Drowning Myron.
I was gonna write a post about identifying this mood or tone I've been in for maybe years now. A post about attempting to be authentic, and dismantling maybe too many motivations and/or at least their manifestations to their inauthentic cores. Maybe this began in earnest with Hellerwork. Maybe Eliade really sucked the wind from the sails in showing that Real Being--as I'd pursued it--was still just will to power or some crap.
Anyway, I was gonna write this post about looking under my motivations and seeing primary motivations having nothing to do with either the surface motivation or its projected manifestation. For instance, wearing some crazy pants today because of the joy of self expression or whatever the fuck instead becomes a need for love and acceptance. At which point wearing crazy pants no longer seems like a fun or honest experience. What I really want won't be achieved so easily. So I don't do it.
And I was gonna write about how so much of me feels this sort of dullness of inauthentic motivation. Why do it if it doesn't align with an authentic experience? How the hell do I wear crazy pants that say love and accept me, need me need me need the real me? Why bother with charming? Why learn too much, talk too well, be too buff, know too much, have too much music or books when what I really want is to be like loved for being the person whose authenticity led to the accumulation of these things?
No doubt much of this is (false) fallout from Adam's Evo Psych. No doubt it's a general purposelessness. And perhaps, moving into architecture, it's better to have it come up now, where it can die.
And I was gonna sort of elaborate on this debris in a whirlwind imagery from a couple of posts ago. How Dionysian it all is. The feeling of being inhabited by an authentic Force, of being primarily and absolutely a FORCE. And how masks are constructed to give a knowable face to that Force. Where masks are at best these sort of sorcerer's foci of being. The point at which self-creation is infused with the real thing, where the mask becomes being. But at worst, and most commonly, they're just the habit and detritus of self. Empty calories. OBSTRUCTIONS. There are so many masks I've made with differing levels of success. And sort of seeing how others see me makes it clear how much a construction even those best caricatures of myself are. That seeing me from outside I'm nothing but a well constructed character. But beyond that each mask is a great investment. I've spent countless hours researching, faking, fine tuning, retracing, modifying these roles to get them just right and righter. What a waste, says my goal oriented mind, to just dump them all. If I don't have these things, this self, what the hell do I have to show for 26 years of life?
I was gonna write all this and probably more, had it mapped out in my head on the walk home. Then yes of course it became clear that even writing it was inauthentic.
So I just got so bored instead, and wrote something else.
"As the faithful, in the Dionysian mysteries, invoke the god by miming scenes from his life, I call up the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper. The god is actually there when the faithful can no longer distinguish themselves from the part they are playing, when their body and their consciousness cease to bring in, as an obstacle, their particular opacity, and when they are totally fused in the myth. There is a moment when sleep 'comes', settling on this imitation of itself which I have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to be: an unseeing and almost unthinking mass, riveted to a point in space and in the world henceforth only through the anonymous alertness of the senses- The body's role is to ensure this metamorphosis. It transforms ideas into things, and my mimicry of sleep into real sleep. The body can symbolize existence because it brings it into being and actualizes it." Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Anyway, I was gonna write this post about looking under my motivations and seeing primary motivations having nothing to do with either the surface motivation or its projected manifestation. For instance, wearing some crazy pants today because of the joy of self expression or whatever the fuck instead becomes a need for love and acceptance. At which point wearing crazy pants no longer seems like a fun or honest experience. What I really want won't be achieved so easily. So I don't do it.
And I was gonna write about how so much of me feels this sort of dullness of inauthentic motivation. Why do it if it doesn't align with an authentic experience? How the hell do I wear crazy pants that say love and accept me, need me need me need the real me? Why bother with charming? Why learn too much, talk too well, be too buff, know too much, have too much music or books when what I really want is to be like loved for being the person whose authenticity led to the accumulation of these things?
No doubt much of this is (false) fallout from Adam's Evo Psych. No doubt it's a general purposelessness. And perhaps, moving into architecture, it's better to have it come up now, where it can die.
And I was gonna sort of elaborate on this debris in a whirlwind imagery from a couple of posts ago. How Dionysian it all is. The feeling of being inhabited by an authentic Force, of being primarily and absolutely a FORCE. And how masks are constructed to give a knowable face to that Force. Where masks are at best these sort of sorcerer's foci of being. The point at which self-creation is infused with the real thing, where the mask becomes being. But at worst, and most commonly, they're just the habit and detritus of self. Empty calories. OBSTRUCTIONS. There are so many masks I've made with differing levels of success. And sort of seeing how others see me makes it clear how much a construction even those best caricatures of myself are. That seeing me from outside I'm nothing but a well constructed character. But beyond that each mask is a great investment. I've spent countless hours researching, faking, fine tuning, retracing, modifying these roles to get them just right and righter. What a waste, says my goal oriented mind, to just dump them all. If I don't have these things, this self, what the hell do I have to show for 26 years of life?
I was gonna write all this and probably more, had it mapped out in my head on the walk home. Then yes of course it became clear that even writing it was inauthentic.
So I just got so bored instead, and wrote something else.
"As the faithful, in the Dionysian mysteries, invoke the god by miming scenes from his life, I call up the visitation of sleep by imitating the breathing and posture of the sleeper. The god is actually there when the faithful can no longer distinguish themselves from the part they are playing, when their body and their consciousness cease to bring in, as an obstacle, their particular opacity, and when they are totally fused in the myth. There is a moment when sleep 'comes', settling on this imitation of itself which I have been offering to it, and I succeed in becoming what I was trying to be: an unseeing and almost unthinking mass, riveted to a point in space and in the world henceforth only through the anonymous alertness of the senses- The body's role is to ensure this metamorphosis. It transforms ideas into things, and my mimicry of sleep into real sleep. The body can symbolize existence because it brings it into being and actualizes it." Maurice Merleau-Ponty