Lost Inwardness

Inwardness is losing. We live in a society of cell phones, cameras, the incessant superficial poser anxiety. With the loss of inwardness comes an inverse growth of externality. With externality comes massification. With massification the self no longer is itself; the "I" is lost to the intoxicating "we". Ontology becomes mixed in with the path of least resistance; this means transparency, superficiality. The doors of desire are opened, and the pathway of addiction is walked. It would be better to say that addiction does the walking.

Desire amputates existence. It keeps a man alive -- with no freedom to question why he is alive, an existence for the sake of fulfilling. This is false meaning, or, more appropiately, pre-meaning. Desire is bestial; consequently is means the fragmentation and dissipation of consciousness. Only when the desire is transiently fulfilled or frustratingly abandoned does a man have the possibility to question himself and his world -- both of which are inextricably linked. But this is becoming harder and harder with the progress of civilization and its continually new clever ways at providing the means to the fulfillment of these desires. Desire is a stomach. It stretches imperceptibly with each moment of oversatiation. And stimulation is so expedient, so simple, so overflowing, a possibility at every thoughtless angle, that it is capable of murdering the soul, shutting it up, leaving the world of the sensate in domination. The self is a relation between two terms, two polarities. With the amplification of one comes the negation of the other. A moment of pure sensation, pure stimulation, is the death of the soul; the relation is lost, lopsided, and this results in the death of the self. In a moment of pure contemplation, the body (outside of neurological processes) has died; the relation is lost, lopsided, and this results in the death of the self. Consciousness is the relation, and insofar as one is conscious, he is at least minimally "alive". Walker Percy likened our selves to a percentage: the average self, he said, is about two percent. Thus the common man is perpetually on the edge of oblivion, existential nothingness, death, death, death.

Desire makes the other opaque. He is no longer a You realized through relation, translucent in being. Even sub-relationally, the recognition of his body, her smile, her laughter, her fingers fail to signify immediately a subject, a relation potentiality. This is because desire instrumentalizes for the sake of its own fulfillment. A You instrumentalized fails to be a You, and becomes instead an It. With the loss of the You, Buber notes, comes the loss of spirit. "Spirit in its human manifestation is man's response to his You." This response is made freely; it literally defines man through the freedom he presents as a response. Whether God or mankind (a tautological statement), existence as becoming-towards, as striving, as freedom (all of which are synonyms for spirit), is possible only through relation. With the loss of relation through the reduction to and particularization of the Other, the I, which otherwise has authentic being only in relation to a You, becomes a ghost, a misconception, an existential misnomer. A critique of Descartes.

The past age was one of constipated meditation. No action. Today hardly anyone thinks with a depth enough to deserve the title of meditation, yet activity inwardly qualified is a ghost, a nonentity, a fiction, just as much as it was in the past age where thought was almost an excuse for movement. Thought and authentic action are both erased from culture. What is left? Sensationalism, sentimentality, intoxication. In short, the senses. In short, a return to Greece. But at least the Greeks knew how to think. A child is born into this world, discovers his surroundings tactilely, visually, yes, gustatorily (and maybe the carpet does taste better than we think). He learns to crawl, then learns to walk. This inclination and dedication to movement is a parable for mankind. Spiritually understood -- inwardly understood -- most men have only crawled through life, with the smallest possible amount of self-assertion. Few have actually stood on their own legs and taken a few steps. Only the saints have walked. Which isn't to say that the crawling man doesn't have spark-moments wherein he proves himself to be a saint -- but again goes back to crawling. The same is true for those who don't know how to crawl.

