Faith

Thomas a Kempis, in one of his less misanthropic moments, wrote:

What good does it to speak learnedly about the Trinity if, lacking humility, you displease the Trinity? Indeed it is not learning that makes a man holy and just, but a virtuious life makes him pleasing to God. I would rather feel contrition than know how to define it. For what would it profit us to know the whole Bible by heart and the principles of all the philosophers if we live without grace and the love of God? ... all is vanity, except to love God and serve Him alone.

Plato defined the beginning of wisdom as wonder, Descartes doubt. It's clear we've taken the latter extreme too seriously in molding our quest to know anything in life. If wisdom begins in wonder, what one discovers has a certain playfulness about it. We can philosophize as a way of clarifying misconceptions, but we are still capable of holding that the greatest things in life can be taken for what they are before reason is on the scene. Learning about the world, which can be the broadest definition of the philosophical mind, functions as a sort of aesthetic: we intend to learn as a way of discovering the goodness of the universe, which we presuppose from the beginning. If wisdom begins in doubt, however, then everything we aim to know functions as a life jacket to save us from the anxiety of knowing nothing. This attitude presupposes the necessity of insight to lead us how to live.

Kempis proves that the mind is secondary, and this point provides all the resources for the invisible selves in society who have no time or inclination for "learned" things. Life is more than thinking about life. We must first properly exist before the mind can likewise have its proper standing in relation to the self. But this is impossible without the mind ascertaining something that the heart, as it were, already knows. Perhaps this is why all great truths carry the ring of epiphany, and all epiphany the feeling that comes when one recognizes (replaces in cognition) something one knew before but had forgotten along life's way. As Pascal has said, "the heart has its reasons its own mind knows not." The task of initially learning how to live means convincing the mind what the heart (or something very deep in the self) already knows.

What is the point of preaching? To point out what we as sophisticated adults once knew as charming children. It isn't properly insight or understanding that we need, unless we have fooled ourselves through our reason and thus need a proper rational counterbalance which undoes the damage already done. This is most certainly the case more and more often with a society whose more intellectually prone members are continually blooming towards rationalism and consequently away from intuition. To realize that God exists and that in a paradoxical sense all is right despite the immediate madness that surrounds us isn't grasped solely through the mind, although the mind is involved in the process. The mystique of faith is precisely that God has implanted a conviction in human beings that is very much a power in their lives -- a power that is both impervious to doubt and incapable of proving itself. We have too often understood faith as relating to cognition, to correct belief, rather than something beyond (or before) this; and once again, basic beliefs come with the deal, but are not defined by it. The act of coming to faith isn't specifically a reception of information, but rather analogous to a man who hears an old song he had been somehow missing for years, and upon hearing he says "that's it! I knew it went something like that."

It's important to keep the order that Anselm has presented intact: faith seeks understanding. Understanding can never seek faith. Reason only invites an infinite number of reasons, and this is the nature of the reasoning mind. Understanding can, however, clear away misunderstandings about faith, and this is the task for the philosopher, the theologian, the apologist. But faith essentially remains ineffable, a given that precedes comprehension and reason. Indeed, it is part of the wonder of wisdom for the heart set correctly to the rhythm of the universe.

A Night With Kierkegaard

Sickness Unto Death:

-self as self-relating relation of temporal and eternal

Upbuilding Discourses:

-soul as contradiction of temporal and eternal

Concept of Anxiety:

-self as synthesis of psyche(soul) and body, constituted by spirit

Ergo: soul not the eternal

-perhaps the soul is the original contradiction/relation, without second relation -- the "immediate relation"

-second relation (relation's relating to itself) is the spirit/self -- "relation as becoming"

How can man be a self and also the soul of which the self is part?

Answer: he is a soul as he is a body -- as a synthesis, peripherally. Authentically self through spirit; inauthentically (passively) without spirit (spiritlessness).

I am my body essentially because I have senses and am constituted by matter.

I am a soul because I have consciousness, meaning, reason, possibility, etc., and am constituted immaterially.

*I am simultaneously both, however, but only through spirit or freedom, which is my self in the deepest sense, and comprehensively all these elements are my self in the broadest sense.

Dualism: one over the other; Cartesian "ghost in the machine", soul controlling the body.

Is eternity identified as God or the soul?

