, thinking about subjectivity, thinking about existentialism, thinking about the sun, thinking about the moon, thinking about rotation and revolution, thinking about drinking, thinking about smoking, thinking about cereal, thinking about milk, thinking about pasteurized processed cheese food products, thinking about the body, thinking about the spirit, and thinking about the mind can sometimes bee too much. I didn’t used to do this, you know.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
So Much Things to
say. Thank you, Bob. It is difficult to organize thoughts that are coming randomly. In the last five or six hours of my consciousness, and I would imagine that previous to that time while I was sleeping, my mind, as most normal human beings mind’s, has moved through an incredible range of reflective topics. The mind is an absolutely fascinating, unbelievably powerful, deliciously comprehensive muscle. It can be developed, as any other muscle to perform unrealistic feats.
I just thought about how you always give me what I need. Previous to that I was contemplating the budding trees outside my window and wondering why they can’t be like that always—and if I would appreciate them if they were.
When we are young, the mind is so supple. I remember a brief period of my life where I wandered around the world ensuring that I appreciated things as much as I ought to, and I say “things” intentionally: the ostrich egg on my table, the eyeglass case full of insight, and the plastic bottle full of life-giving water. But this is a double-edged sword because sometimes we ascribe to dear a value on things that do not deserve them: our cars, our jobs, our careers, the merchandise we’re selling, our TVs, and our iPhones.
And it’s funny the way history can move so slowly sometimes, moving like the last drip of molasses from the spoon, and then turn around the next day and move like a heavy metal guitar solo. I think it moves just right when set to the rhythm of the blues. But I have come so far from the boy I was only four years ago, and I have come so far from the boy I was only two years ago. The tumultuous upheaval of history can make a body somewhat seasick. Bill Martin and Bob Avakian would disagree with Stephen Dedalus in that history is not a nightmare that they are trying to wake up from it’s something they’re trying to learn from. Or maybe waking up is learning: “I have a vision, too.”
It’s that kind of music that just makes you want to put yo’ head in yo’ hands, and cry.
I like fixing things. Today I fixed the broken leg of my coffee table that’s been wobbling for well on a couple of months. Then, in a spirit of DIY, I went over to the door that has been hanging off of its hinges for the last week and fixed that son of a bitch, too. I forgot that this was something I used to do for a living when I was in college. Paint, patch, fix, mow, repair, install, and entertain. That’s what I learned how to do while I was learning how to read.
Fuck that pronoun “you,” it just means too much. You, who? It means absolutely nothing out of context. And indefinite pronoun they call it. It’s nice having a you, no matter who you are.
My arms felt longer than usual again yesterday. This is always an odd phenomenon for me to experience. I just get up, stand up, and there at my sides hang the longest appendages I have ever seen. I can scratch that itch on the back of my knee with ZERO effort. I can touch the ten-foot ceiling above my head. I can reach out and touch somebody’s soul. They are mystical, you see. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I think it feels nice.
Decisions made in a rush can often be hard to keep to, if only because when you absolutely HAVE to make a decision, it is in the heat of the moment, and you are only doing what you feel is the best decision for that moment. The next moment you could realize that your previous decision was composed mostly of dogs bollocks and you immediately change strategies…difficult to stick by. I decided today that I would travel back to that place where I told everybody the truth all the time. My job makes me a liar. It forces my language to conceal as it reveals, and the true mark of professionalism is knowing what to conceal and when and how and what to reveal and when and how. Get some perspective.
I think I would choose to be a merman, even if it was against the will of god.
I’m just so happy when I see you happy. It’s kind of unsettling, and I think about the sublime. And I think about love, too. And I think about how terrifying beauty is so related to love is so related to Jimi.
To do what one wants, is not that the desire of most of humanity? You certainly don’t want to do what somebody else wants you to do, unless it’s helping you get where you’re going. We make decisions like that all the time. I don’t really want to do this, but I believe that it is moving me towards my ultimate goal, so I’m going to go with my intuition here and move in that direction. I just want to go with how I feel.
Like my only job here is to care for and covet you, dear.
