July 7th, 2011
Driving cars now; but also, flying on planes. I am circling both a planet and an ego, like regular normal peoples. I travel interstate, overseas, on my own compulsions, alone.
As if that fucking cliché about the traveler escaping themselves wasn’t silly enough, the novelty and irony jumps down your throat and disrupts the unusually palatable tequila that now only barely lines the bottle. Like any good absurdist, this unbelievable world citizen will find both truth and untruth in that burning sensation that he just coughed up in laughter; all whilst putting it to use in some diatribe about the less subtle health risks of religious conviction. This choking is merely a sign that he can be further surprised, further laugh, weep, smile. He’ll talk about himself in third person for a while until he catches his breath and tries to open up the wounds that were just stabbed at (both moments and months ago). Cauterisation is order, chaps.
Locked away like some self-aggrandizing fucking princess in the castle of rural Australia, the pretty (possibly in part autistic) yet parasitically adept rationalist looked out and performed his swan-song laments about the egoistic depths of travel and the dangers of pretentiously long sentences. Again, those seemingly honest absurdists that good clever teenage boys read about, we will find both the truth and the untruth. Travel’s not that bad, home’s not so bad either. Hate and home and love and not mutually exclusive, at least not in so far as I look at my divergent composition. The further we run, we find that we cannot escape ourselves; yet the further we pull into our depths, the hazier and inexact we will find our focus. Like the good princesses in the stories, we tell ourselves that we’re just as disinclined to act. If everything is absurd, then nothing is. Taking a look at some specifics might help to illuminate some path away from this stupidity.
Firstly; this lovely lonely southern clay house is as good and as authentic as it ever gets, despite the subtle differences that might seem like a lover in a lie. All the while, any nostalgia can come back tasting like an attempted dodge / swerve by an admirably self-respecting angel. And each and every one of us has so many angels, should we momentarily drop the scientism and binge on the imagery for a while. These supposed angels, hovering just out of reach, seem to have just absorbed the scorn, reappropriated, reconsolidated and taken in a new foundation of their own in spite of that feeling you can leave in their guts and mouths with such minute physical force. The religious imagery in this southern ‘united’ state will always bring me parables of conquest and suffering, despite the untruth of their theistic origins. I’m now leaning towards the idea that love can be thematically investigated within this context. However, there’s still that stupid conflict between ideas.
Now we look up, scan the frescoes – didn’t these monkeys used to dance for us, as for de Lampedusa’s The Prince? Make up your mind, miscreant: are they relished or relics? Do your awkward words still make their hearts turn, or are they dust through and through? Whatever your answer, there is both force and distance to consider. Force, considered up close – especially when bodily close – is wholly apparent and strong. Considering force at a distance however will increasingly demands inferences. And the demands of this relative concept are forever shifting, asking further revaluation.
(Almost a side note -) Traditional gods also occupy this absurd relation, giving both power and insecurity to their worshiper, yet always at a distance. The god is there for you individually, always with an ear or sympathetic understand and encouragement. Yet the god is at every second capable of calling you out on your inconsistencies, your half-hearted convictions, your doubts and fears. There are still many gods of this type that people chase like shadows that are misread. One senses Freud or Nietzsche in this rambling – they’re probably in there somewhere, absorbed thoroughly beyond acknowledgement. Consider Nietzsche’s Antichrist and Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.
Fucking dogmatism.
Move back away from the abstract theorisations for a moment. You act like this distance is in some sense damaging to both yourself and your partner. How could these standing laws of physics prove so universal and holding if they were not at once acting on such large and discrete objects as planets, systems, universes? Rhetoric again borrowed from Nietzsche, but this time with feeling. The fact that you have both strong influence over others and that such individuals drastically sway your judgement is of paramount importance in building your own strength.
