New. Well, this is the first time I have had a chance to sit at my computer and write as I used to do. Location is an incredibly important part of any writer’s ability to do what he or she does: what was Walden but the perfect environment for Thoreau, what is Starbuck’s but the perfect environment for people writing on their laptops, and what would Hunter S. Thompson be without his amphetamine-crazed glancings around a room full of booze and drugs and news clippings. It’s always difficult to say how a new environment will influence the way one writes, but I guess we’re back to the old experimentation stage—which can oftentimes be awfully sublime…something I’m very interested in.
So, from the wild confines of the freedom of New York City, to the uncomfortable independence of Kansas City, the land of my birth, I manage to make my way. Funny that. But funny also that I have now lived a full third of my life away from this city and I feel at once as if I belong and I don’t.
There are no lowball glasses in my parents house. I’m not sure how to feel in a world without pint glasses, lowball glasses, martini glasses, and general alcohol paraphernalia. That sounds bad, I guess, but the reality is that these are just things you have around the house. How does one explain it? It is not as if there is binging every night on cheap booze and passing out with your head spinning a little bit as was so common during the college years, this is a more respectful relationship with alcohol. You know what it can, and what it can’t, do, and doing is just so important. When it comes to most things in this world, it is simply the doing of them that matters, the particulars of the performance are most generally of little consequence.
“I played The Garden.”
“Oh. How’d it go?”
No. That conversation doesn’t happen, and even if it does, it would be fatuously ended by a brief, “Oh, you know, pretty good.”
It doesn’t matter how it went. It doesn’t matter when your pants are on inside out when you are sitting in the comfort of your own home. It just doesn’t. It’s true. It doesn’t matter if you stand on a chair swinging your Johnson (yes, that’s a Johnson) around like some kind of weird puppet show starring an earthworm and a couple of clumps of dirt because you are in your home, and it doesn’t really matter how weird you are when you’re alone.
You do get into a sticky area there, though, because it is entirely possible that weirdness is a sign of mental instability—or at least the baseline of some kind of social deficiency. You’re missing something when ALL you want to do is stand on a chair swinging your downstairs around in the shape of a cross saying E nomini patri, et Fili e spiritu sancti, or you’ve got something extra, and either way, you’re dealing with some deviation from the norm.
Things seem to mean so much, yeah? Or is that just me? Sunsetwatching could be the name of my religion. Every sunset means that what just happened is in the log books and cannot be undone, while it simultaneously means that a brand new day is on the way. I watched a friend of mine this evening as he fed his three-month-old baby girl, and realized that the fathering, mothering, caretaking, growing, developing, loving, and feeding another human being can be a spiritual experience. I would imagine that it develops a part of our soul that can be developed in no other way, and that is why it is such a significant event. Your life is forever changed in that moment. I am, obviously, excluding those folks that don’t care, because they honest aren’t worth thinking about. If you can’t understand the effect you can and will have on that person’s life, you probably shouldn’t have one to begin with. There is a possibility that it will force that part of the soul to develop, but that seems like an incredible crapshoot. If you go into it with the wrong attitude you will be a bad parent, and a bad parent is nothing more than a parent who can be apathetic to their offspring. Love them, hate them, show them the spectrum, but don’t do nothing.
Jesus, what was all that about. Maybe I’m just taking notes for when (and I’m gonna throw a big IF in here) that happens in my life. This suddenly seems to be the most overtly journal-type entry I’ve ever made, but we’re back to history at that point, and it can be extremely lucrative to have those bits of history to look back on and say, “O, I totally remember that frame of mind.” Which is important, because my frame of mind is like something out of an experimental novel by an unknown author.