The body has come back to me lately—funny how something like that can “come back”: my mangled right hand with the scar from twenty-seven stitches, the scar from skin grafting, and the thumb that you think is resting on top of the joint from that time you dislocated it wrestling in Oklahoma at the Junior Duals and never got it even looked at. I’ve lost a lot of weight…apparently. When I came to where I am, I wore a forty-four. When I got to where I’m at, I wear a thirty-six. I’ve lost eight inches off of my waist by doing next to nothing more than I usually do, eating healthier, and keeping my body’s well-being front of mind.
He said as he lit his cigarette. Front of mind: historical materialism. What am I to you? How are you? Would you?
I love those very brief moments in my life when the brain can rattle along its merry path unencumbered. There is an incredible freedom in it: skipping down a dirt trail through the mountains.
Maybe I’ll teach high school in Oregon, I thought to myself.
History is moving quickly now, and I’m strangely comfortable with its velocity.
I just thought about how you always give me what I need. Previous to that I was contemplating the budding trees outside my window and wondering why they can’t be like that always—and if I would appreciate them if they were.
When we are young, the mind is so supple. I remember a brief period of my life where I wandered around the world ensuring that I appreciated things as much as I ought to, and I say “things” intentionally: the ostrich egg on my table, the eyeglass case full of insight, and the plastic bottle full of life-giving water. But this is a double-edged sword because sometimes we ascribe to dear a value on things that do not deserve them: our cars, our jobs, our careers, the merchandise we’re selling, our TVs, and our iPhones.
And it’s funny the way history can move so slowly sometimes, moving like the last drip of molasses from the spoon, and then turn around the next day and move like a heavy metal guitar solo. I think it moves just right when set to the rhythm of the blues. But I have come so far from the boy I was only four years ago, and I have come so far from the boy I was only two years ago. The tumultuous upheaval of history can make a body somewhat seasick. Bill Martin and Bob Avakian would disagree with Stephen Dedalus in that history is not a nightmare that they are trying to wake up from it’s something they’re trying to learn from. Or maybe waking up is learning: “I have a vision, too.”
It’s that kind of music that just makes you want to put yo’ head in yo’ hands, and cry.
I like fixing things. Today I fixed the broken leg of my coffee table that’s been wobbling for well on a couple of months. Then, in a spirit of DIY, I went over to the door that has been hanging off of its hinges for the last week and fixed that son of a bitch, too. I forgot that this was something I used to do for a living when I was in college. Paint, patch, fix, mow, repair, install, and entertain. That’s what I learned how to do while I was learning how to read.
Fuck that pronoun “you,” it just means too much. You, who? It means absolutely nothing out of context. And indefinite pronoun they call it. It’s nice having a you, no matter who you are.
My arms felt longer than usual again yesterday. This is always an odd phenomenon for me to experience. I just get up, stand up, and there at my sides hang the longest appendages I have ever seen. I can scratch that itch on the back of my knee with ZERO effort. I can touch the ten-foot ceiling above my head. I can reach out and touch somebody’s soul. They are mystical, you see. It doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I think it feels nice.
Decisions made in a rush can often be hard to keep to, if only because when you absolutely HAVE to make a decision, it is in the heat of the moment, and you are only doing what you feel is the best decision for that moment. The next moment you could realize that your previous decision was composed mostly of dogs bollocks and you immediately change strategies…difficult to stick by. I decided today that I would travel back to that place where I told everybody the truth all the time. My job makes me a liar. It forces my language to conceal as it reveals, and the true mark of professionalism is knowing what to conceal and when and how and what to reveal and when and how. Get some perspective.
I think I would choose to be a merman, even if it was against the will of god.
I’m just so happy when I see you happy. It’s kind of unsettling, and I think about the sublime. And I think about love, too. And I think about how terrifying beauty is so related to love is so related to Jimi.
To do what one wants, is not that the desire of most of humanity? You certainly don’t want to do what somebody else wants you to do, unless it’s helping you get where you’re going. We make decisions like that all the time. I don’t really want to do this, but I believe that it is moving me towards my ultimate goal, so I’m going to go with my intuition here and move in that direction. I just want to go with how I feel.
Like my only job here is to care for and covet you, dear.
