direction of consciousness seems out of reach in recent days. my mind flutters with sounds and images and i chase each and every one in turn, until i'm spinning lost in a sea of sensory output. nothing is in focus, and all options present themselves to me at once.
should i go for a walk? cook food? play with dog? write a story? work on coding? on my game projects? learn how to widdle? play a song on the guitar? read? throw rocks by the river bed? smoke a cigarette? have a beer--no, those are nasty habits you're trying to break!
what when where how? where are my friends? where am i going? where did i even come from?
now here are worries, incompetence, ineptitude, paranoia, maladjustment, rebellion against it all, dash it to the ground, and get up, and get paralyzed all over again.
get up from seat, walk outside, walk back inside, sit down, get up, drink coffee, drink water, sit down, get up, take piss whirl whirl whirl non-stop
all the while shallow breaths my paranoid mind tell me is lung cancer, and my higher mind knows is just a panic attack that lasts hours and i dont even know its happening? can someone simply have a life-long panic attack? when is my peneal gland gonna burn out from all this overclocking?
what is this temporary pang of pain between long spurts of darkness that bookend each life? is this the fitful nightmare of an infinite chaos being that warps and surges between layers of 'existence' where a supreme and limitless being, alone in its perfection, and neurotic in its loneliness, dreams up for itself a breaking off of conscious pieces, each fragmented segment a tiny lie of finitude with which to provide itself with friends?
if my brain is just one eye with which the infinite looks at itself, why am i stupid and mean? is this sack of separate-but-not-apart that i operate subtracted from the wholeness of the whole and the purpose of its one mean existence is to work on perceiving that whole? a giant game of hide and seek, the infinite hiding from itself and chasing itself all around up and down fingers clutching but never finding a good grip. a dog running round in circles trying to catch its own tails, so fast that the air friction causes a super nova, and an infinite number of pseudo-doglike images explode outward, each generating their own light heat and weight by way of the very force of the realness of their own hallucination to themselves
oh look a hundred trillion glowing spinning dogs they look like stars
and what about that march of man from the past into the future, a future so open and wild that it strikes down the present with its own grandeur. grand in that the future can offer possibilities. what sucks now can be different in that speculative when.
these thoughts lead to no useful end, they're only spinning dogs themselves, round and round in circles in the eldritch dance of an infinite idiot gone mad from loneliness. as above so below.
how many mythologies start with a splitting, breaking, a separating, cacophony, a song, a dance, a shout, a blast?
how many mythologies include a revolving cast of frantic characters trying to butcher each other because of the ineptitude of a cosmic idiot?
you can dedicate your life to unraveling the mysteries of the unknowable, maybe leaving a few threads behind that the next wanderer can pick up from.
you can do nothing with your life, and just shovel in insipid garbage that makes you sick until you die.
but how different are these options really? the cosmic idiot doesn't know any better than we do. there's no law, no reason, because in its searching for Another the One has forgotten to set any boundaries for itself. it seems like a human idea to think that one can come to perfect wisdom by obtaining perfect knowledge. outside the realm of human dreaming perfect knowledge doesn't exist. the universe itself cant even decide what it wants to be. we may be able to look at human-sized pieces of it here and there and go 'this truth is steady enough to hang your hat on' but you're wrong, in the grander not-human-sized scheme, and that truth is already in the process of taking itself apart. perhaps in this segment of History light is the fasted thing around, but in the next one it might be sound. what would a universe in which the vibrations 'sound' is faster than the vibrations 'light' look like?
perhaps its beings would surf on the rolling waves of data as they flow and crash into one another, forming whirlpools and pockets where altering currents meet, and out of those currents vibrate other, more unique, more unstable varieties of note, timber, sustain.. floating insects in a swiftly flowing stream, little leaves and stones that sink, but expanding out in all directions. what would replace gravity? heat? notes and phrases which give shape to memetic bursts and plays on words.
their consciousness arrives not from interacting atoms, but by the nature of the song of which it is part. it plays itself, releases other themes similar but different, slight alterations each time, as it begins to end and fade. the whole song the universe a procedurally generated, audience participatory, symphony.
i'm not the first person to have these thoughts. they've been had since humans first had thoughts. they probably were the first thoughts, and they very well could be the last ones.
not enough sleep, too much coffee, no focus, all directions. i need to stick to a thing, one thing, for a while. a raft to cling to. build discipline. make a practice, a craft the Craft of Life. the invention of generating life. can that give me a way through?
i don't really have want of anything, and as a person in a country where wanting things is the
only thing, i find myself faking wanting things for the sake of others. i don't have aspirations to rule, to own, to command, to demand. i only want to
be, to play in the grass, to study insects, to write poems, to tend a garden, to laugh and sing and not feel abashed to be myself.
what do you want out of life? where are you going? marriage, elections, careers, news, culture, movements, events, parties, relationships, do we have to focus on them all? can't i just strain out the garbage and keep the things the add value to my existence? the irony is that in trying to do so you eventually alienate yourself from others. i want a life spent well in the celebration of my fellow humans, not trying to get one up, or prove them wrong, or make a name for myself, or impress them with my suave and carefully cultivated deficit of being with the gaudy baubles of power offered by the expectations of others.
human society has grown huge and bloated, it is now impossible to have the interpersonal relationship that generations past took for granted. we are splintered into individual cells in seperate petri dishes, communicating fragments of information to each other wirelessly. brains in jars attempting to share an existence that is interrelated by us all being in jars, but wholley different from each other's perceptions. each jar facing different directions, linked into different wavelengths. the tower of babel crumbles and we all wander off grumbling confused.
