Becoming

More and more misanthropic. The aliens can't be found, and the animals never stick around.

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You believe in preaching to the ends of the earth, and you can't even mean a smile in passing a forgotten face on a sidewalk.

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In a sense it's an insult to tell a writer that he writes well. You will only rise in him the cyclical, self-cynical feelings of confusion and dismay at his own perceived inability. If a writer's words bore flesh, there would be plenty more outcasts in the world.

Writing is a surge. One writes with a feeling, and the words that result are always a crime against the spirit that bore them. I can only think of one sentence I've ever written that I thought was out-and-out, solidly good. Do we really read a work by analyzing each word and stringing them together? Or do we at most use certain words to indicate a deep tone, a certain energy, in which the work is written, in which each word considered in itself can never contain? The second, which is why the idea of a writer who perfectly knows all the "rules", who prides him- or herself as a good writer because of a degree from a university, is repugnant, a crime upon aesthetic humanity.

Nothing can come close to touching the hem of the garment of a high feeling, of the intoxication of creation, of releasing the inner demons who constrict and drive insane and of so exorcising, angelizing, the soul through splurging words on paper. Then you look back to what has fallen, and it looks like it was from a hand from another universe. Words are a form of murder, and language is more than words. Thus all great writers loathe what they write. They know that what they've revised for the hundredth time is still light years away from the misleading feeling of perfection that tagged every moment of creation. They know and shrink, for writing always involves a degree of self deception. Do you want the litmus test for a good writer? Test how much he shrinks at what he's written. A "classic" writer might be nothing else than a masochist with stratospheric words.

But, no, I'm an exception: everything I've written, except that one anorexic sentence thoughtlessly composed years ago amidst a pile of creative stillborns, is nothing more than the blood of my own soul from which I wash my hands. The wound will never be content with closing up. Blessing, curse, or cursed blessing. Choose your time of the day.

Philosophy Shot My Brain

A lot of people read for leisure. I read either until my eyes grow heavy or until I can feel my frontal lobes bloating. I read to grow, and the moments of transcendent wonder clairvoyant in snatches of prose catch up on me serendipitously. I pray to God to be able to understand obscure truths, almost as much as I pray to love the world. I want to know everything that can be known.

But what would happen if that ever came to pass? Who would I ever tell? Genius is an island with miraged bridges.

It's better to read for crucifixional purposes. To prove that your preconceptions are wrong -- about yourself, about the nature of the world --, or not-quite-right. Perchance to the point where you abandon your work and decide to pay attention to nature, other people, a cold autumn morning, cumulus clouds exiling an innocent blue sky. What then? It's a matter of time before this attention breaks its womb and bursts into an undifferentiated, God-breathing love.

Lightness blooms. Nothing is as heavy as it was before. Effortlessly, you filter obscurity from the vital, because you see how the vital is so intimately related to ameliorating life. You wear this cure as an invisible badge and flit lucidity at every section of the world you come across. And at this very moment, wisdom is born.

Philosophy, my dear professor, is the means to discovering that we don't know. Love of wisdom is found in shadows that when entered break into gardens of light.

Socialism?

I've been doing a decent amount of thinking on the so-called Socialism of the president-elect who conservatives can't seem to stop complaining about. "Redistributing the wealth," as it's called, is an indictment on Capitalism, which has a heartbeat of rugged individualism. Individualism, it turns out, is absolute, delusion-breeding nonsense. No man is an island; who we are is a product of external decisions outside of our control, which only potentially can be acted on by free choice. Individualism claims that everything rests on the responsibility of the individual. The individualistic response to a person predestined to psychological abuse by his family, an intellect worn down by stress, poisoned by neurotoxins, and ultimately genetically defunct, who clearly can't progress, isn't just "tough shit," but, "it's your fault," with the elliptical deletion of "you poor, lazy bastard." As one member of an online forum crushingly put it:

Under the rules of individualism, man is the cap'n of his faith.

THEREFORE

1. Anything that happens in his life, is by his own doing and his alone.
   
2. If good things happen (wealth, health, success) then he must have done good things; if bad things happen (poverty, sickness, failure) then he must have done bad things.
   
3. Circumstances beyond his contol do not apply (see rule one)
   
4. The actions of others have no effect (see rule one)
   
5. Groups dynamics are either illusions, abhorations or of no consequence (see rule one)

THEREFORE

Man must be the cap'n of his fate.

There are clearly serious problems inherent in Capitalist systems. As of 2001, the top 10% owned 71% of wealth, the wealthiest 1% owned 38%, and the bottom 40% owned 1% of all wealth (Peter Phillips). To recapitulate: the bottom 40% owned 1% of all wealth. In case you've already forgotten: the bottom 40% owned 1% of all wealth. And that's seven years ago.