The body has come back to me lately—funny how something like that can “come back”: my mangled right hand with the scar from twenty-seven stitches, the scar from skin grafting, and the thumb that you think is resting on top of the joint from that time you dislocated it wrestling in Oklahoma at the Junior Duals and never got it even looked at. I’ve lost a lot of weight…apparently. When I came to where I am, I wore a forty-four. When I got to where I’m at, I wear a thirty-six. I’ve lost eight inches off of my waist by doing next to nothing more than I usually do, eating healthier, and keeping my body’s well-being front of mind.
He said as he lit his cigarette. Front of mind: historical materialism. What am I to you? How are you? Would you?
I love those very brief moments in my life when the brain can rattle along its merry path unencumbered. There is an incredible freedom in it: skipping down a dirt trail through the mountains.
Maybe I’ll teach high school in Oregon, I thought to myself.
History is moving quickly now, and I’m strangely comfortable with its velocity.
Monday, April 21, 2008
It's Hard to Know How to
feel. Right now I’m experiencing something that is disturbing me at a fundamental level. There is a sense inside me that I ought to be feeling a certain way, which is to say I think I feel pretty bad. Now, the disturbing part is that I’m sure I know if that’s the appropriate way to feel. It is a strange disconnect.
But it always begs further questions doesn’t it? Why do we feel in the first place? Is our emotional or psychological or intuitive feeling any different from a hand re-coiling from a flame, a tongue in the throes of jouissance from some delectable dish manufactured from loving hands, or eyes burning from looking at the sun? Can we separate the way we feel?
Perhaps brain-mapping can tell us things about what parts of our brains feel. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that somewhere, somebody has already strapped a willing test subject to a table, attached diodes to his head, and has screenshot after screenshot of how the brain feels. I guess I’m a generally distrusting person, and I’m sure that these brain mappings have some validity; however, the question for me is how we ought to feel, which is an entirely different thing…I think.
When I get spitting bacon grease on my lightly haired torso, I ought to feel a little sting. When we kill somebody brutally by bashing in their cranium with the broken leg of a coffee table, we ought to feel remorse. When we taste something foul, we ought to spit it out. And yet there are exceptions to every rule: people who cannot feel their skin, sociopaths, and people with no taste.
It’s not an exact proportion, you understand. It’s not like a one-to-one correlation where for every one sociopath there is one person who feels what he ought to, but there are certainly enough of them out there that their level of aberration is at least somewhat suspect. Like they ought to be there. Filling out the an Aristotelian spectrum of sorts, where the two ends would be feeling wrong at the wrong time in the wrong way (either in excess or deficiency) and the mean would be feeling the right thing at the right time in the right way. But, as always, the difficulty here is having the right perspective on where the two ends are so you can have a somewhat vague idea where the mean might be.
Here’s the rub, as the bard once called it: with the conglomeration of events from the past fortnight—including but not limited to exhaustion, financial crises, knifings, shooting, emotional crises, and insomnia—I really ought to feel like I’m losing my mind. My ex-girlfriend’s stalker got stabbed in the kitchen of the restaurant he works at. True story. I have had zero dollars in my pocket and negative funds in the bank for longer than my stomach thinks advisable. A drunk man ran into the wall in front of my house as he was being chased by the police, got out of the car and started unloading a clip on the red-blue-flashing cars around him. It is STILL a not uncommon thing for me to be awake for more hours consecutively than can be contained in a day. Even when I get into bed I have to budget in an extra hour for the time it will take me to fall asleep—and pray to god that’s enough.
But I’m surprisingly comfortable in this place.
I feel most comfortable in a place where things are not making any sense. I feel most alive when I cannot control the future. I feel most at home when I don’t know where home is. I feel most in control when things are spiraling out of control. I feel most sane where it’s farthest away. It all feels most natural.
That’s why I guess it’s hard to know how to feel. I have to take into account how I feel about how I feel. I don’t know how to feel things in a normal way, but I have to trust in my feelings.
Acting. That’s what it is. We’re all acting—in a very stage way. The job of the thespian is to put as much of themselves into this character as they possible can in order for it to come off right. If they don’t invest enough of themselves, the character is rendered flat on the stage. If we don’t give enough of ourselves to the characters we’re playing, they are rendered flat in history. Curiously, thespians change characters sometimes three times in a year. I would argue we do the same in existence.