To travel in order to escape self, work, desire, routine, etc (as Alaine de Botton notes in a manner that seems to be unpopular) is delusional. However, contrary to de Botton, such escapism is not entirely untruthful. Equally delusional is the quest to ‘find oneself’, to remove the shackles and embrace the true core that lies beneath. Without this contention, one might fall into the trap of assuming the absolute solidity of the self; not an entirely undesirable position, but a position that has lacked reason for a long while now. You can’t drop everything, either way.
Many people do fall either one way or the other. But this absurdist fucking leaning, this difficult weighing and reweighing, has become far too ingrained to remove. It was there before I knew it was there, it was there before I could decide if I could remove it or not. If we question our desire to want to know, we’ve already been infected. At this point I’m not inclined to think of foundations anymore.
Like that music that holds this piece together, there seems to be some sort of melody or genre to it. A sort of coherent amalgamation is slightly less than the foundationalist monster that I spoke of previously, limbs asunder and each supporting the mainland. Perhaps this coherentist model, this lack of legs, is a fucking cop-out: an easy and non-explanatory solution. The music, surroundings, and harsh words that provoked these thoughts are usual for me. Welcome back to the conflicting interests. However, I still feel entirely whole and happy as a single entity.
But in this contentedness are those I have loved and drastically disappointed (coextensively with such unmet obligation to human needs that I’ve come to interpret in modern religions). You know, just like those who haven’t ‘broken the spell’, I’m pretty happy with how it’s gone so far, although your disdain and your suffering are warranted. I’m sorry if this isn’t enough, but I cannot ask for a more wonderful life with everything I have seen. Sillier things have happened, but denying how good it has been does not seem like an option for me. I wouldn’t wish that others removed this feeling of cautious contentment with the past, nor would I remove it myself.
This is the optimist. There is also the cynic. Cynicism tries to show humans how they could be, but have not been. Optimism is hope for the future. I think that they’re quite complimentary, but I wouldn’t mind being shown otherwise. In the mean time, here are some of my errors in love, in respect, that I have been working on since before junior high:
1) Lack of empathy.
2) Lack of distance.
3) Lack of affection.
4) Lack of challenge.
Like the cynic I am, I always laugh at how people interpret the world through their own rose-coloured lenses. But I’m a twat, or I’ve always been a twat so far. We’re not that dissimilar, you and I (although probabilistically I’m currently more of a pretentious twat!). We will laugh at each other and at the same time feel the most horrible sense of empathy. I’ve been working on this first lack of respect for so long and now with the help of my students I feel that I’m finally making good ground. I wish I could convey that feeling in a meaningful sense and I hope I can to a few of them. I’ve never really felt like I’ve needed it. Perhaps I have at some points? I know for sure that some of them do need it and that I may finally be in the position to begin becoming one of those ‘healers’ that late Camus talked about (as in, ‘late in life’, not just the dead guy).
Maybe a good start is: how has your week been? What have you eaten, thought about, discussed? What is the best thing that has happened today? By the way, I like your shirt.
The traveler clichés are absurd and stupid, but the settler ideas are worse and far more harmful. Be always at home and always moving. Bottle of tequila has slowly disappeared; take nothing here at face value as per usual.
bUCKETisDead |
agnosticism, education, epistemology, girls |
May 7th, 2011
Wow, I’d forgotten about that last post. What a refreshing rant - relatively dissonant to my current state of mind but amazingly clear as a memory. All of those moments of clarity that I had to rush through last year… and in hindsight, I might have made some marginal impact with this optimistic cynicism that I’m crafting. I wonder how it is that I think so slowly compared to other people. Perhaps either myself or others aren’t thinking hard enough at all.
Dear future-me. Here’s a poem that might reflect your inability to grab hold of anything substantial, that weightlessness that means that gods and spirits have very little gravitational pull on your thoughts and feelings.