But we’re working back to equilibrium, now. The fingers are once again dancing across the stages of the keyboard and putting words together to form sentences and sentences together to form some kind of meaning, as all words mean something when put into the context of other words. It can’t help but mean something, right? The only thing that can mean something is something done, and doing things usually takes the form of revolution. Daily revolution, a guide to keeping life interesting in twelve easy chapters. The future is unknowable, keep your head up. The bill may be a factor, as you have no money to pay for it, but you can’t really be all that worried about it, they plan on this kind of thing happening. As a matter of fact, they hope it will. They are so far removed from it that they couldn’t care less. Your couple of hundred bucks on the bill is really only a big deal to you because you feel like you owe somebody something and that that means something, but the reality is that you owe a couple of hundred bucks to a corporation that only barely cares about your interaction with it because they’ll get what’s theirs one way or another. From you or another source. You’re not putting them out of business.
Good god what a lot of drivel this has turned out to be, but I suppose that there are days when the brain absolutely has to just flush itself of the insanity that is wildly racing through it. I wish I dreamt more. Three of the people I love most in the world dream multiple times a week. I get, at MOST, one a month, and usually more like one a year—obviously these are the dreams that I remember even vaguely. I dreamt consistently one time. They were scary and I’d rather not be there. Am I running away from my dreams to pursue them in reality?
Monday, July 28, 2008
Monday, July 7, 2008
Through Movement and
change. We’re going to do this very free form style and just sort of roll with what comes up, because I’m seeing the physics of movement as applicable to the metaphorical, spiritual and metaphysical movement of bodies. Motion in the physical world can be calculated using one of a number of equations involving consistent variables: distance traveled, initial position, initial velocity, final position, final velocity, time between initial and current states, and constant acceleration (where most bodies fall under the acceleration of gravity). The reason that there are so many equations involving motion is because it depends on the knowns to determine which equation is most appropriate to solve for the unknowns.
Calibrating instruments in an effort for maximum accuracy, the instruments of my trade are the pen and ink, pencil and lead, computer and keys, the body and brain and all of them need constant maintenance for optimal efficiency. Complicated notions of erratic motion can be solved with a little bit of hard work and the appropriate equation—but beware of using the inappropriate equation as this can lead to inaccurate answers. You have to ask the most appropriate question, you see, in order to get the most appropriate answer. I’m moving! I’m moving! I’m moving! But what, ye gods, will be my final velocity in comparison to my initial velocity and how far will I go, how fast will I travel there, and where the hell am I, and where will I be.
For example, let’s say we have one of those high bounce balls that you get from the machine outside the grocery store for twenty-five cents (I guess there about fifty cents now, but anyway…). We want to know the distance traveled by this ball as it bounces, but all we know is the initial velocity and how long it bounced. Not a problem. Let’s take: vf=vi + aΔt, where the final velocity is found by taking the sum of the initial velocity and the product of the acceleration and the time. If we’re dealing with a dropped ball, and it bounced for two seconds, then the final velocity would be 2m/s (our known from the beginning) + g (gravity, 9.8 m/s2) * 3 seconds which gives us 2 m/s + 29.4 m/s = 31.4m/s as the final velocity. Then we just plug that guy and all our other knowns into the equation d=1/2(vi+vf)Δt. The distance traveled is then 1/2(31.4+2)3 = 50.1 meters.
I have come so far from the boy I was in my youth—my mantra, it seems, along with “the act reveals the subconscious desire” and “only act, the future is unknowable”…I guess I’m working on a collection of aphorisms, but I feel like it’s important for a man to have at least one aphorism attached to his name, but to return—and the distance traveled has been so great it is nearly impossible to calculate. Although I know I feel like I have lately been traveling at a much greater velocity than any time previous and now I know that this is mainly as a result of the way my life is being lived, which is to say fast and hard. If production is the distance is the outcome of the equation, then I guess I have to feel pretty good about what I have accomplished and am going to accomplish. The pace of existence is largely determined by our circadian rhythms and how our day is structured to help us complete any variety and number of tasks. A simple map can tell us how far we are traveling, and a speedometer can tell us how fast we’re going at any given time, and a clock will tell us how long, but what of acceleration. Is acceleration desire? Put the metal to the pedal to the other metal, Bender, and get us out of here! It’s funny that the one general constant in the physical world is a true variable in the metaphysical based on what we want and illustrated through the way we act.
