Aphorism of the Day: This? Yeah, well, dope smoke that, motherfucker.
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I want to say I’m not quite sure what I’m doing anymore. But then I’m not sure what it means to say one is doing anything anymore. The reflexes seem to be in functioning order… Be witty. Be urbane. Charm those around you, and most importantly, impress. You never know… You never know…
These are the offerings we cast into the blackness–nowadays. This is what throws us on our bellies, what we burn. This is what it means to live in a world without bubbles of air, where the social has flooded the most ad hoc recess, the most hidden pocket. Always guarded. Always poised to be poised. Always polite, lest… who the fuck knows?
Bury that scream deep in the meat.
Look, it says. Just give it to me, whatever it is it wants.
You were never good at the game–or at least you rarely count yourself as such. If you were, it would be easy. And it’s anything but. You look at them wondering that you wonder, huddling about a spark of pedestrian superiority, the glee of seeing, the one that twist smiles into cramps, like toddlers hiding in plain view. What joy there is in deception!
Bury it.
Where is the agon? The strife? What you call ‘professionalism’ is prestidigitation, the absence of personality made indicator of truth–the faux voice of no one to cement a faux view from nowhere. The winnowing of idiosyncrasies as grace. Nowhere is the mania for standardization more noiselessly sublimated than in academia.
Life has become a conflict of machines: the stochastic wave of your nature, paleolithic consciousness shooting the translucent curl, versus the deterministic demands of a metastatic bureaucracy, forever punishing you for your margins of error.
And now look at you, weeping for reasons no one would care to admit.
Shush. Shush, you fool. The belly is full. The bowel voided.
Honesty has always been an angle.
Smile for the camera. No one can pretend not to be a politician anymore.
Set a great stone before the tomb.
I like talking to addicts. I like thinking I can see further, that I have some kind of wisdom to impart. I mourn the flutter of indecision, the wary squint, when something in my tone or vocabulary gives me away. I like learning the lingo, the names of things illegal. I like bullshitting about things that seem worth bullshitting about–though only at the time. I like to be the one that knows. I like that my life has been tragic, that I can stop strangers cold with my memories. And I find it strange, this inability to arbitrate between personas.
This is soul rotting stuff, this.
Philosophy sets you at odds with your origins as it is. It alienates and isolates you, especially when all seems convivial. Or maybe you’re ‘just-different-that-way.’ Maybe I’m ‘you-had-to-be-there’ like, all the way down.
But I doubt it.
To be a philosopher is to forever hold your tongue, watch what you say. They grow quiet around the turkey when you speak, out of forbearance, not interest or deference. They endure more than understand. They refuse more than fail to recognize your ‘expertise’–and how could they not, when it would relieve them of their humanity? To accord you authority would be to concede their right to judge and believe, to dare hold forth a world from their small corner.
How could they not despise? Lampoon your cartoonish pretension? And above all, how could they not distrust what you see?
All theory is megalomania, a crime against interpersonal proportion. Could you imagine actually telling them what you believe? That they are hapless, cretinized, duped, tyrannized by their purchase patterns, their stories, their comedians and body-mass-indices?
That they are the They? The hoi-fucking-polloi?
But then it cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Maybe you catch a glimpse of it, now again, the lunatic scale of your defection. The inkling of undergraduate condescension–of patience.
The knowledge that you would be murdered were this any other age hangs like implicit smoke about you.
If you are young, you’re still working through the consequences of what you are becoming. You still resent. You still primp and preen, declaim before make-shift worlds. You can still taste the transformation of frustrated pride into ingrown loathing. If you are not so young you have already learned to be wry and acerbic, to speak only to make the people around the turkey laugh or wonder. You find refuge in observation, and even manage to flatter yourself, on occasion, for your anthropological isolation. If you’re lucky, you recover joy in ways devious and orthogonal. You heap abuse upon what you have become as both lubricant and prophylactic. You imagine Zizek fucking groupies, wag your eyes at the circus that was once your passion.
You let mystery become the one simple. Perhaps find wisdom in exhaustion.
I’m not sure what I’m doing any more. What I’m writing or for whom, whether it’s important or outrageous or pathetic. I’ve never been a robust person. I’ve always been frail in ways that stoke a father’s outrage, enough to worry that I’m not a match for whatever it is–let alone this. Always faintly amazed that I have survived. And always driven.
All I know is that indulgences exact a toll.
Back when I was doing my PhD a friend of mine would walk his dog every night, one of those toy breeds that sound like rats when crossing hardwood floors. A classmate of ours, a solitary soul, happened to live a few doors down. He would see him through his patio doors every night, laying motionless on his couch watching the tube, soaked in erratic prints of white and blue. Every night. Passive. Watching. Wordless.
Never screaming.
And he would wonder about him. Theorize.
+1, Bakker.
Cheers.
Coo. Christ it must be cold out your way, Mike! Didn’t mean to add any winter to the soul.
Psh. Buddy, you’re on the sunshine and rainbows list – I turn to your writing when I’m in need of consolation… if only to whisper all is not lost for a couple hours.