-If God, then the soul must be other than eternity

-If the soul, then the soul is eternity

UD:

Soul as a contradiction of temporal and eternal

CA:

Self as synthesis of soul and body

Ergo: Self is a self-relating relation of a contradiction of temporality and eternity and a body

(temporality--->soul<---eternity)----->self<-----body

Soul as subject to temporality by virtue of being associated with a self which exists by definition within time.

-As if the soul were defined according to temporality and eternity *after* spirit defined selfhood.

Could it be that God provides salvation for the soul in the sense that He provides us with possibilities?

-When I have possibilities, I breathe.

-Too much possibility is a form of despair; absurd to think the soul fully exists during despair. It is dampened in despair.

--This points to the soul as more than eternity/possibility/infinity; if it were such, then losing the self in these extremes would mean the fulness of the soul. However, the soul is dampened by despair; ergo, the soul is not this.

:. Soul is found in a balance as well -- contradiction/synthesis

Perhaps the soul is the self in a more peripheral form:

(1)Spirit, (2) soul, (3) body

(1) Relation self-relating (active), (2) the relation (immediate), (3) an element in the relation

If the body is an element in the original relation, what is the other element? Soul.

How can the soul be a part of the synthesis and also the synthesis?

The soul must be a *different* synthesis than the synthesis for the self. Cannot be the "self in a more peripheral form."

"According to Kierkegaard’s anthropology, man is a paradox, an inter-esse which is composed of contradictory aspects (body and soul, time and eternity, necessity and possibility)*. The self is a third, synthetic element which founds these opposite aspects and holds them together. This means that the self is the opposite of an immediate given self (defined by Kierkegaard as a synthesis between these contradictory aspects). Only the awareness of the contradiction makes subjectivity concrete. The more self-development, the more contradictory existence, and the other way around" (Moonen, "Touching From a Distance: In Search of the Self in Henry and Kierkegaard")

*"Man is always both aspects at the same time, so there is no dualism involved: man cannot be one aspect without the other. If he is not capable of understanding the significance of temporality, then eternity in him will also fade."

"Freedom means to be capable" ( appendix to CA)

We must eschew the belief that we are more our souls than our bodies. It is not the case as Lewis said, and virtually every half-thinking contemporary Christian believes, that we properly don't have souls but rather are souls which have bodies. To be one is to be the other; to place emphasis on one is to deemphasize the other, to negate the other, and in doing so we lose both.

Purpose Still Wins the Day

This is a scintillating economic study which unveils two findings:

1) Financial reward works when commensurate with "simple, straightforward tasks" (i.e., non-cognitive).

2) It doesn't work at all when the work involves cognitive tasks (conceptualization), even to the point where higher rewards negatively correlate with job output; i.e., the higher the reward, the lower the job performance.

Conclusion: there is a place for purpose and meaning in work which transcends simple stimulus-reward contingencies.

Quite a kick in the pants for unmitigated capitalism and self-interest, which is always good when ideological egos of its hucksters have inflated to the size they are. This could explain quite well why I'm working on a two year degree so I can make $12,000 less than the average Bachelor's degree salary. Just sayin'.

Giggles

Which reminds me of that scene from Serpico where he bursts into his apartment and yells to his hip but disgruntled seventies girlfriend, "the whole f**king system's corrupt," immediately followed by an image of Bill Hicks acerbically (and funnily) yelling "Go back to bed, America. Here is American Gladiators. Here is 56 channels of it! Here you go, America! You are free -- to do what we tell you! You are free -- to do what we tell you!"

Exactly like it, actually.

Politics and Spirituality I -- God is not a Capitalist

I haven't been in a political mood lately, which provides me with excellent ground to really think about political topics from different angles without getting seeped in the angry opium high which we call current events. I initially started a very long essay on contemporary conservatism, which ended up becoming a bit of a sermon on religion and politics. So after dividing it into two separate essays, and then eventually dividing the first into three parts (I know), here we are.

The first thing anyone can say (or should say) about contemporary politics is that most who adhere to a political party are who they are because their traditions have shifted the memes to their own cognitive bloodstreams. Mom and Dad were conservatives (or liberals or Democrats or Republicans), so it goes without saying that son and daughter carry the weight of the same unreflective belief system on their backs. This much should immediately loosen the emotional burden when trying to argue with people who disagree with us on political matters. Their points of view are even likely based in "unarguable" values which determine them. We should be wise in learning where the threshold lies.

