Pushkin

"The curse is, if you lose your sense,
They shun you like a pestilence,
And all your ways are tied.
They'll chain you to a madman's yoke,
And through the prison-bars provoke
You like a beast inside."
-- Pushkin

Dream

A dream last night: almost in a classroom setting, there is a middle-aged lady sitting in a desk in the middle of the room; she is somewhat overweight, her skin is tanned. She is conspicuously unhappy, of the angry/agitated sort. I remember her calling me out, rudely, and demanded I answer a question. I did, with prudence; but it wasn't reciprocated -- she stopped me in the middle, mocked me boldly and heartlessly, and disregarded me as something inhuman. But I wouldn't tolerate it. So without even thinking of what I was doing, in an alcoholic-emotional haze that bordered on a trance, I went up to her, stared her straight in the eyes, and slapped her on the face. The recoil! She was incredulous, and what happens next? I am conscious of myself on death-row, with the thought that my lawyer is trying incessantly to appeal a court-ruling that never took place. Why this dream hits home for me I cannot quite understand.

Religion

Superficial religiousness is the most abysmal of superficiality; it smacks one in the face the hardest, it nauseates the intellect the deepest. Go ahead, poor man, poor girl, love and live with pagan sensuality those who satisfy your own external test, who are attractive enough or well-thought of enough by others; you are a Christian, you read your bible, you pray from time to time, you hold the correct stereotypes and dogmatic conclusions; you believe that Christ has saved you, and you emit fumes that seem sincere in loving your neighbor. But then one comes along, without satisfying your external demands, without any attractive idiosyncrasies that a simple person has caught onto, leading to the admiration by the crowd and therefore yourself; the commandment is set up on pedestals in your mind, and you are demanded to make something pressing: a choice. But you refuse to engage him, and he wanders to the shadows of the crowd, justifiably bitter towards the religion you claim to worship; who can blame him for thinking otherwise? But it doesn't matter too much does it? It is, after all, their fault for refusing the value of your company, and Christ goes with the deal; they are in the wrong, they are the heretics, they deserve your sympathy -- and how expedient of sympathy to make one feel righteous, even if its roots are based in nothing at all! A narcotic.

Once the usefulness of self-deception withers away, there is nothing left for you to hold on to; you are then forced to exist, to face God in the face, and actually assert yourself. But this will never happen. You will always have the baseless sentiments of the crowd to absorb yourself in. The last thing you need to think of is -- thinking. All you want is positive attention, and you will assert whatever power within your perception to attain that end -- for to have the attention of others is also to have their love, and a desire for love is an indication of its nonexistence.

But were you to love boldly, unconditionally, without dancing with the ephemeral, then you would see that there is nothing to see in the external to judge a person by; that it is beneath this exterior that determines the person, and that this underlying life-force -- this soul --, regardless of its presentation, is something attractive, something that either needs edification, or a sharing of the brilliance it resonates.

With God and without love, or with love and without God? This is the apparent choice these days; religion is so dry a thing, so conditional, so devoid of personal relation, of benevolence towards others that actually transcends the commandment of loving your neighbor; the individual in realization of this fact is prematurely pressed with the conclusion that he must reject religion and God entirely in order to love freely in the coldness of absolute solitude. And when he takes this step, and valliantly resigns himself from the decadence of the crowd, when he is sitting in his solitude and the sorrow that comes with it, when he finally calls out to God in the authenticity of spirit perhaps for the first time in his life, his response will birth a new life for him. He will see the universe through a dialogue with the Eternal. And nothing will matter, therefore everything will become beautiful.

My Scintillating Danish Guru

"If a person possessed a letter that he knew or believed contained information about what he had to consider his life’s happiness, but the characters were thin and faint and the handwriting almost illegible, then, presumably with anxiety and agitation, he would read it most passionately again and again and at one moment derive one meaning, at the next moment another, according to how he would explain everything by a word he believed that he had deciphered with certainty, but he would never progress beyond the same uncertainty with which he had begun. He would stare, more and more anxiously, but the more he stared, the less he would see. His eyes would sometimes be filled with tears, but the more frequently this happened to him, the less he would see. In the course of time, the writing would become fainter and less legible; finally the paper itself would crumble away, and he would have nothing left but tear-filled eyes." -- Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Discourse on deception, par excellence. Have you ever been deceived? Have you ever breathed?