You attract damn interesting brains to the growing noosphere of your writings. Always an honour to interact. And a privilege to read such honest reflection – I’d hazard that that honesty is what draws many of us in the first place.
-36 this morning
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Pure poetry. Well done sir.
Thanky thanks.
Well I only came here to put a comment that this xkcd strip is relevant to this blog’s interests: http://xkcd.com/1163/
But it seems I wandered into a post that went and made me /think./
The first thing I thought when reading this was “honest”
“That they are hapless, cretinized, duped, tyrannized by their purchase patterns, their stories, their comedians and body-mass-indices?
That they are the They? The hoi-fucking-polloi?
But then it cuts both ways, doesn’t it? Maybe you catch a glimpse of it, now again, the lunatic scale of your defection.”
That resonates deeply… especially recalling when I saw friends completely mesmerized and glued to the TV watching Jersey Shore. Not really joking.
Bakker’s point is that we are ALL instrumentalized and compartmentalized. Whether your drug of choice is Jersey Shore or Louie CK, doesn’t matter. The only way to TRULY defect is to try and rip an original thought out from the void, which is goddamn near impossible so far as I can tell. Even in my more speculative musing, I am eternally a slave to a thousand unseen voices whose provenance I cannot establish. Was it some thing Dawkins mentioned in passing in a book? Was it something a childhood friend said? A paper I read? An internet post?
I’m going to puke.
You make Jersey Shore sound like a bad thing! My worry, as Jorge says, is that it’s simply Jersey Shore all the way down, except that our Jersey Shore is meant to dupe us into thinking we’re masters of their Jersey Shore. I dunno… I go through these crises of wank periodically.
Very interesting. So maybe the human condition in this context is that we never do reach a cathartic enlightenment… we are always going to be reaching.
I had this neighbour, an elderly bachelor who had turned to evangelical christianity searching for ‘peace’ and ‘resolution’ and ‘divine insight’ – anything but what he had been stranded with. He had literally demonized his anguish, to the point where he was terrorized by it. Part of the problem, I came to realize, was that he couldn’t see how he could have truly found Jesus when he found no joy in finding Jesus. The way I see it, we’re all groping in the blackness, whether convinced we’re chasing lights or no. The only difference between his terror and mine, I would tell him, was that I had given up running away from my own feet.
Today I sat in a seminar about presentations, and wondered at what was going on: was it a performance? How much of it was staged? I don’t usually attend the seminars but the group assembled were subdued, almost silent. My comments fed into the furnace and the game – why not play the game, you have to play the game if you want to join in, be one of us – snarled at me, or so it seemed. Our lives are postcard-open. Even emails must be written in a tone that both respects the possibility of misinterpretation and expects the malevolent hacker who may or may not use words against one (though they’d no doubt thunk their head against the keyboard if they were forced to read through most of the drivelling banalities included in my conversations). Even this ‘reply’ circumspect: will one of the other attendees stumble upon it and reflect that I might have referred to them? Can they contrive an insult from it? What is going on? Is it because we know each other less well, we who correspond with virtual strangers, in communications reduced to metaphorical grunts and waves, smiley faces and exclamatia? Are we more ready to believe that behind the staged smiles our contempt for one another is mire-deep? Ready to pounce on any potential mockery and threaten with defamation laws? Perhaps it’s the written word that’s done it – all this text that hangs around incriminatingly long after we’ve sobered up or grown out of whatever phase distracted us when we said whatever it was we said, in anger, fear or sheer boredom. You write wonderfully, and your ideas are sizzlingly original. Thanks for your provocations – there needs to be more of it. I’m tempted to throw in something mean just to get you snarling but there’s plenty of offal out there to keep you outraged and vocal. I’ll sit in the corner with a wry smile. You have summed us up. Irony might brighten the situation but even irony requires the understanding of a tone of voice and it’s hard to find the font for ‘tone of voice’.
reply IS circumspect – sorry
Thanks, gamanrad. It’s funny how the internet has transformed all this, the imperialism of the interpersonal, and definitely worth thinking through.
You put into words what a lot of people feel. I don’t think its just you and me who do and such posts remind me of this, so thank you.
Dietl
Danke, Dietl.
That whole thing read like a poem. Although not a fan of poetry, I rather like that. Makes me think of myself, and how I’ll turn into my father.
Too late, Wil
The only wisdom I have found in exhaustion is to live in the now. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’” I try to speak my thoughts clearly and precisely, and to ground everything I do in my senses, in the reality I see around me. To make my personality so small, so centered on the here and now, that there is no space within me to hold thoughts like the ones written here. And when these thoughts do appear, I do breathing exercises and meditate until my sense of self dissolves, and all that is left is an acute awareness of the physical world I inhabit.
I guess what I am saying is that less importance you place on the concept of self, the more incomprehensible and silly the essay above becomes. To much self reflection is bad, because you stop seeing your actual self, and are only able to see the act of self reflection. I break the loop by defining who I am as what I am doing right now. Everything else is mental wankery.
My current life goal is to escape from this exhaustion and be driven by something other than dissatisfaction with life. Coffee and some mild anti-depressants seem to help a great deal.
Thanks for writing this piece. It reminds me of my teenage self.