I have changed characters a couple of times at least, and I’m still looking for that starring role in existence. Consistently strive to be the magnificent man. Question where appropriate. Listen where appropriate. Direct where appropriate. Take direction when appropriate. I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel. He seems inhuman. And we are human, all to human.
I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel.
But it always begs further questions doesn’t it? Why do we feel in the first place? Is our emotional or psychological or intuitive feeling any different from a hand re-coiling from a flame, a tongue in the throes of jouissance from some delectable dish manufactured from loving hands, or eyes burning from looking at the sun? Can we separate the way we feel?
Perhaps brain-mapping can tell us things about what parts of our brains feel. As a matter of fact, I’m sure that somewhere, somebody has already strapped a willing test subject to a table, attached diodes to his head, and has screenshot after screenshot of how the brain feels. I guess I’m a generally distrusting person, and I’m sure that these brain mappings have some validity; however, the question for me is how we ought to feel, which is an entirely different thing…I think.
When I get spitting bacon grease on my lightly haired torso, I ought to feel a little sting. When we kill somebody brutally by bashing in their cranium with the broken leg of a coffee table, we ought to feel remorse. When we taste something foul, we ought to spit it out. And yet there are exceptions to every rule: people who cannot feel their skin, sociopaths, and people with no taste.
It’s not an exact proportion, you understand. It’s not like a one-to-one correlation where for every one sociopath there is one person who feels what he ought to, but there are certainly enough of them out there that their level of aberration is at least somewhat suspect. Like they ought to be there. Filling out the an Aristotelian spectrum of sorts, where the two ends would be feeling wrong at the wrong time in the wrong way (either in excess or deficiency) and the mean would be feeling the right thing at the right time in the right way. But, as always, the difficulty here is having the right perspective on where the two ends are so you can have a somewhat vague idea where the mean might be.
Here’s the rub, as the bard once called it: with the conglomeration of events from the past fortnight—including but not limited to exhaustion, financial crises, knifings, shooting, emotional crises, and insomnia—I really ought to feel like I’m losing my mind. My ex-girlfriend’s stalker got stabbed in the kitchen of the restaurant he works at. True story. I have had zero dollars in my pocket and negative funds in the bank for longer than my stomach thinks advisable. A drunk man ran into the wall in front of my house as he was being chased by the police, got out of the car and started unloading a clip on the red-blue-flashing cars around him. It is STILL a not uncommon thing for me to be awake for more hours consecutively than can be contained in a day. Even when I get into bed I have to budget in an extra hour for the time it will take me to fall asleep—and pray to god that’s enough.
But I’m surprisingly comfortable in this place.
I feel most comfortable in a place where things are not making any sense. I feel most alive when I cannot control the future. I feel most at home when I don’t know where home is. I feel most in control when things are spiraling out of control. I feel most sane where it’s farthest away. It all feels most natural.
That’s why I guess it’s hard to know how to feel. I have to take into account how I feel about how I feel. I don’t know how to feel things in a normal way, but I have to trust in my feelings.
Acting. That’s what it is. We’re all acting—in a very stage way. The job of the thespian is to put as much of themselves into this character as they possible can in order for it to come off right. If they don’t invest enough of themselves, the character is rendered flat on the stage. If we don’t give enough of ourselves to the characters we’re playing, they are rendered flat in history. Curiously, thespians change characters sometimes three times in a year. I would argue we do the same in existence.
I have changed characters a couple of times at least, and I’m still looking for that starring role in existence. Consistently strive to be the magnificent man. Question where appropriate. Listen where appropriate. Direct where appropriate. Take direction when appropriate. I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel. He seems inhuman. And we are human, all to human.
I’m not sure the magnificent man knows how to feel.
Monday, April 7, 2008
The State of The...
Revolution. It occurred to me the other day that it is possible there might be some misunderstanding of this word revolution. Its two definitions are related, you know. The one I think I am guilty of bending most of my thought toward is the violent upheaval and movement of people: 1917, 1789, 1618, 1776. I think it is precisely because there are more of these revolutions of the people than there are of the sun. In almost any part of the world, at almost any given time, no matter how tiny or internationally insignificant the country, a revolution is being led against the ruling imperialists. I think that if the matter were looked into, there has been a revolution somewhere in the world every year, at least once a year. It’s funny, but there are very few revolutions that happen in the same year. Interesting. Sometimes revolutions LAST for more than a year, but generally speaking there are not more than one in every year. Some years there are no revolutions. I feel like the mean here (in a very Aristotelian sense) is one per year.