Content and demanding
Nothing more than that I became who I was
And that any regret became mine to know and own
To make a home for any scratch or laughing reply
Lest these neighbours invite us into their homes
Alone with friends and that part of us in them
We’ll colour skies with our moods and forget
About as many lies that we’ve yet to tell ourselves
Any future tree that offers branches to sleep under
Or on and above but depending on the weather
In our imagined orbit and passers-by forever
Always at home
Since you’ve came back here, future-me, have a good hard think about how you fostered that elusive combination of self-efficacy and resilience this year. And how you’ve stopped being so god-damn serious.
bUCKETisDead |
education, meaning, poetry |
September 3rd, 2010
Miracle of fucking miracles, the spam comments are better than the drive-by religious repetition that drips into some of these posts. They are both as pointless and irrelevant, but at least some of the spam comments and URLs are entertaining. I have decided to clean up my comments by allowing a small portion of the spam through; these comments have certainly improved my efficacy with their kind and encouraging words.
Let this be a testament to the progress made in AI by spambots everywhere - these machines have created messages more appropriate than the vague cliches tossed about by the fleshy morons who feel compelled to make religious comments on a blog that posts a couple of times a year.
And what aggrandizing, self-depreciating wit the author uses to cut them down to size!
Long live those days that saw me scratching together some sloppy and lightly intoxicated rambling as a warm up for the things I was actually trying to write. Nowadays I’m sober from the boredom of being such an encouraging and contributing member of society: so sober, decaffeinated and bored that I’ve crept here at night to try and recall what that was like.
That was less than a year ago. I’ve been a positive role model for too long already. Give me my peers back so I can cut a hole in our reasoning and crawl back into that unfortunate gaping womb to hibernate. I need to stop ignoring those trendy, pseudo-academic, barely empirical educational wankfests and jump on board with some of those common counterexamples that philosophy majors are often vaguely familiar with. I need to re-envelop myself in those words, ideas and argumentative essays that birthed me while others around were content with writing soap operas. So many of those people I used to know are now parents, creating new life while they are still so incomplete in what they could become: soon everyone from back home will have started this cycle all over again, much to the dismay of us less-than-serious educators who would be content to kill off the industry if it meant an improved world in which more parents saw worth in educating their kids. It’s as I predicted before puberty set in. I’m tired of being correct in my cynicism. It needs a cathartic release and these reflections aren’t quite enough.
Funnily enough, most teacher are also masochistic introverts. Perhaps this can be my home away from home for a while, a recluse from the outside world and a justification for not ‘growing up’. That academic world that is truly fit for my stupid egoism will still be around and unchanged in a couple of years time.
bUCKETisDead |
miracles, reflexive |
January 14th, 2010
Melbourne’s ‘Global Atheist Convention’. Despite the insistence of some of my academic acquaintances that it will be great and that I should attend (which is kind of comic in itself, for some reason), I don’t think I’m going.
It’s not that I’m explicitly against a gathering of ‘like-minded’ people. Neither is it due to my conditioned response to be disgusted at large groups of people and the bureaucracy that surrounds them. It’s just that there’s only so much that they can be like-minded about, and anything past that would be an unbearable dogmatism. And yet here we have an entire convention of people who think that it is worthwhile.
Irreligiousity is the norm in Australia. Very few attend a church regularly, and even less understand the basic tenets of their beliefs.
Perhaps my fears are that this convention is just going to be a rampant Dawkins wank-fest, emboldening further pseudo-philosophy and idiotic rationalistic dogmatism that comes up every century or so. Such phenomena is often said to spark a revival in faith-based systems, given the choice of either/or that make it simple for those who aren’t believers, but who are uneducated about other ways of looking at things. The best read I’ve had all year (so far!) is a confession-style piece by former New-Ager Karla McLaren about converting from the New-Age movement to a sort of sceptical naturalism; she touches on issues of reactionary cultures better than I ever could.
