A Mirror Floating in Water

Again, I'm sorry litnet for polluting the Recent Blog entries sectoin with my nonsense, but I'm just really in a posting mood.

This one is just some long rant I wrote about a year and a half ago. I was scanning through my long endless stream of files and came across this and thought "oh what the hell".

Admittingly this rant does posses the typical adolencent whining you can find anywhere, but I suppose I'll still post it just in case you guys want to get a good look at me. I suppose that despite the fact I've matured a great deal, I'm still kind of the same person.


The reason why I don’t want to take responsibility or even confide in the thought of my future in school, is because it leads to an overwhelming mountain of stress that I simply can’t handle rationally. I have now come to realize, due to this result, what I want and what I seem to have always wanted; the simple life.
I think the reason why I have at times detested this desire in the past is due to the fact that I enjoy contemplating the complex. How foolish of me to think that the two are connected! I have now come to realize that I can contemplate the complex, but I cannot live in it. I can contemplate the beauty of complex mathematical systems and their intricate workings, but I cannot live in one. I joyfully giggle like a little boy on Christmas morning when I see big numbers like one million, what they mean and what I can do with them, but I cannot live among the millions.
I have always loved being able to get know other individuals, through novelists like James Joyce or Fyodor Dostoyevsky, these men, who even put themselves into some of their characters, possessed a sort of authenticity in their characterization, which seemed to surpass even reality itself. I loved delving into a great story and observing so closely a character’s psyche, sometimes at a vantage point to high, you feel like you have become the character in the novel. I joyfully indulged in reading great novels like Joyce’s Ulysses , in which I consistently got to voyeuristically peer into another persons’ thoughts and feelings, like an omniscient god. I also soon discovered, that in even reading non-fiction, the author tells so much about himself, even if it concerns a completely impersonal subject such as history or science, every subject becomes personal when there’s interest and passion.
Though, I could wander these magnificent worlds, almost as if in a dream, without any worries, without any body, almost in an eternal way, I discovered that the real world never seemed to stand above the world of books.
Society, it seems, once it sees an intelligent mind, it does either two things; it uses it or it ignores it. The one thing which seems to be at the front of every person’s mind these days, is practicality. Nothing resides more in the American mind today more than its own obsession with what is practical and it is no wonder that the original American philosophy was pragmatism. So when society sees anything that can be of any use, it exploits it. With this I believe that society’s a tyrant. It is an invisible force which seems to rule over everyone’s life (or at least their public life) and yet it doesn’t even exist beyond the constraints of our own conceptual faculties. What it really is, is a prevailing collective authority, which becomes a part of any cultures idea on how things should and do work. It is cultural truth being enforced as a system. Before the 20th century when global culture and communication had not even emerged, there had been different ideas of truth, and whatever those ideas where, in whatever culture, those ideas presided over the society for centuries. Eastern cultures, which had been the home and birthplace of the lives and ideas of Confucius, Lao Tzu and Gautama Buddha, had lived for centuries with the idea that their way of doing things was the way things should be, so did the West. Now it wasn’t that any culture was more right than the other, it’s just that since they believed that their way of doing things was the way it should be, it was. It is the simplest of tautologies, if you accept it, you accept it. America, and by the end of the 20th century; the rest of the world, accepted pragmatism.
Now it’s not just that this obsession with pragmatism has been a new thing in society, in fact it’s very old, as old as probably civilization itself, and it’s definitely not originally American (though its philosophical establishment is), and in fact spans across Eastern culture as well. And throughout these cultures, many poets, writers, scientists, thinkers, detested the hypnotic sociological habit of daily life in society. Many sought deeper, more important ways of living. Plato for one said that we have become greedy with insignificant “worldly matters” and should aim for higher purposes, namely, that of the eternal Forums of mathematics, in the East Buddha said something similar along different lines.
It just seems that this pragmatic lenses through which we see the world which today’s society enforces, seems to be so vaguely distant and complex. Fragmentation is all that truly remains after this, something the modernists immediately recognized. If one is to step outside the abyss of modern life, one begins to see how disconnected and arbitrary everything is. For modern life is a spell, a hypnotic timeslot of infinity into which all is drained and all is meaningless. But this sort of meaninglessness is quite contrary to the sort of unoccupied nihilism one encounters in ones actions once looking into the abyss and seeing the absurdity of it all. No, one is in the abyss to the contrary case, but by being in the abyss, all consciousness is lost along with all pain, and this is probably why so many adhere to this option. Everything is still sapped of meaning here in the abyss, but there is nothing philosophical about it, or ones actions. Everything is done and done without preliminary consideration or thought, this is the idea of a human being becoming mechanical. Through the emotionless indifference in everything, one begins to possess a certain kind of thoughtless enslavement to the world, quite contrary to the overpowering burst of sentimental despair from consciousness, which, at it’s worst, leads to ethical nihilism.
It is syntax, which leads one to such extremes. But in the absence of consciousness, syntax no longer exists and so does everything else. In the abyss, everything has died, and no longer does thought or meaning adhere to anything rational, and the only thing that still seems to continue living is action, it is only this from which we ghosts of time wander the dead world. The point is, is that these are acts of perspective. The two views from which we can experience the abyss, within it or outside, are nothing more than perspective, the abyss probably just being the cynical workings of our mind might be nothing more than an illusionary despair on the behalf of our brains, thus making the abyss all the more real.
I have lived in and around this abyss for so long, and yet it is like the hallucinary act of falling asleep, all time begins to make less and less sense until soon enough time becomes so meaningless that it holds no relevance to the present moment. I would imagine that on the edge of that abyss, lies a dead garden, with flowers cringed up into crinkly pieces of paper, buried into the ground and yet seemingly struggling to get out, but really just in a state of non-movement. Though I cannot imagine the sight of being inside the abyss, for such a thing is contradictory to what defines it.
It simply seems that life is an endless procrastination of days and duties demanded by those around me. I have never intuitively related thinking to work, and in fact saw them as opposites, work being mundane and rote, thinking being the opposite. If my intuition serves me right on this matter, I think it is a sin to combine the two, or at least it feels that way for those who are of my hyper-sensitive nature.
I have always found it, that duty is what destroys the magic of intellectual thought and the miracle of intuition. It is a chain and shackle unto the mind which demands of it to work on an order. But such a thing is impossible, at least for me, for if such a thing was, one would be able to produce thoughtful work at any time of day or week on any demand. But this is not so, and this enslavement ruins the intuition’s childlike ecstasy.
Though, if there is one thing I find true about myself, is that I am a pessimist. To an extent that Victorian and Romantic literature nauseates and confuses me, leaving me with a sense of disingenuous sentimentality. This is why I run to the World War I stricken arms of the modernists, writers who, living in an age of exponential change and war, where quite shocked by the worlds coldness and the absurdity of the universe. Now many writers, including the Romantics, before them had faced these problems, but not in such an embracing way as the modernists. From Kafka’s terrifying metaphors to Eliot’s overwhelming disillusionment, these writers have always genuinely and unsentimentally touched my soul (whatever that is) in one way or another.
It seems that so much of the world remains forgotten, due to the arrogant prioritization of working life over the arts and the breezy air of a cloudy afternoon.
Anyway, I sit here in my little corner of the library, listening to Duke Ellington and falling into a book of poetry, as the grey skies subtly cloud up and the rain comes.