What bothers me most, however, is how contemporary Republicanism has used ideas such as God and family values and all the emotive sensitivity that these labels carry with them as a way of militarizing against a created enemy that is perpetually intent on actualizing his evil scheme of turning America to moral ashes if ever the Democrats and "liberals" steal the day. If we had no greater reference for Christian spirituality in America than the campfire meetings of Republican ideology, we would walk away with the belief that God is for money (even the love of money), war and all the millions of innocent deaths that go along with it for a likely avoidable end, and that he rewards only those who pull themselves up by their bootstraps and break from the crowd to achieve all the greatness that is demanded of them all by themselves, without inspiration or help from others.

This is all ironic to the point of comedy, because I think that if you look at the matter close enough, you'll see that the vast majority of what Republicanism has come to stand for -- and with it the vast majority of self-titled "conservatives" -- is as far from the spirit of Christ as possible. Thankfully, though, most people self-identify with it because (as said above) tradition has provided them with an unreflective emotional attachment to it. As an aside, I only choose Republicanism because of what I deem the mammoth contradiction of values essential to it. All political ideologies run the risk of danger if for no other reason than because they can easily make a secular paradise take the place of a spiritual one. Democratic values (or for that matter conservative, liberal, libertarian, socialist, Marxist, etc.) are not exempt from their own weaknesses, and I make it an honor not to affiliate with any party in American politics.

Let's be honest with ourselves by admitting this much to begin with: God is not a capitalist. The most superficial of skimmed readings of the Gospel makes it clear that Christ has nothing but wariness and disdain towards a spirit which values material wealth:

He has brought down rulers from their thrones, and has exalted those who were humble. He has filled the hungry with good things; and sent away the rich empty-handed. -- Luke 1:52-53

But woe to you who are rich, for you are receiving your comfort in full. -- Luke 6:24

Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. -- Matthew 19:24

Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions. And He told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man was very productive. And he began reasoning to himself, saying, 'What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?' Then he said, 'This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry.' But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?' So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God. -- Luke 12:15-21

And all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need. -- Acts 2:44-45

No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other You cannot serve God and wealth. -- Matthew 6:24

This should be more than enough to convince us that God is not for any political ideology that advocates the accumulation of wealth as valuable in itself, that is pervaded through and through with the most basic forms of capitalism, that posits self-interest as a motivator for profit. The last verse is enough to cause considerable quivering from a pro-business fanatic, as it should. I don't think (although some would clearly disagree) that these verses mean that God is advocating socialism. I have little but laughter for anyone who would read such a specific economic doctrine into the words of the Bible, considering that both socialism and capitalism are hundreds and hundreds of years in the future in relation to the writing of the New Testament. The meaning is unambiguously clear, however, that the selfishness that a pursuit of happiness along materialistic lines blooms is antithetical to everything that God and love (or God and therefore love) are for.

Further, some would be hermeneutically naive enough to interpret the passage where Jesus asks the rich young ruler to sell all his possession and follow him (Luke 16:22) and apply this to everyone at all times. This much is obvious from other passages. Example:

Zaccheus stopped and said to the Lord, "Behold, Lord, half of my possessions I will give to the poor, and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will give back four times as much." And Jesus said to him, "Today salvation has come to this house, because he, too, is a son of Abraham. -- Luke 19:8-9

So is it all of my possessions through appealing to the story of the rich young ruler, or half of my possessions through appealing to Zaccheus? If half by Zaccheus is sufficient, why not a fourth by others, or an eighth, and so on? The point of emphasis seems to be that the rich man loved God in everything except wealth, which he loved so dearly that only a violent break with it could pull his heart fully towards God. His mistake was what C.S. Lewis warned about: we are trying to "remain what we call 'ourselves,' to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be 'good'.... And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do." This little bit of "ourselves" is relative to each individual; each self has, as it were, its own idol to starve to death through one's abandonment of it through finding shelter in the presence of God. With the rich man it was clearly wealth. With others it could be lust, or food, or looking the flashy in the eyes of others.