It’s only since reading that best-seller, The God Delusion, that I’ve grown so distant from this supposed ‘movement’; the ill-defined philosophical terms that floated through the book was one thing (where a first year undergrad understanding of epistemology would have been sufficient), but to actually lambast VOLTAIRE for being a deist…? Voltaire, one of the greatest and boldest humanists and satirists of much religious and superstitious stupidity… this dogmatic ignorance about history, philosophy and even rationalism is inexcusable for anyone with an intellectual conscience.
But to the topic at hand, and put simply and miserly: over one hundred dollars is too much for everyday kids like myself. It is too much for anyone with a slight interest in the subject matter. It is okay for those deeply invested in this stuff, but that means that it will only be a bunch of clever people preaching to the choir.
bUCKETisDead |
agnosticism, atheists, fundamentalism |
October 1st, 2009
An old joke. What walks on four legs in the morning, two at midday and three in the evening? The idea is, as everyone probably knows, that human infants crawl, adults walk on their own two feet and old people hold themselves up with a cane.
Of course, the original joke only concerns men - just one facet of stupidity found in the ancient Greek thinking. Another criticism that a Christian might level at this joke concerns the ‘footprints in the sand’ theodicy/poem: the all-loving deity is supposedly walking alongside or carrying the worshipper through tough times. This of course makes the joke a bit funnier, as it implies that Christians have more legs than ancient Greeks. That is funny, isn’t it? I’m out of touch with the current standard of jokes.
But there is a realm of secular truth to be analysed in this devotional imagery. When the sense of self is questioned or knocked about, when the foundations of our lives seem shaky, it is often nice to know there is something bigger there to hold it together. Social institutions such as the various religious seem to stick around, as history shows. They chop and change, reorganise power, and even completely alter dogma (contradiction of terms isn’t really an issue in religion). But man, do they stick around.
And now the imagery is getting disturbing. If we incorporate the pillars of our social existence into the equation – i.e. our friends, families, lovers, organisations, histories, etc – we end up with these hideous multi-limbed incestuously connected organisms that never cease sprouting more and hacking off smaller periphery limbs. Of course some limbs are a bigger part of the foundation than others. And I like this coherence-as-foundation analogy for the self despite how multi-limbed creatures are often presented in horror and/or anime.
Now imagine hacking off your own leg.
Either one, really. Even a few toes. You’re still pulling out the floorboards that hold you up.
Anyone who has metaphorically hacked off a limb knows what I’m talking about – I’ve never had the issue of hacking off an almighty all-protecting god-limb before, but I have a lot of respect for people who really have made the struggle. To completely rearrange the foundations of your life is an extremely risky and painful experience.
Take the imagery a bit further. One day you notice that one of your legs is misbehaving. All of a sudden, this aspect of your self that has supported you your entire life is looking a bit out of place. So you start testing it to see what’s wrong, and it starts to look a bit… foreign. We all have a self-defence system that acts like a toned-down Capgras delusion in relation to fending off imposters: that is a fake. It’s a lie. We don’t want to get rid of it, because it’s so possible that it’s still our leg, it just doesn’t seem to fit anymore. Eventually we start to notice that it’s affecting the rest of our bodily support. The limb has to go.
Ockham’s Razor never seems to have much of an effect on religious belief, or other factors that build up one’s identity. That’s because you need a fucking hacksaw, not a Gillette Shaver. You really just need to start hacking into it, and rip that limb off, dealing with the pain, blood and tears that come with it.
And once it’s detached sufficiently, that’s not the end of the story. That phantom limb will be floating around your entire life. Across the room at a party. Displayed on street signs. Hovering around like something that should be there but isn’t. A sense of nothingness that wants to be filled by something specific, but all it can find are imposters.
The analogy is in the Saw movies (in part), but the lesson is obviously different. Next time you encounter someone, look at their beliefs, look at their life projects, look at their loves and hates, and remember what fucked-up multi-limbed creatures you’re dealing with here. Now step back and take a look at yourself.
bUCKETisDead |
Uncategorized |