Inwardness is losing, and true movement is possible only by surpassing the threshold of externality and joining with inwardness. Nietzsche hypothesized a necessary return to man's prelinguistic state, where consciousness becomes a thin veneer, stretched over the controlling impulses that now constitute man's "lower" nature. Brutal, if you will. But Nietzsche, the incarnation of Dionysus he claimed himself to be, was opposed to drinking. He had profound moments of transcendence. He knew beauty, and knew the aesthetic "fight" for life entailed with this incendiary love for the sublime. But a thin veneer of consciousness has no place with a deep love for life. Feelings transcend, yes; but it's after the experience, when the self is left with the effulgent remainder of the experience that culminated in transcendence, when it returns again to itself in a deeper sense that it can truly appreciate what has happened. It is the feeling that follows transcendence that results in the positive feeling of this transcendence, and without a relative depth of, by no means a hyper-selfconsciousness (this often is painful), there is a smaller appreciation entirely. The hidden law of existence comes to mind: contrast is everything.

Poetic

"What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music." -- Kierkegaard

The great thing about being poetic is that when you get sad over losing your poetic vein, you have it all over again. Analogously, the closer to suicide you are, the greater a writer you are. Hemingway's greatest creation was the one he was working on -- when he shot himself. The trick of writing is to quarantine negative memories, steal the fire, synthesize them with the magic of creativity, birth a wonder in words, and let the memories flow back into the unconscious rivers of the mind. Yes, it's a skill that takes time to master. But to choose the power to create luminously over living -- that is the mindset of a person whose children I weep for.

Dylan Said: "I'm Sick of Love"

The sadness of love sickness is unlike other forms of sadness. These other forms, based in other causes, are always too mundane, too banal, to be worthy of the sadness of love, for this sadness is caused by the particularly of a person -- who cannot be replicated precisely because she cannot be generalized.

"I'm down, down, down. This whole world seems against me. I lost my job, wrecked my car, my dog died, I'm unattractive, obese, stupid, unoriginal, with no talents."
"Please. If you only knew the sadness I feel. Because of X! Ah! The endless ways to think of her!"

Which accounts for why love sickness is the most preferred of all forms of sadness; which also accounts for perhaps the leading cause for suicide. The coils will not be shaken off -- the cause seems heroic, noble, archetypal, and is fought precisely for the different characteristics that constitute this counter self. If the person is warm and endearing, the sorrow is for that; humorous and forgiving for that too; beautiful -- why, for that, oh, celestial wonder of this infinite cosmos, if only for that! And the latter cannot be escaped; the person is inexorably beautiful, just as beauty is inexorably attractive. The emotional release -- the pheromones, the endorphins, and other narcotics of the brain -- sets in place the gravity of focus, and, depending on the broadness of the luminous qualities of the person in consideration, this focus will either work within reason, or insanely hard to find at least a single quality that can be held in esteem -- and run it into the ground. The person is creative and charming and funny and poetic. This isn't to say that the emotional release predestines our perception of the other, though typically this is the case. These two attractive adolescents love because they are both -- attractive. Their positive qualities hold only black holes in their personalities. They reason out the angles of each other and conclude, with consciences pinpricked, that all is glory, wonder, beauty. They attempt a relationship -- and grow in emotional maturity. Their failure is obvious to the non-intoxicated: they have no matching characteristics with which to hold each other up. This is the spiritual test of love: to seek an obective set of matches in another while being gloriously suffocated with a torrent of glittering emotions, and if this cannot be done, suffer for the sake of future happiness by cooling the heat of passion and dropping it when it is closest to hypnosis.