But for our political subject, it is clearly the case that wealth is an easier and more dangerous temptation than other inclinations to sin. It seems, especially upon surveying the sample of verses above, that wealth is one of the popular subjects of Jesus, and it's not hard to see why. Wealth allows both the possibility for security and power. When I have money, I can very easily believe that because all my earthly cares are provided for, there's nothing else to worry about, unconsciously yielding to the consolation that I "have many goods laid up for many years to come; take your ease, eat, drink and be merry," not apprehending that my very soul is murdered while I speak these words (Luke 12:19-20). Power can be defined as the capacity to influence one's world for the sake of one's preferred ends. Precisely because money allows us to buy all the things we crave, including what we falsely believe to be absolute security, others are easily under its influence. Indeed, in advanced capitalist societies like ours where there is a large gap between rich and poor, the rich often are the kings over individuals who fill the servant role in proportion to how little they have. Money has purchased assassinations of presidents because they didn't fit the goals or values of those who made the payment. It corrupts our politics because the immediate monetary gift offered by the lobbyist is so much more seductive to the politician than the cold abstractions of justice for the people. Verily, love of wealth has instrumentalized the whole world for the sake of the wishes of its lovers.

I can hear the bowtied critic now: "Well, you're against love of wealth, not capitalism. There are thousands of honest business men and women who work to make a living without loving money." This is most certainly true, but what I'm focusing on is capitalism as a central ethos for American society, as something that every "good American" strives to fulfill. It's seductively easy to go from adhering to a doctrine which values private property to valuing private property as a form of security or power that shifts God out of the way in place of idolatry. Many don't do this, yes, precisely because they love God more than anything, and when you love God it is impossible to be so foolish as to value anything as a source of security or happiness, but I'll be wary of anyone who claims that it isn't incredibly hard to keep the monster of wealth at bay.

Of course, when I pose this longwinded theological rabbit trail I'm not saying that things can't have a place in our lives, and even be enjoyed by us. They most certainly can. After all, the universe was created for a reason. It's when we put the emphasis on matter as ours that things become problematic. It's much better to see everything as it is: the creation of God. This much can be so very helpful in balancing the greed that so often attends the quest for private property. And we shouldn't stop at the world out there, but include our bodies with the deal. Hence Neruda could say in his ravishing poem, "October Sky":

Little by little, and also in great leaps,

life happened to me,

and how insignificant this business is.

These veins carried

my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,

I breathed the air of so many places

without keeping a sample of any.

In the end, everyone is aware of this:

nobody keeps any of what he has,

and life is only a borrowing of bones.

I'm fond of imagining an alternate ending to the story of the rich young ruler. Upon being told by Jesus to sell his possessions and follow him, after a time of painful contemplation the man looks up and says "very well". The moment the last object in his life is gone, every piece of furniture moved from his house, every expensive ornament sold from his body, his heart becomes full with a preternatural joy that he's never experienced before. After days in solitude with prayer and appreciation before God for finally achieving that small stretch of liberty he could never seem to have despite his previous love of God before giving up his possessions, he finds Jesus again preaching on the streets. He walks to his face, half-squinting in the scathing Middle Eastern sun, and after releasing a sigh and a smile tells him "everything is perfect! I finally understand!" Whereupon Jesus responds without skipping a beat, "Good. You may have your possessions back again, for you finally see with untrammeled perception."

The problem with love of wealth is that it snuffs God out as the firm security for our lives, and the very life of every truly spiritual person should be centered on absolute dependence upon God. What does it mean to love something more than God? A good test is to ask yourself if you can really live as happy an existence without it. The modified question of Jesus can apply hypothetically to ourselves: "When I sent you out without iPod or Mustang or kitchen collection or professional reputation, you did not lack anything, did you?" If you can answer with the disciples, "no, nothing" (Luke 22:35), then your heart is fully right with God, and you can see the mad scraping for material goods towards the goal of an invisible kingdom of self for the silliness that it truly is.

Introducing God

The theologians and philosophers treat God like they were friends at a party who spend so much time speaking about him that he never properly gets introduced, left in the foreground smiling, waiting patiently. The pastors and religious community, on the other hand, introduce God with an outdated, pedestrian attire that they've forced upon him for hundreds and even thousands of years, like starstruck sorority girls who say between warbles of bubbly praise that he's someone who's been dying to meet you, and someone you should really get to know, you know.

How hard it is to find someone with a heart and mind fully dedicated to God, and how large and perpetually growing the population is who would be receptive to hearing him spoken of in this way! Could this in part account for the rise in unbelief in America we've seen creep upon us, from 8% to 15% over the past twenty years?