There are many factors that attribute to this. See David Shipler’s “The Working Poor” for a relatively detailed account. The rich typically are born into rich families; they have the resources, values (extremely important) and psychological support that springboard them to success a million times more likely than the average entrepreneur. The poor families, however: they have higher probabilities of sexual and psychological abuse (most notably from society, with its incessant, “it’s their fault they’re in this state”), a history of non-progressive values, a higher chance for genetic insufficiencies with relation to areas such as intelligence (and the psychologists of today are pointing out how genetics is much more responsible for traits such as intelligence than environmental factors), malnourished diet (leading to malnourished intellect), neurotoxins associated with poor living conditions (leading to a malnourished intellect), and other things, other things. It’s very simple: if you live in a well-to-do family, you have a well-to-do chance of getting ahead. If you don’t, your chances are virtually shot.

No wonder people "abuse" Welfare; they are probably caught in the dehumanizing memetic set that they can't be anything, that they aren't worth anything, that they are incompetent -- an incompetence that Shipler argued so lucidly pervades even unskilled labor jobs. Who on earth would be content with poverty-level governmentally-supported cash when they could easily make fifty to sixty grand with a little direction and appropriate values? But, alas, poor people don't have direction; they don't have progressive values; and both direction and values aren't their responsibility. You can't improve when your thinking leaves no possibility for improvement, and the fact that you're caught up in certain thought patterns isn't your fault unless you're taught to critically analyze everything and refuse to critically analyze anything (how many Republicans vote straight ticket while peripherally looking at their wallets?) -- but, again, this ability is a (dying) quality instilled by higher education. And the claim that people are riding the wave of government intervention and refusing work is almost certainly a myth. Does Welfare give people an incentive to avoid work? Doesn't look like it.

What to do? Government regulation? I guess. Increased taxes on the Obaman fashion? I guess. A tenacious dedication to universal eduction? No guess. That's what it all comes down to; and if the goal can ever at least approximately be reached, laissez-faire for everyone. Education might be the great equalizer; those who have the means from a poor background will meditatively consider this poor background and find fresh fire to thrust them forward and make something of themselves, equating the outcome of the careless rich who swallow the entreaties of tradition and the snug families who support them.

But that's a little too idealistic. It's hard to find truth attractive when you have drugs and cheap sex as unashamed accesses, when all your friends and family have gotten hitched at nineteen with three kids by twenty-four, when you're caught in the groupthink click of the cliques that exist as a sanctuary of look-afters in view of the hostile, careless outside world. If a spread of education will work, it will take time.

But what Washington hotshot wants to altruistically support potential business rivals? Maybe there are people who actually think that the heart of democracy isn't profit-making but, you know, freedom, egalitarianism, a fair shot. And maybe this inexperienced-therefore-uncorrupted, eloquent, intelligent future president with a terrorist sounding name will actually keep to his good ideals. That's much better than not having good ideals.

Wrath

At times I burn with anger. The demon settles and makes a home between my heart and stomach, bursting my metabolism to a rushing, uncontainable mania, where nothing constructive is possible, where concentration is an ally to escape, where I can only face my rage until it drops its guard and I murder it by losing myself in something completely accidental. This rage is the only chink in my detachment armor.

There is too much wrong with the world. Too much. Where is the global flood of our times? I can't imagine a world being worse than this one, but it was; there are lights now that pervade Christian souls -- but where are they? I can only find misery and no company with a world miserable but ignorant of its misery -- screaming undisciplined children; overweight, cowgazing women whose eyes contain a history of apathy; arrogant, selfish elite, content with money and indifferent to others; intellectual chits spouting useless abstractions to prove an incommensurate better-than-thou; partisan civilians bitter to the bone over election results. It all should go up in flames. God, it all should go up in flames.

Jacob has my envy; Jacob could wrestle with God. I don't plant my anger on particularities -- on single souls who wreck darkness microscopically or massively. They can't help it; and where the rest of the world would displace its anger, mine has no target. God can't be wrestled. He hides.

You'll call this blasphemy, but then you clearly haven't read the book of Psalms. I want universal love, but I am a spot of sand on a beach that spreads to infinity. I want the will of God, but the waiting is so tortuously hard, and I'll be damned if I volunteer myself to a descending shadow of ignorance. I dare to say it even if I'm wrong: you'll call me a blasphemer because you're too cowardly to admit the feelings you yourself have. You don't know how to hold your anger; you spread it on the innocent world.

One sticks one’s finger into the soil to tell by the smell in what land one is: I stick my finger in existence — it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint? -- Kierkegaard, Repetition