The details of the trip are as complicated as possible, and for good reason. Stage one: flight to base. It will be an early morning red-eye that we board bleary-eyed from the ingestion of chemical lubricants and then will be promptly missed as a result of lubricant-induced slumber. Stage two: procure automotive transport unit and use it to cross twelve-hundred miles in one revolution of the earth around the sun—and we all know how I feel about revolution—during which it will be an all out burn down the interstate of youth to it’s termination/initiation point. Stage three: old business. When the automotive transport unit comes to a stop at the destination, the clock is already well under-way, and time is running thinner and thinner, and there are so many things to do. Stage four: wander back to base. The idea here is that the only truly appropriate way to understand how far we really travel is to take control of the means.
I moved to New York City two and one-half years ago from Kansas City, Missouri. In nine days I am moving back to Kansas City. There were hiccups in the process, given the expenses of a moving van, but it turns out the cheapest way we can find to get everything back effectively is to fly to Kansas City, rent a car, drive it back to New York City, load it up, and drive it back. The plan, right now, and there are those saying of best laid and mice and men, is that we’ll burn out to the coast, spend a couple of days, and then meander our way back. In a way it’s like a grand metaphor for what happened here in the city. When one gets to New York City it is an all-out sprint, and while one is here the race is consistently moving. The only way to bust out is to take control of the race and make your way at your own pace. When mental and physical capacities are running rapidly at all times with barely any pause, it is only a short time before you run out of gas or throw a rod or step on some glass or otherwise need to reach equilibrium.
Movement is a change. You cannot run away from your problems. This is true. Your problems will be with you wherever you are, but by moving you are changing… something. You can never know what that change will mean. You cannot know how far it will take you. You cannot know the future. But by changing the meaning of one variable, the entire equation changes and the outcomes are all different. It’s kind of like mathematical randomness, because change makes anything possible in math, and anything means that any random point will be the result of the new trajectory. When desiring something new, it is important to change something, otherwise there will never be anything new (you would, after all, simply be recycling the same old equation with the same old plug-ins), and that is counterproductive to the desire (i.e. change). Changing something illustrates the desire for change.
Here we are then, changing things, altering trajectories, and feeling more in control of the previously erratic. It’s a revolution of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit. Maybe I’ll grow my hair out again, I thought…
Calibrating instruments in an effort for maximum accuracy, the instruments of my trade are the pen and ink, pencil and lead, computer and keys, the body and brain and all of them need constant maintenance for optimal efficiency. Complicated notions of erratic motion can be solved with a little bit of hard work and the appropriate equation—but beware of using the inappropriate equation as this can lead to inaccurate answers. You have to ask the most appropriate question, you see, in order to get the most appropriate answer. I’m moving! I’m moving! I’m moving! But what, ye gods, will be my final velocity in comparison to my initial velocity and how far will I go, how fast will I travel there, and where the hell am I, and where will I be.
For example, let’s say we have one of those high bounce balls that you get from the machine outside the grocery store for twenty-five cents (I guess there about fifty cents now, but anyway…). We want to know the distance traveled by this ball as it bounces, but all we know is the initial velocity and how long it bounced. Not a problem. Let’s take: vf=vi + aΔt, where the final velocity is found by taking the sum of the initial velocity and the product of the acceleration and the time. If we’re dealing with a dropped ball, and it bounced for two seconds, then the final velocity would be 2m/s (our known from the beginning) + g (gravity, 9.8 m/s2) * 3 seconds which gives us 2 m/s + 29.4 m/s = 31.4m/s as the final velocity. Then we just plug that guy and all our other knowns into the equation d=1/2(vi+vf)Δt. The distance traveled is then 1/2(31.4+2)3 = 50.1 meters.