Something else happens once a year. The earth revolves around the sun—the celestial nature of revolution. Recently, I have begun to think that the revolution has to be less about movement within the revolutionary track, but movement from the inside out. Our tendency is to think that when we perform some kind of revolutionary act, we are moving things along, but that has a very static definition to me in that evolution is not within the realm of circulation. It is rather more wave-like. We’ll try a couple of things, oh, nope, we’ll take a step back, re-evaluate, try a couple more things, and, BAM!, we got us a keeper. Waves. Not teleology.
And I guess that’s the nut, right there. An unfortunate amount of thought by revolutionaries in the modern age is bent toward the idea that what they are doing, they are doing as a very final form. What this creates is the idea that this revolution means to put itself on an entirely different track from the last regime. Now, the unfortunate problem with this is, of course, that they are wrong. There is only one historical track. It moves around and around, unceasingly. I guess this is where historical dialectical materialism really comes to the fore and lets us know that the reason for its importance lies in the fact that its only purpose is to use the things we cannot change to throw the state of history into an entirely new track: communism.
There is no denying the slightly utopian aspect of communism; however, for those who understand it, sacrifice is actually built right in to the structure, and with the world community working together to make everybody better, it is difficult to say that this is not the ideal. If it were possible, we ought to have it. If it were possible.
I feel I’ve diverted every so slightly…and yet not. At any rate, I’m beginning to think of climate change. When does the earth’s climate change? It changes most drastically when we are nearer or farther from the sun in our revolution. That, generally, creates pretty drastic climate changes for the entire world—the equatorial regions excepted—and produces an extraordinarily wide variety of environmental changes. And good god the variety of storms they produce (I guess that’s a pretty good metaphor for what the mini-revolutions are like: storms of various strengths: April shower, thunderstorm, tropical storm, hurricane, tornado, etc).
What communism is talking about is impossible, and that is unfortunate. It is talking about permanent, variable climate change. How can something be permanent and variable? It has to exist in two states, first of all, like the world and the people on it. The world, for all intents and purposes, is permanent. We could kill the goddamn thing, and it would still continue on its maniacal track around the sun. It would just be a big dead universal weight, but it would continue. And yes, the sun will eventually explode, but it will take far longer for it to happen than anybody can imagine. I mean we can put a number on it, life five billion years, but that means earth is currently halfway through its life expectancy. I guess when the universe gives birth, its offspring have a ten million year life expectancy, and that’s comforting in a lot of ways.
At any rate, this permanent variability and its ability to exist simultaneously in two seemingly contradictory states is the key to communism: it takes history, the present, and the future into all accounts it needs to settle. It would move all the world a permanently variable position one step closer to perfection.
Revolution, therefore, is not movement within the realm of history, but movement outside of history. Being completely unprecedented. There are unprecedented people who have had this revolutionary effect on history. The ideas are permanently ingrained, the state of them are variable. It is kind of problematic in that we have seen how an individual can step outside of history and affect all times (PPF) because we have also seen how it would be beyond impossible that an entire world of people could take the same track. (Camel through the eye of a needle, anyone?) Groups can break the bonds of history, somewhat, but the harsh reality of things is that to move the entire world to a state of mind where everything needs to be done for the good of everybody else is impossible and impractical.
It is rather disheartening to think that the best we can do is throw pebbles at the revolutionary track of history once we’ve stepped outside it, but I guess the goal is to build your strength so that you can throw boulders at it in the hopes that it will create such a block that the flow will be permanently and variably carving new tracks of history. But we do have to step outside in order to aim.
I plan to have an effect on history. I am in the middle of a revolution right now. All my will is bent on breaking the cycle and stepping outside. I guess I’m not even worried about the idea that I am twenty-four years old and have no reason to believe I will be successful in my quest. It is with an eye to the past and an eye to the future while taking the present into account that I make my way through my existence. I am practicing right now. I am working on being permanently variable. I am working on being X: everything and nothing, what you want and what you don’t want, anger inducing and pacifying. I’m practicing for the big games. And every revolution there is a new season, a new opportunity to win the championship, a new opportunity to throw boulders into the ditch carved by inappropriate understood historical revolution.