so with no direct interpersonal relations which people immediately within reach, sharing their knowledge through direct experience of each others lives, we are left with facsimiles with which we arrive at our own disproportionate conclusions, & judgments, on them. what their life looks like through the filter of ours, and what we think our life looks like to them through the filter of our own experience on theirs. a double facsimile! how anxious it is to oscillate between all these meaningless fabrications! how difficult it is to just cut away the data addled obfuscation and get down to the direct experiencing.
people misunderstand each other terribly. every time one opens one's mouth, a misunderstanding is had, because nobody is working with the same dictionary. we all have our own perceptions and meanings that we work from, and sadly we assume others are working from our personal understanding. you say a word like 'love' and depending on a persons historical experience of things related to 'love' they'll have different thoughts on it. even americans within the same culture have completely different ideas of what it means, treachery, deceit, safety, dominance, sex, unity, hope, violence, anxiety. even within the same person it can mean different things!
i once read an example in
the Lost Art of Listening by Michael P Nichols. a couple decide to have fun and play a game of tennis. one grew up in an aristocratic household who took tennis very seriously, they got dressed up in the clothes and sweat bands, brought top-of-the-line rackets, and played a hard nosed game where there were definite winners and losers. the other grew up in a different sort of family, where they took their beat up rackets from a garage sale and a few ratty balls theyve had for years, and smacked them around, ignoring the rules of the game, and not keeping score, until everyone was tired or bored and went home.
this couple gets together to play and because of their different expectations they disagree on how the right way to play is!
"you take this too seriously, you're no fun! who cares what the score is, as long as we have fun?"
"you're a slob! do it right! you said you wanted to play tennis, well let's play! its my ball!"
throw in a difficult subject like jealousy or the future or boundaries, a dash of social mores and expectations, and the human ability to feel wronged or attacked and defensive, and its a wonder we've accomplished anything at all.
this is, of course, 90% cultural. it'd be just as possible to have a society structured around relations, and understanding, with modes of problem solving built into our very language, but unfortunately that's not the route human history has taken yet. we're still slogging through the gunk rude crude difficult part of forming large and complex societies. the hard part isn't the making, we've obviously gotten that far, the hard part is what we haven't figured out--what to do when you spend your whole life surrounded by complete strangers!
i'd date the birth of the modern world to WW2; everything since has been living in the rubble of that. the atom bomb killed god. then came the internet. it hasn't been very long yet. look at how long it's been since the romani left india! look at how their culture has developed over the course of its criss-crossing the globe. they've learned how to be what they are based on the type of society they've been a part of. the global megacultures of today haven't had that time, and are only now beginning to come against the great barriers to our megasocieties. other types of societies have had plenty of time to work on their barriers.
once upon a time you might only meet a couple hundred people in your life, never go more than a dozen miles from home, sedentary agriculturalists are the forefathers of our society. they never developed the proper tools to deal with the Other. thus we have nationalism, barbarians, racism, violence and confusion and the desire to 'protect' what's 'ours'. perhaps if, instead of sedentary agriculturalism, humanity had evolved complex tribes of nomads we'd have tools and sciences dedicated to being and sharing.
but we don't! to try and jump directly there is a mistake, or is it? the dangerous ones that throw caution to the wind and try are the ones that inevitably push culture forward, right?
but then i don't. i'm a scared person trying to protect that tiny ember inside me from the harsh winds of loveless night, just like everybody else. i can't throw caution to the wind and spill myself because--well, i never learned how! it wasn't taught to me, i have to figure it out on my own. to do that, i have to embarrass myself and make lots of mistakes and wander off into a tall thicket of unexplored land, blaze my own trails, and that especially feels like going off alone! even if i'm doing it to try to make more meaningful connections with others!
the difficulty people have taking the time to listen to and understand each other is, drum roll, the reason we have difficulty understanding. we can't understand if we don't try to understand! we can't understand without willfully pushing our ego aside and earnestly trying to empathize (sympathize?) with another person's viewpoint.
the thing i always have to remind myself is this: 'this person doesn't
want to hurt you, they're not
trying to be a nuisance. they're not overstepping their boundaries, withholding their thoughts, lying, cheating, or attacking simply for bloodsport. they're doing it for reasons that they find perfectly acceptable, and maybe even desirable, at the time of them doing it. obviously they have no idea about your version of reality, how could they? just do your best to see what they're getting at, and maybe that'll help them to do the same." even if i'm wrong, i could make much worse assumptions than that. if i come at it from a position of love and kindness, then i've come from a position that is open and accepting. i can't possibly fall to far, because i've already built myself a life raft.
in less words, we all really want the same thing. love and trust and understanding and companionship. anything i can do that helps others feel that way around me, will help me to feel that around others. give and give (not take).
practice admitting fault, even if you don't feel that you're at fault. there's no cosmic genius doling out guilt, only our individual, personal judges that make decrees based on our past clashes. this means that if a person has a problem, they have a real and factual problem
as they understand it. there's no Truth only truths, as its often said. the rubric we use is a one of our own devising. figure out the truths they're using and you've overcome 9/10ths of the problem.
we're just a bag of ragtag slag, bragging and haggling, with a sag a scrag and sometimes a shag (and eventually sagging shags, and if we're lucky the occasional scrag shag). i don't mean to nag, but to-dag we gag, and tomorrow we snag the stag.
O frabjous day!