I have come so far from the boy I was in my youth—my mantra, it seems, along with “the act reveals the subconscious desire” and “only act, the future is unknowable”…I guess I’m working on a collection of aphorisms, but I feel like it’s important for a man to have at least one aphorism attached to his name, but to return—and the distance traveled has been so great it is nearly impossible to calculate. Although I know I feel like I have lately been traveling at a much greater velocity than any time previous and now I know that this is mainly as a result of the way my life is being lived, which is to say fast and hard. If production is the distance is the outcome of the equation, then I guess I have to feel pretty good about what I have accomplished and am going to accomplish. The pace of existence is largely determined by our circadian rhythms and how our day is structured to help us complete any variety and number of tasks. A simple map can tell us how far we are traveling, and a speedometer can tell us how fast we’re going at any given time, and a clock will tell us how long, but what of acceleration. Is acceleration desire? Put the metal to the pedal to the other metal, Bender, and get us out of here! It’s funny that the one general constant in the physical world is a true variable in the metaphysical based on what we want and illustrated through the way we act.
The details of the trip are as complicated as possible, and for good reason. Stage one: flight to base. It will be an early morning red-eye that we board bleary-eyed from the ingestion of chemical lubricants and then will be promptly missed as a result of lubricant-induced slumber. Stage two: procure automotive transport unit and use it to cross twelve-hundred miles in one revolution of the earth around the sun—and we all know how I feel about revolution—during which it will be an all out burn down the interstate of youth to it’s termination/initiation point. Stage three: old business. When the automotive transport unit comes to a stop at the destination, the clock is already well under-way, and time is running thinner and thinner, and there are so many things to do. Stage four: wander back to base. The idea here is that the only truly appropriate way to understand how far we really travel is to take control of the means.
I moved to New York City two and one-half years ago from Kansas City, Missouri. In nine days I am moving back to Kansas City. There were hiccups in the process, given the expenses of a moving van, but it turns out the cheapest way we can find to get everything back effectively is to fly to Kansas City, rent a car, drive it back to New York City, load it up, and drive it back. The plan, right now, and there are those saying of best laid and mice and men, is that we’ll burn out to the coast, spend a couple of days, and then meander our way back. In a way it’s like a grand metaphor for what happened here in the city. When one gets to New York City it is an all-out sprint, and while one is here the race is consistently moving. The only way to bust out is to take control of the race and make your way at your own pace. When mental and physical capacities are running rapidly at all times with barely any pause, it is only a short time before you run out of gas or throw a rod or step on some glass or otherwise need to reach equilibrium.
Movement is a change. You cannot run away from your problems. This is true. Your problems will be with you wherever you are, but by moving you are changing… something. You can never know what that change will mean. You cannot know how far it will take you. You cannot know the future. But by changing the meaning of one variable, the entire equation changes and the outcomes are all different. It’s kind of like mathematical randomness, because change makes anything possible in math, and anything means that any random point will be the result of the new trajectory. When desiring something new, it is important to change something, otherwise there will never be anything new (you would, after all, simply be recycling the same old equation with the same old plug-ins), and that is counterproductive to the desire (i.e. change). Changing something illustrates the desire for change.
Here we are then, changing things, altering trajectories, and feeling more in control of the previously erratic. It’s a revolution of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit. Maybe I’ll grow my hair out again, I thought…
Thursday, June 26, 2008
What's It All
mean? That’s like the big daddy of them all, isn’t it? But it seems like a real impossibility as the meaning of life is never revealed during life…or maybe it is, but only very rarely.
There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.
By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?
I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.
The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.
I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.
But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.
From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.
So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?
I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.
If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).
But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?
There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.
By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?
I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.
The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.
I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.
But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.
From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.
So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?
I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.
If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).
But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?
Friday, June 20, 2008
I Hate My
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?
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?
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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