Something else happens once a year. The earth revolves around the sun—the celestial nature of revolution. Recently, I have begun to think that the revolution has to be less about movement within the revolutionary track, but movement from the inside out. Our tendency is to think that when we perform some kind of revolutionary act, we are moving things along, but that has a very static definition to me in that evolution is not within the realm of circulation. It is rather more wave-like. We’ll try a couple of things, oh, nope, we’ll take a step back, re-evaluate, try a couple more things, and, BAM!, we got us a keeper. Waves. Not teleology.
And I guess that’s the nut, right there. An unfortunate amount of thought by revolutionaries in the modern age is bent toward the idea that what they are doing, they are doing as a very final form. What this creates is the idea that this revolution means to put itself on an entirely different track from the last regime. Now, the unfortunate problem with this is, of course, that they are wrong. There is only one historical track. It moves around and around, unceasingly. I guess this is where historical dialectical materialism really comes to the fore and lets us know that the reason for its importance lies in the fact that its only purpose is to use the things we cannot change to throw the state of history into an entirely new track: communism.
There is no denying the slightly utopian aspect of communism; however, for those who understand it, sacrifice is actually built right in to the structure, and with the world community working together to make everybody better, it is difficult to say that this is not the ideal. If it were possible, we ought to have it. If it were possible.
I feel I’ve diverted every so slightly…and yet not. At any rate, I’m beginning to think of climate change. When does the earth’s climate change? It changes most drastically when we are nearer or farther from the sun in our revolution. That, generally, creates pretty drastic climate changes for the entire world—the equatorial regions excepted—and produces an extraordinarily wide variety of environmental changes. And good god the variety of storms they produce (I guess that’s a pretty good metaphor for what the mini-revolutions are like: storms of various strengths: April shower, thunderstorm, tropical storm, hurricane, tornado, etc).
What communism is talking about is impossible, and that is unfortunate. It is talking about permanent, variable climate change. How can something be permanent and variable? It has to exist in two states, first of all, like the world and the people on it. The world, for all intents and purposes, is permanent. We could kill the goddamn thing, and it would still continue on its maniacal track around the sun. It would just be a big dead universal weight, but it would continue. And yes, the sun will eventually explode, but it will take far longer for it to happen than anybody can imagine. I mean we can put a number on it, life five billion years, but that means earth is currently halfway through its life expectancy. I guess when the universe gives birth, its offspring have a ten million year life expectancy, and that’s comforting in a lot of ways.
At any rate, this permanent variability and its ability to exist simultaneously in two seemingly contradictory states is the key to communism: it takes history, the present, and the future into all accounts it needs to settle. It would move all the world a permanently variable position one step closer to perfection.
Revolution, therefore, is not movement within the realm of history, but movement outside of history. Being completely unprecedented. There are unprecedented people who have had this revolutionary effect on history. The ideas are permanently ingrained, the state of them are variable. It is kind of problematic in that we have seen how an individual can step outside of history and affect all times (PPF) because we have also seen how it would be beyond impossible that an entire world of people could take the same track. (Camel through the eye of a needle, anyone?) Groups can break the bonds of history, somewhat, but the harsh reality of things is that to move the entire world to a state of mind where everything needs to be done for the good of everybody else is impossible and impractical.
It is rather disheartening to think that the best we can do is throw pebbles at the revolutionary track of history once we’ve stepped outside it, but I guess the goal is to build your strength so that you can throw boulders at it in the hopes that it will create such a block that the flow will be permanently and variably carving new tracks of history. But we do have to step outside in order to aim.
I plan to have an effect on history. I am in the middle of a revolution right now. All my will is bent on breaking the cycle and stepping outside. I guess I’m not even worried about the idea that I am twenty-four years old and have no reason to believe I will be successful in my quest. It is with an eye to the past and an eye to the future while taking the present into account that I make my way through my existence. I am practicing right now. I am working on being permanently variable. I am working on being X: everything and nothing, what you want and what you don’t want, anger inducing and pacifying. I’m practicing for the big games. And every revolution there is a new season, a new opportunity to win the championship, a new opportunity to throw boulders into the ditch carved by inappropriate understood historical revolution.
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