My Philosophy, Cat Stevens Style

Well I think it's fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Get what you want to if you want, 'cause you can get anything.

I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorryloads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems you can't get off.

Oh, I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

When you crack the sky, scrapers fill the air.
Will you keep on building higher
'til there's no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?

I know we've come a long way,
We're changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

This is all a poetic call to a return to life and nature, away from the sparkling seduction of technology and advancement, back to the God-given gifts we miss in our striving for the multitude of insignificances that we foolishly label great, and ultimately to the saving simplicity of the heart of a child. A prayer from George MacDonald applies the provided perception:

"O Father, thou art All-in-all, perfect beyond the longing of thy children, and we are altogether thine. Thou wilt make us pure and loving and free. We shall stand fearless in thy presence, because perfect in thy love. Then shall thy children be of good cheer, infinite in the love of each other, and thy eternal love. Lord Jesus, let the heart of a child be given to us, that so we may arise from the grave of our dead selves and die no more, but see face to face, the God of the Living."

Worry

I think I finally know what distinguishes the carelessness of youth from the bedraggled, beat up, deadpan semilife that starts perchance in the twenties, blooms in the forties, chokes in the sixties, and kills shortly thereafter. It's not anxiety (good guess), not despair (ah, too romantic), not even stress (not precisely).

It's worry. Youth represents carelessness, lightness, freedom of mind; old age, which deposits its seed before the hairline rises, represents worry, fear, despair. Groucho Schopenhaur had it all wrong (as he usually does, but in truth-revealing ways): "At every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence...hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment." Au contraire, my poodle loving pessimist. There is plenty in life to be happy about, as with the reverse. It's not disappointment that paints the faces of the old, but the faintly lingering touch of exhaustion which no mere life of physical drudgery can form. And the greatest contributor to this exhaustion is worry, for worry is mental murder, an unassailable overcare for the future and all the valleys it contains.

To slightly alter the words of unappreciated existential psychoanalyst Leslie Farber, worry is the act of willing what can't be willed. As such it's close to obsession, but even obsession has a little fun with it. Worry, however, conjures up being worn out by something or someone who is transferred to an abstraction that pummels our minds. This is different from anxiety (although the two are sometimes used synonymously, often with one entailing the other), and it's actually anxiety that Farber uses in the paraphrase above, which I've changed. Anxiety, at its very basic level, is healthy; Kierkegaard calls it "the dizziness of freedom," and as such it signifies that I'm on the verge of making a choice, becoming a self, really existing, all of which has its reward -- namely, the euphoria of truly being alive. But when I worry my whole being is frozen up in idleness, save for that constantly repeating inward attention I have for something that concerns my future and births my desire. I can do nothing but think of it, whatever thing I would substitute for the pronoun, and this thinking is a prison. It's psychologically and emotionally exhausting, suffocating in the slowest, most torturous way.

And worrying is on the rise. To quote from Farber: "with the disappearance of the divine Will from our lives, we have come to hunger not for His Will -- neither in the sense of living in His Will nor usurping His Will for ourselves -- but rather for our own sovereign will, which is our modern way, this side of omnipotence of suicide or madness. And all exhortations notwithstanding, this will we cannot will." Ours is the beginning of the second century of what Nietzsche called the death of God, where religion is disappearing from culture, with the converse rise of technological and scientific idols. This has obvious results: nihilism, the twentieth century as the bloodiest in human history, and (relevant to our discussion) the surging up of worry as a popular torment because God, who previously bore our burdens, is becoming less and less of a sanctuary for us. This disappearance of the divine Will which Farber speaks of isn't limited to atheism. Within the confines of orthodox Christendom, the false secular solution is becoming popular when trials burden us: rather than the prophylactic of prayer and dialogue with God, we try alternate methods. We vegetate in front of the television, or lose ourselves online, or let alcohol ameliorate our wounds, or seek out transient salvation in the lives of others. Our century is one where our troubles are never quite bad enough to force us into prayer, and this loss of deep suffering is the worst suffering of all.