Interestingly, whether one quality or ten doesn't matter; and some qualities can be created ex nihilo and still be worshipped as evidences of perfection. It's as if the mind, seeking a reasonable explanation for why a person is attracted to someone with no intrinsically good qualities, creates its own fantasies to satisfy the demands of reason, and reason, so transfixed by the magic of the imagination, resigns to the predisposed desires of the self. Thus the blindness of love, created by the emotional release. Thus the "falling" into love; the emotional swirl is a torrent of euphoria, a thunderstorm. Love is almost a vice of the unconscious inflicted on the person who is inebriated with it: it rises out of involuntary feelings, these feelings based in emotions, these emotions based (in part) in lower chemical neurological reactions. It rises out, and strangles the person "in" it, whether blessedly or as a curse, depending, of course, on the person's capacity to follow through with what love has fulminated in his being, unasked, but always subsequently preferred. If the person cannot follow through, his desire is broken off. Consequently he is tormented, and his love will, once again, abdicate reason through the possibility of imagination. He will be deluded into waiting -- until she is available, until she returns, until she consents; it doesn't matter. This period of waiting will bring before him the continual possibility of just breaking it off and getting on with his life; but this takes incredible spirit; often he will simply wait until his passion cools. The hardness of the way is what it is because, as alluded to previously, he thinks he is fighting for something scintillatingly particular, unreplicable, a portion of the universe with no equal -- and it has no equal; no self, no matter how superficial or nearing-nonexistence, is equivalent to the next (even though, spiritually considered, one has to look closer for differences the less of a self the self itself is in relation to the other). He is fighting for her beauty -- nothing compares! Her smile -- nothing compares! And, yes, dear reader, nothing compares! Glory to God! Mankind is a treasure! But skip ahead and imagine one year from now when he no longer desires her. He will say to himself, "yes, I was in love with her once. She was beautiful; she still is beautiful. Her depth was endless; her depth is still endless. Her smile is immaculate; why, her smile still is what it was. Why, then, did I ever torment myself over the fantastic chance that she would be mine then when I feel nothing now?" The answer is: the emotional playingfield. He could not break from the drug because he confused the drug with her. After all, attraction is not tantmount to the thing attractive. Hm. But to realistically think a person could think that, through cold, detached reasoning, in the moment of erotic ecstasy -- ludicrous! But, ah, yes, yes, glory to God again! He still has the impulse of the Eternal within him; the timeless signpost stamped on the walls of his soul, conscious of it each moment he is conscious of himself. The Eternal commands: move on. It does not reason; reason only invites doubt, and doubt is a stronger tide than certainty. It only stands, immutable, with the same advice: move on! Yes, move on; make the leap and get on with your life. God will provide. Enough of this futile ruination of a good soul! Move on, and in moving, yes, you will suffer too, but the darkness of your suffering will contain with it a light of hope, and with each step its rays will warm the skin of your happiness until it once again penetrates your whole being, and there you will stand, a stronger man because of the sufferings you overcame. Not the sufferings of despair, that always bear no fruit. The sufferings of righteousness; of responding in faith to the Eternal within you! Lovers of the world! I say, continue to love! But when your love wraps itself around you tighter than loving hands should and proceeds to constrict the very blood within you, simply resign it, and all will be well.

But how hard, how infinitely hard even this leap is! Broad is the way to destruction. Yes. Few find life; that is, few will the strength to live it. To suffer for love! What else is there to suffer for! But this suffering murders the one caught in it; thus it potentially murders, or at least mutilates, the relations the one has. This is worth fighting for? No, the higher love is worth fighting for, for in fighting for it there is none of the inner turmoil of erotic love; in fighting for it the inwardness of man is revitalized as he fights for it, and in fighting for it, he fights for the good of the whole world. This is the love worth fighing for!

But erotic love has brought so much as well. It is responsible for almost all of the beauty in the history of the world, whether as an immediate cause, or a cause proper. Its frustration is sublimated into creativity, whether explicitly with the beloved in mind, as the subject, or not, where the power of the love fuels the creative flow, undifferentiated (Freud was three-fourths wrong: love moreso than sexual desire as a motivation for creativity; at times sex predicated by love; rarely sex without love). Without love, more, we would not be capable of perceiving beauty. It is really love that opens the doors of perception; it signals the beautiful patches of the ontology of the beloved, and for once we see something for its own sake -- and with each taste we form an idea, a preference, for the beauty of the world. Consequently we desire to see it as often as we can. And eventually perhaps we choose God, for He is the keymaster to the floodgates of the beautiful.