Aw shucks
Click to viewI love this song. Everything about it is kickass, and its lyrics are seriously unparalleled.
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"Life is a continual distraction which does not even allow us to reflect on that from which we are distracted."
- Franz Kafka
"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random among the profusion of the earth and the galaxies, but that in this prison we can fashion images sufficiently powerful to deny our nothingness."
- André Malraux
The summer before my senior year in high school I think was the last time I was truly happy for more than just a few minutes at a time. I had just finished reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and had just started to get into Wallace Stevens. The depth of their connected perceptions of the world filled me with a sense of real excitement to live and sheer joy in perceiving all the tiniest minutiae of life. It was also a time when I finally understood the beauty of death, the intense impermanence of everything, and the giddiness of the free spirit who was combined with this all and stopped resisting it in order to be a solid "individual." Now all of this is some vague glow. Maybe it really even wasn't as great as I remember it, perhaps in the narrativization of my life I've kept this summer as some kind of Edenic place to give me an unconscious hope that one day I'll be able to return to it.
Slowly after that peak of inspiration and creativity, I started to go dry. My idealism started to become nihilism. The more philosophy I read, the more skeptical I became of the common sense perceptions I had about life and the more pessimistic I was about creating any kind of sure, stable meaning from my existence, the more I felt I was being pushed against a blank wall, a no-man's land of skepticism where even Sartre had become too optimistic for me (after all, he still believed in free will and independent self-construction but what were those but vestigial, secularized remnants of the concept of a "soul" which I had long done away with?). Because my views on everything became more and more blurred and hesitant, I started to become more and more "open-minded", so I was able to essentially argue any side of any argument. I realized that the opinions and experiences that people hold most dear in defining "who they are" are mainly based on their socioeconomic and educational backgrounds as well as genetic factors and in time these opinions become hard-wired into how people define themselves and it becomes especially easy to predict which side certain people will take in any one argument just based on the opinions of the community of people they grew up around. All our "opinions" are is our brain recalling and abstracting from specific memories of experiences relating to a certain concept, so, for example, what we think of as sexy pertains to the memories we've had since childhood of what got us aroused and nothing more, and what we think of as "right" is only what's least contradictory to the opinions we already have. I consciously sought out the things which I held most "defining" of myself and realized they had little rational basis, but became a part of me for purely emotional reasons that I never actually thought about before.
I realized throughout all of this though that my pleasure in life was fading away as my initial thrust and sense of purpose was corroded by more and more skepticism. But now there was no going back. It's not as if you can just forget everything you learned and then just be the naive, idealistic, happy person you were before. Sometimes I wish it were like that. And now I'm not sure really where to turn. I feel like I'm on the outside of everything. Like I've "heard it all before" and now there's no story I can tell myself (because isn't everything really a story?) to convince me that I'm on the right path in life. I've realized that everything is just some kind of arbitrary "construction," every meaning we tell ourselves is an "image" we place over the barrenness of nature, and now that that's become so clear to me it's hard to construct anything at all without knowing that I'd just be lying to myself. I would readily just accept any kind of faith at this point, but I feel like I "know too much" now. And I don't know where to go from here.
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"The Storytellers"
Suppose the sweet lies swelled
pushed up against woods and sky
and painted the world, blind and blank
as gusts over a frozen lake,
into the enraptured art of meaning
resurrecting our thoughts and deeds
from mundane trivialities soon to be forgotten
into altars to worship by virtues meant to seem
more transcendent than they actually are
And the din of nature's will
red in tooth and claw
was hushed at last
the moaning bodies pierced by
violence, silenced
the beasts who live like dumb machines
crucified by poetry unto order
and morality, crumbling like an old temple
was rectified and made absolute by words
would we live better lives, basing everything on this
deluded faith than an order and plan exists for us
giving everything up to a religion, a science or an ism?
or if to face the cold truth of accident and chaos
underlying our attempts to categorize, our language itself
would we not flounder in the face of cruel absurdity,
and prefer the painting to the blank canvas
sheltering ourselves still in these beautiful fabrications?