So you must be, like, 30. Always nice to meet someone who has outgrown self-doubt. Reminds me why I avoid yoga.
Coffee, meet keyboard.
Was I a little rough?
It seems that you draw strength, rather than weakness, from this form of self doubt. I guess this essay wasn’t written for me after all.
And I would not say that I have outgrown self doubt. It just takes a different form for me, one grounded in comparing the person I am now to the one I see in my journals, and in trying to measure whether or not my current actions meet my goals (Usually my goal is happyness, which makes this an easy thing to judge).
If you actually took the original post all the way, you’d eventually either have to die or develop some conscious illogic.
Feel free to take your time though.
Interesting Yahoo article about how to be successful with a great idea….Forge ahead BBT!
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/horowitz-most-important-quality-entrepreneur-not-honesty-integrity-124132795.html
I’m not so sure people will like the product, but…
Wow, this piece touched a nerve. Well done.
@Scott – You need a Doobie Snack brother
Joking aside, wow indeed. Spot on, on a number of different levels.
That being said, sometimes, the mindless flicker of the TV can be a welcome distraction. Sometimes we DO over think. Sometimes it’s OK to escape for a bit. There is something to be said for NOT driving yourself crazy. As with everything in life, it’s all about maintaining as much equilibrium as possible while riding the roller coaster at the circus.
I think if one was staring at the flicking of a fire, or the flicker of the scales of fish in a fish tank, or the dapple of light through leaves, I’d fully agree. But I’m not sure about putting ones mentally disengaged, firewall relaxed self in front of a bunch of intricately designed corporate machinations.
BTW, they have roller coasters at a circus? Dude, that wasn’t a roller coaster – you are in so much trouble right now…
^ lol, circus just sounded better than amusement park. i took some artistic liberty :p
I think those of us folk that play in the philosophical realm can get caught up in overthinking and overanalyzing. Sometimes a tree is just a tree. I think it is easy to miss out on all the remarkable beauty around us, and within us. We are a remarkable species. The fact that we can express compassion and empathy, which goes against our natural wiring, is something to marvel at. Sometimes, actually “experiencing” a thing is more rewarding than simply thinking about it.
I don’t know if I have free will, or a soul. I barely comprehend what moves me at all. But I will refuse to become so jaded and disenchanted that I get to the point where I cannot enjoy life’s simple pleasures. Even if the occasional machination is false. As long as I can identify the machination for what it is, I am not worried about it. We all must pick and choose our battles.
I think true, in as much as maybe you figure a certain segment of effort over time to put towards the worlds ills, whereas if your an author who can kinda hit the nail on the head writing wise, they can afford to sort of get all consumed by it. But that’s a luxury of that kinda author. It depends if you’re an accademic, I guess, since the main post seems to be about them. If not, I agree to segmenting off a certain amount of effort and otherwise yeah, enjoy the rollercoaster ride at seaworld!
With the resumption of the hockey season, I’m living proof of your point, 3rdI. In a sense, that was the ironic equipoise I was aiming for in the ending, the philosopher walking his dog night after night versus the philosopher watching TV… Theorizin’.
Do you remember the words?
Yes?
Then you are whole.
Great piece. Oh, and Žižek and groupies, now there’s a thought provoking image. Is that based on some article about him?
Well he was recently married to an Argentinean model 30 years his junior.
Just a whimsy regarding theory and rockstars.
For what it’s worth, as someone with Asperger’s Syndrome, I appreciate this piece a great deal – but perhaps not for the reasons others do. Even as a child I felt compelled to hide the things I thought, noticed, or sensed and wondered at how adults could make so much noise yet never utter a sensical phrase.
Perhaps, in this, neurotypicals and those like myself have something to share – even if it is only that my cage is also designed and built by their hand.
Like a knife, sense has an edge. There’s a sense in not making sense.
While I respect your opinion and am not attempting to sway you, I disagree. The opposite of sense is nonsense and that way lies chaos and madness.
To just cut to the chase with words risks cutting to the wrong chase. Perhaps drastically wrong.
If you have Asperger’s, it’s possibly you just wouldn’t consider flirting with madness as a means of delaying commitment (and so buy time to try and ensure cutting to the right chase).
You’ll have to speak less abstractly if you want me to be able to reply.
Well, I’ll use a stark example – what if you’re trying to convince someone not to jump off a bridge?
What makes sense might very well make sense.
But do you really know it wont just prompt them to jump off because of your very words?
Do you want to cut straight to making sense, when you don’t know if that’ll just make them jump?
Of course this question hinges on certain value sets, ie, taking up some amount of responsibility as to the whether the person jumps, rather than leaving all responsibility to them.
Is that a more concrete example? It’s a bit of an extreme example, I’ll grant.
Why can’t this kind of honesty illicit more than the erection of so many more intentionally mystifying walls? But at least I have nothing to preach to you about the good glory of setting aside self-reflection in exchange for the actualized self. See it’s easy, just watch how I do it and you too could not be damned so long as you wish a precious little wish. Wait, here’s another. As though the imposition that you either think or not think could resolve the problem one way or the other.