Melancholy II

I do not prefer my melancholy, but I cannot keep from praising the immaculate landscape of subjectivity it helps me see, and this cannot be experienced in any other state as solidly and deeply as when in the mode of melancholy; it is like a man who is tortured every so often, but on a mountain-top that overlooks a breathtaking view, so transcending for him that he continually oscillates between being ravished by the view and being conscious of his tormentors. But the metaphor is not entirely appropriate; it is not physical pain that is the problem when in sorrow, but psychological. We shall never sacrifice our sorrow, for it is sorrow that is the primer on which all colors of life find their accentuation; it is this black backdrop of sadness that this ground of repetition rests -- repetition understood in the transcendent sense, as getting the world back you have once lost -- and who could dare whisper his way back into pure existence, crawling up the rope of happiness, bit by bit, until he retrospectively realizes he has it, without the joy of capturing it, when repetition unveils the strong rush of euphoria at every moment joy strikes us -- a song we hear, a smile we see, a thought that evokes our laughter, and there we feel her hiding cunningly in the foreground: joy, joy, joy. Our sorrow may wade perpetually in the sea of our souls at these moments, but the contrasting joy of repetition does stand as a mark against it, and it is this mark that we dedicate our lives. To attempt to escape sorrow is twofold madness: firstly because it holds for us the potentiality for the greatest spurts of happiness we know, and most importantly because we cannot do it by fiat -- it is the striving to escape it that causes the greatest pain.

But melancholy must be consummated, and again, nobody would dare prefer it to a life of happiness. Melancholy falters being, and that is the essence of it. In being drawn towards reflection, melancholy is the magnifying glass of despair, for reflection is the branches that constrain one's becoming-alive, one's transition towards being; but this is positive, albeit in a negative light: it helps to grasp the depth of one's weakness, one's shallow defiance in refusing the eternal -- that is, our pre-packaged happiness as possibility, our hope, the refusal to follow which leads us to despair, the ideal by which we must strive in order to continually become ourselves, which I cannot help but call that most excellent of cosmopolitans: God. A man longs for a girl that his reason knows he cannot have, and this longing constitutes his unhappiness, his melancholy -- all melancholy has roots -- and while it may reveal itself deviously by making it appear that melancholy shares the same root-structure as despair, this is far from the case -- one's sadness as sadness is not necessarily a mode of despair; it is possible in every way imaginable to negate one's despair while continually affirming the hope of the eternal in one, thus it is possible to be happy, while remaining -- sad. Thus it says in Ecclesiastes: a sad face may hide a happy heart. Happiness spings from within, from an eternal center -- a center that we can control; sorrow acts as a catalyst on this happiness, but it works from a different direction: it consumes from outside, towards a center that can never be swallowed like it can be when we twist our wills toward the nonexistent goal of despair.

The important thing -- the absolutely central idea -- is to keep moving, for melancholy, as touched on, acts as an anti-catalyst in drawing us to the nothingness of reflection and thus simultaneously keeping us from striving for the eternal and becoming ourselves -- keep moving, but not in the direction of feeling, but aimed at the eternal; feeling will only leave one in a transitory diversion from one's despair, and as soon as that fleeting episode of seeming happiness has subsided, there lies with more intensity the great abyss of despair at one's feet, strengthened precisely by negative repetition -- that is, the contrast-effect into non-being.

Melancholy

We cannot live without our melancholy. She is ever-willing to leave our presence, at the mere suggestion, the mere assertion of our will, a determination towards movement, a shedding of the infinite silence of its haunting chrysalis and the stillness she hides in -- she is willing; she is standing at the door, a face that appears to hold the deepest of ambivalence, but it is this moment that she melts, at this moment we melt, and she is taken again, not in open arms, but removed to the remote corner. We may stare, but we do not dare touch; it is at our touch that she dissovles into happiness, and we cannot have this. Happiness does not have this mysterious beauty about it; it does not have the seedling, the promise, of something that we perpetually find ourselves wagering will consummate in something ineffably brilliant, charming, ravishing. No, no, melancholy holds her mystique better than happiness could ever hold our spirits, and this incredible beauty inherent to it, to the whole process at times excruciating, this infinitesimal wonder, so peripherally seen by the mind in its soreness in the face of pain, I tell you, my wise ones who know this ground with your own feet, this is our motivation in sustaining the doors of sadness, locked from the inside. Happiness, pure happiness, is too boring, too bland, too common. Give us our suffering; throw out the possibility of escaping the necessity of its course. Suffer boldly, as you love boldly, and your name will be refashioned: impenetrability. We may be pushed, but we are not broken; we may despair, but we do not remain in the coldnesss of its deathgrip. Our melancholy does not negate our happiness; it becomes it. But first we must accept it; for there is but one impossibility: conceiving it to be within the ground of possibility in escaping it.

Happiness

The mediocre is always the goal of the path of least resistance; this is a law of life. You will always have to assert yourself, and inevitably this will demand a degree of pain. But this is the price of happiness. The greater the pain, the more luminous the reward, the more euphoric your victory.

