Preconceptions

Preconception really and truly is nothing less than this: murder. Don't do it; you have the seedlings of the antichrist if you do, and I'm only half-joking. If you label, you limit; if you limit, you negate the ever-changing -- enter the human being. How can you love a person if you limit him to -- yourself? What more is preconception as it relates to those killed by it than a corruptive form of self-relation? It's the stagnant remainder of selflessness dropping off: with preconceptions one is the ugliest egotist: one insists on creating one's own reality; one thereby becomes the enemy of all relational truth. It is weakness incarnated: cowardice essentially, for what easier way to put an end to this individual who is different than you than to label him heretic and move on, breathing your own contaminated air? Yes, yes, you are ahead of me: the church is notorious for shutting itself in on itself, leaving to the cold (in reality, the warmth: everything outside of corruption is warmth) those "blasphemers" who disagree, usually on the pivot-point of jot or tittle. Ah, well, the institution is born, mummifies everything potentially marvelous, and dies -- and continues dying, until the bodies within it, that preach on its behalf, externally by all means apparently alive -- then one looks closer! -- are no more, which is...ah, don't hope for the microscopic.

Give me religion, politics, an infinite array of values -- praised from the eternal past unto the eternal future as shimmering mediums of progress; but if anywhere this involves preconceptions, you must die -- he who lives by the spiritual sword must die by it. You must die -- and I will not save you from your death, so long as insistence boils in your blood. I will not bring before you the most decadent form of religious superficiality, with its "grace" -- its cheap grace -- and pretend (the adherants to cheap grace do have magnificent imaginations!) you are righteous when in reality, through preconception, you are revolting -- no, I will consent to your death, soft-hearted, melancholic, for you have reached even where forgiveness is powerless -- and you will live again! -- If not for the first time!

A heart without obstruction loves -- inexorably, inevitably, involuntarily loves, and loves infinitely, that is, with infinite freedom; and there is no greater antagonist to love than the demon we have before us. It takes a will to love, for the heart is always under the pressure of those invisible monsters that continually seek to stifle it with hatred -- and how is hatred sustained except through its right hand man, the conceptualization of the human being? -- and needs a way to push off such beasts. It takes will -- and will implies pain; thus let us go to war for clear perception, for love -- to war! Noble is the man whose treasure is his own two spiritual eyes.

Criminal

Like a man who is compelled under water by some strange amorphous and invisible force, forced to hold his breath and swim according to a course he does not see any true relevance in doing, to the point of almost drowing, and then: granted that quick little gasp of breath to keep the process running, he emerges at the surface, with the chilling fingers of ephermerality gliding down his spine, takes his air, always only enough to keep him alive minimally, and irrevocably minimally, and down again, again – to the depths, to follow once more that useless path, that seeming self-inflicted psychological masochism, that destruction of all potential for curiosity and the particularity that works with it, and then, at the end of the deal, to be reproached by those within the same generation for being uncreative, without style, passion, anything that signifies life – that is every man under the constraints of education; and only the geniuses – those who see the world in a fundamentally different light – are conscious of themselves continually drowning – the rest have never yet lived –, are conscious of the fact that it takes open air, even if the air is contaminated with antagonism, to actualize themselves through their expression, through their striving for themselves, are thus capable of juggling the essential with the instrumental – for, after all, education is instrumental. All are forced under the pedestrian imbecility of education; better to call it a form of execution for those who are constantly being annihilated under its reign, better still to call it an embalming process for the stillborn. As soon as education was enlisted by the spirit of gravity, it died as a means to foster uniqueness. Proof: as soon as you resign yourself from the common route of overwhelming yourself with studies, you are cursed, treated as a pestilence, condemned as idle, unambitious; even more incredulity is heaped on those who drop the studies of school for the life-instilling experiences of men who also were impervious to the corruption of systematic digestion. The student finishes his studies, and like a dog shakes himself clean of the muck he has raked in – and like a dog he never becomes clean –, finds himself plunged into the world, almost certainly involved in something he comes to find as distasteful – it takes inwardness, particularity, to know what you want to do – and so the conclusion rolls down: he dries up under his despair, follows what gives him money, takes up sports, hunting, other useless nihilistic chores, she tacks on friends like they were magnets, both become attached, enchanted by the black magic of consumerism, and so death has a hiding place. Education has given man the world in exchange for a soul by which to absorb it; what was meant to be a walking stick that aided the wanderer where his heart begged him has now become his heart, therefore he is heartless, aimless, lost, dead. How hard it is to keep one’s uniqueness in this world! It takes either religion or obstinance – and all religion is a type of obstinance, but religion is in eclipse. Marriage? Yes, marriage is a momentary salvation; but soon the lovers who depend on each other with such unbridled aesthetic passion suck up those unified qualities that make each other attractive. We have nowhere to reside except ourselves, but such land is against our super-sensitive tastes, for it involves pain. Whither shall we go? We are bound to die by repetition.

Folk Proto-Existentialism

Reading Nietzsche while listening to Dylan -- is there any higher blessed spiritual hedonism?

Yes

"A man loses his umbrella, and he searches desperately for it all day, but he loses himself -- and does not even notice." -- Kierkegaard

Happiness, Striving

A man who refuses to swim in the deep waters of the beach and thus garner all the beauty and wonder involved at the sacrifice of his immobility, his painless simplicity, for an infinitely higher happiness, but would rather admire only faintly from afar, walking on the shoreline, what his lucidity affords him, what fate has dropped at his doorstep, what serves his senses without a tinge of authentic self-assertion -- that is the man of today, of yesterday, in perpetuity. Let us weep for him; are you weeping for yourself?

Aha, this is interesting: the etymology of the word happiness carries with it the connotation of luck, from the root word hap, "chance, fortune"; happiness is luckiness. Thus the man who looks down the precipice of his own nonbeing needs something grander than happiness, for happiness technically understood has no legs in which to actualize itself, to bring itself into being. Indeed, happiness so understood implies patience, and verily the noble man is patient, but the fortune that he waits for is a whore. The idea of happiness so understood is so secondary, so inferior to not even an ideal world, but a good one, that it is the definitive argument against God if it is the only conception that fits this universe. To wait for happiness! As laughable as it is repugnant; as contemptuous as it is horrifying. Give me sin, the possibility for unhappiness as a result of my misuse of freedom, give me anything -- so long as it isn't happiness as constrained by necessity. And it is infinitely true, as Camus says, that there is no love of life without despair of life; but life ruled solely by that which is beyond my control -- this life is a mockery of decency. So long as it is possible not to be as unhappy as one could be, happiness exists. Relativity is all I ask for.