Do you worry? The theological rage is to quote Jesus out of context:

For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, 'What will we eat?' or 'What will we drink?' or 'What will we wear for clothing?' For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. -- Matthew 6:25-32 (NASB)

We typically stop here, or some point arbitrarily prior. The mutilated implication is that Jesus is commanding us to cut off our worries by fiat. It's a very American way of twisting the intention of Jesus through omission, and fits our Randian mythos of the self-dependent rugged individualist, with whom the will is everything and every angle of reality is a mere coughing servant waiting to be commanded. Add the finishing verse: "But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you." What a crippling heresy! To think that the commandments of God are possible without living our lives in Him. But that, alas, is the subject of another sermon. The moral here, though, is simple enough: seek the presence of God for the solution to your worries, and like all religious methods which work so marvelously, I'm almost sorry for those who would like a more profound solution. Is there really anything simpler for so bothersome a perennial problem?

A Popular Term

Random. Anyone with an online social networking account -- anyone on planet Earth under the age of eighty -- knows that this is the word of choice for capturing collegiate behavior. Just a moment ago I stole this comment from Mecca Facebook: "I can make a mean dish of randomness and cannot always pull off gourmet." God knows I have no idea what that means, although the firm feeling of being different is effervescent moments after I'm done reading it. Why such the push for arbitrariness? After all, the random label almost always contains beneath it pretty understandable stuff. There's nothing really random about photographically capturing a long night of drinking and all the cleaned inhibitions that go with it, or pinning to virtual space a collection of freefloating thoughts -- and there sure isn't anything sensible (or palatable) about a dish of randomness. Yet there the word remains.

Really, it's all motivated by a cut towards unpredictability. Of all things in the world for those who spend their time outside the sphere of asceticism and world-flitting holiness, there's nothing worse than having your actions called out beforehand. I remember a laughable story from an old friend recollecting the actions of a previous mechanical girlfriend (nice, meek, pretty). He told me how at a movie theater he watched her from a distance as she performed her usual social moves, calling them out to a friend seconds before she made them: now a high pitched "hi!" and a beaming smile, now the unselfconscious push back of her hair before she taps the shoulder of a friend as a preemptive greeting, now the cute laugh after a pseudo joke, now the shift back to boyfriend home base after a clichéd goodbye -- before punching him in the ribs in gentle exasperation after being told about his proud little project. Needless to say, they broke up.

What's a better analogy for predictability than the machine? The machine is the antithesis to the human being, with its programmable movements and its formulaic stimulus responses. We want to be unique, original, our own self-created surprises, as the world stands in applause to our glamorous eccentricity. We have free will, damnit, no matter what Dan Dennett or the nasally neuroscientists say -- nevermind if we never actually use it towards the task of becoming who we are. And of course, there's tragic irony. The rage for self-titled randomness is popular for the most boring, predictable people, as if they use the term to clothe the nakedness of their pedestrian nature. The fun ones, the truly spontaneous collections of spirit and flesh, have better things to do than talk about themselves for any other reason than well-wished self-deprecation. A law to add: self consciousness and true spontaneity don't mix. If you think you're random, you're not, caught instead by the cultural meme of wanting to fit the ideal of randomness. Isn't that's what a fake is? A person who wants to do something for the sake of the label that follows it, be it random, intelligent, athletic, humble, sweet, and so on, the river quite dreadfully long and blandishly downhill.

Sartre defined genius as what a man creates when he is looking for a way out. Conformity is a form of spiritual asphyxiation, which predictability always attends. And how is conformity possible? Not through the chameleonlike imitation of actions made by another, but a secret inward decision to say "I will fit this image," much to the disposal of individuality that comes with it. To conform is to say yes to a plan for who you should be rather than the one which comes in multiple gifts the day hands to you. Put another way, I am my own persona when I do the things that organically come to me (read a book, comb my hair, learn French, shop for coffee). The instant an inclination to act a certain way presents itself to me in prepackaged form and the feeling of acting a role overtakes me, then I know that who I am is waiting by the wayside until the performance is over.

Who we are, who we should be, is a collection of atoms charged by an engine of creativity, with each track left in our wake laughed at in appreciation by God and perceptive men. The more generalizable the predictions about our behavior the better. I might have a vague sense that you'll either read a book or play a diddle on piano, but what will it be in either case? Better still if you were to break my preplanned dichotomy and commit that unheard of act of taking a walk on a fine Summer night. The hero in my mind is the one with such existential creativity -- such a self that can be itself by attending to its own possibilities, by living his own life without looking outside for admirers -- that I can only predict that he will wake in the morning, do things, and sleep, if even that.