Facticity, Attraction

The consequence of existential nihilism -- of living one's life without the continual affirmation of some transcendent meaning that sticks past the ten o'clock news -- is inexorably one of trivial attention toward insignificance, a magnification of the otherwise worthless, transforming it into the essential: one's transitory and superficial life calling that seeps up in one's mind for as long as the stupidity takes, and then off it flies to nothingness until again it finds a task at hand, a soul to consume. This is perhaps nowhere better seen than in the cleaning passion of the housewife, but only when the desire to clean is not predicated by a higher telos, for it often is: the house of the wife is a sort of exterior evidence of her superiority, so she thinks, and her commitment to cleaning it (and tormenting others to fulfill her wishes) has this end in mind; but when there is a ceaseless prattle about the necessity of keeping everything spotless, things in order, for no apparent (or inapparent) reason, then here you have revealed despair in its nakedness. A man's worth is measured not by his facticity, but by his commitment to a relative firmness of transcendental meaning, on two points: 1) how deep and pragmatic this meaning is, in the sense of how much it will aid him in his life as it relates to happiness, and 2) how committed he is to it -- but fundamentally it is a question of assertion of one's will, one's own self, in the face of what otherwise is determinism. The man who has a commitment to his fellow man, or to his country, or to his lover, are all stiff ideals, but so long as this commitment is itself lax, the man is no better than the nihilist who cleans his apartment with a flick of the will that resembles that of a martyr.

And who do we see most often praised in society, most often admired and desired, than those who live their lives according to the rule-book of externality? And what is this externality a sub-group of other than facticity? Granted, a good deal of facticity has to do with our voluntarily action upon it -- my muscles will be larger if I work to grow them, my hair will be shorter if I work to cut it, etc. -- but aside from those rare actions that require effort, ultimately to praise or revere a person on the basis of his facticity is a very pathetic and crude thing to do; but our society is saturated to the very marrow with it, and there is no greater example than that nauseating non-sequitur that involves the implicit belief that all attractive individuals are therefore in possession of some greater character than those who lack this attractiveness. The argument goes as follows:

All attractive people are good people
X. is attractive
:. X. is a good person

The attractiveness in question here is not necessarily physical in the sexual sense; the look that an anonymous girl gives a guy may register to his mind the smell of idiosyncrasy, and have nothing sexual or physically attractive to it, but in being what it is symbolizes a sort of uniqueness that he wishes to be a part of, perhaps for elitist (therefore power) reasons. Upon noticing her look, he will say to himself, "aha! she surely must be something interesting," and thus will hold unconsciously in his mind the conviction that she is better than a good deal of other people for no other reason than because of a particular time crystalized in history absorbed his attention.

The only effect of living in such a mindset is a blindness to the objectivity of the wholeness of one's personality; and often this becomes something worse: at times when someone is found to be valuable according to the arbitrary rules mentioned above, the progression will not finalize in a sense of blindness toward the whole person, but even a standard based on his negative characteristics, that way these negativities can willy-nilly become the basis on which justice breeds. There is no better way of eradicating that agitating conviction of badness than by using this badness as a foundation for a standard for goodness, thus making badness -- good. If X. has a negative stance toward a problem acknowledged by a person who admires him on the basis of the law of attraction, Y., in seeking to annihilate this negativity, and thereby keep her deity in the boundless confines of perfection, will simply look at those who consider his problem to be negative and say, "but they should do as X. does; why not?" for he is, after all, too good to err so conspicuously. But to be sure, there is no escape from the omnipotence of conscience, and the person who engages such an attitude will only further harm himself, and the stain of this psychological pain will only further, alas, the fanaticism-spirit that keeps the world divided into those-who-are-attractive and those-who-aren't.

Such a person will only grow helplessly sensitive, for all pain taken in a spirit that repels it garners a sensitivity to the life that fosters it; this sensitivity will only create a greater wall between the real world and those under the auspices of the in-group of attractiveness; and this will only mean -- a greater inclination toward dichotomizing the world as mentioned previously. The cycle is very nasty.

And so you see, you have this power to discern the difference between two very subtle paths. Do not wager on the basis of fact, but on the true basis of character -- that exists by nature of spirit, of the nobility of work, the courage to be oneself, the audacity to stand against this world and present whatever authenticity one knows to the fold. Join the crowd of the truly great men throughout history. Do not look on the outward appearance, but on the intentions, the motivations, the inclinations of those around you. If these inclinations hold in their midst something of badness, consider the person who is resisting these inclinations. For it is the person that transcends inclinations, facticity, and such; and unless the person is considered, you will only harm yourself and the world you unjustly neglect.