The Wandering

The Wandering

To say my mind wanders a bit is an understatement.  Thus, the internet is an horrible and unspeakable invention.  Here is where the mind is allowed to wander free of any sort of barrier (well, if you live in America that is pretty much the case.¹)  I have, in the space of an hour: looked up aspects of the Myer's Briggs, read a short story by Donald Barthelme, watched a movie trailer, and on and on and on.  My left eye is twitching because it wants sleep, but here is the problem I have: this is the time when I am most lucid.  My mind is simultaneously on fire and a dwindling pool of embers.  I told one person that my mind doesn't start really working until three a.m.  That was a lie, my mind kicks in at about midnight and three a.m. is the time when it is ready to collapse but it is still very much awake.²

This is my world.  The hours of two o'clock and three o'clock are my hours of temptations.  Here I can feel society giving me a unison "tsk tsk" as I plow into the night accomplishing nothing.  "At least," so it says, "do something with this time.  Plan a business, write a story, do something."  I can't.  I try start an essay, but it ends up unfinished.  I run out of words or find that a myriad of segues have led me to some unknown area; like a traveler in a car stopped by some desert gas station, I pull out my map and mumble, "well now where the heck am I?"  I know exactly where I am.  I am at my computer at two o'clock in the morning writing a paper that will be read by a few people.

Well, the heck with it.  I am a great writer.  Perhaps I am not as disciplined as others.  I have a great affinity for all of my thoughts because they are mine after all.  Like a little-league coach, I want all my players to play in the game regardless if it is the right time.  I send my thoughts out there.  I joke that I just like to see if any one of them will really and truly stick.  The fact is I want them all to succeed, even the inconsistent ones.

The fact is, it is very late.  I wonder if this is just catharsis.  I wonder if my words have meaning to anyone out there.³  I think they do, even though they don't.  Kierkegaard talked about relying on the absurd instead of the known outcome.  It is less pleasant to human pride, but it is the only way any of us can function.  Barthelme says as much too in the one story I read by him.⁴  It is here in the absurd that we find meaning in the meaningless; and we find that meaning by accepting the fact that maybe we are too concerned with finding meaning.  What is the point in our discovering the answer if it doesn't give us an answer.  People make fun of my love of useless knowledge because it doesn't seem to have any application, the absurdity would seem to dictate that our greatest answer undermines while reinforcing this notion.  Life is absurd, find that answer and you will be something ... whatever that means.  When one realizes that nothing has meaning and that means that it is infinitely important; one truly begins to be insane; and insanity is the label that the world gives to people who really start to get it.

We write off the insane, not because they are crazy; but because we do not like where they are going with all this.  I am probably wrong, so lets just skip it.  There are people who believe they are Napoleon Bonaparte or Teddy Roosevelt or a box of Chex Mix; they are clearly insane, but they don't get it.  Maybe all people who understand life are insane, but not all insane people get life?  No, insanity is merely a place that we have to walk through to get to enlightenment.  I am laughing right now.  How often do we talk about enlightenment, and we never really mean it.

Well, I need to get some sleep, the pitter patter of my keyboard is having an intoxicating effect on me; and it is pretty obvious that it is time to sleep when that sound is as musical as the sound of sheep being counted.  Though, here is my question, why am I cursed with thinking so well at this time of the day?  Why couldn't this happen a few hours earlier when the sun was out and I was quite bored.  I wonder if the insane are bored?  I wonder what it is to be wandering after you have gone through the world of the insane and reached the world of the absurd.  I bet God still allows for journeys there as well.

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1. Oh sure there are many who would argue that this is not the case and that there is a great deal of repression going with regards to American access of the internet, but that is mainly due to copy-written stuff, military secrets, and good old fashioned corporate greed.  That stuff is normal.  That stuff is typical.  That stuff is boring.  If boring people want to have boring secrets, I say let 'em.
2. I can remember at college dragging myself up stairs to go through the necessary steps and processes and rituals to prepare for sleep.  During these times I would wish simultaneously for sleep and still be thinking of the subject of the paper.  I would write sentences in my head and contemplate all of the different subjects going every which way.
3. I sometimes like to dream that there is some college out there secretly basing a field off of my study.  Some professor has been stealing my stuff for years, passing it on as his own, and he gets caught one day and I am now the genius.  Or perhaps some country has decided to develop my philosophy into some sort of model for development.  Who knows?  It is fun to dream.
4. Unless of course that one story Spencer let me read was by him as well.  Something about porcupines going to college.  

An Appeal to Reason

An Appeal to Reason

    
I saw a rock band had an album entitled: "An Appeal to Reason."  It struck me as a rather pretentious name, but I can't say as I blame them, it is a good album.  The question is: is it even possible to appeal to reason?  What does it mean to appeal to reason, to appeal to good faith, to appeal to really any of the human qualities?  However, the question I would like to explore is this one: What does it mean to "appeal to reason"?  It seems whenever one says this, there is a fervent hope that our views will be taken seriously, not necessarily thoughtfully, but seriously.¹ 

    However, no one really wants to appeal to reason.  There are two reasons²  for this, and they stem from our actual definitions of reason.  Firstly, it is quite impossible.  Reason is a tool of our thought process.  Reason, according to the Oxford Dictionary's first definition is: a cause, explanation, or justification for an action or event.  It is the color inside a "fact," I would say, but lacks form.  Put another way, at my job I am sometimes doing rather circuitous work to accomplish what appears to be a rather simple and straightforward task.  When asked to provide my reasons, they are rejected or accepted not on the virtue of an "appeal to reason," but rather on an appeal to something else in the other person.  My reasoning is apparently flawed, but I have listed reasons for my activities.³  Therefore, there must be something else besides reasoning with which my flawed reasoning came into contact.

    A second problem comes into play when we ask ourselves: who is to say that the person pronouncing judgment is working through "reason"?⁴  Surely this is a mammoth problem.  The Nazis "appealed to reason" with their devilish work.  Atheists and Christians both say they are "appealing to reason," though that cannot be the case since one side is obviously right and the other side wrong.  We then will often dismiss the other side for being "unreasonable."  Reason cannot be that which we base our world.  Reason is only an aspect of our understanding.

    So, when we appeal to reason, we are asking the impossible, and, I believe, subconsciously know it.  It is a circular argument and follows like this:

1.    I am appealing to your reason.

2.    Your reason should be like my reasoning.

3.    If you cannot be appealed to by reasoning like I have, you are unreasonable.

However, the problem is that that which you are trying to appeal to is also that which you are trying to convince.  In other words, when we ask to appeal to reason, we are really handing people a blank sheet and calling it a test; expecting them to know the answers to questions of which they were not provided.

    Life is a mystery in a larger part than we would like to acknowledge.  It is built on a faith that the world will not kills us.  Even ignoring some Hume-based problem with causality,⁵ we cannot know if our universe is a ticking-time bomb and that we may have only moments left.  In the end we rely on inductive reasoning⁶ and blind faith to carry us through to the end of the day; an "appeal to reason" boils down to pride and nonsense; but I am willing to be proven wrong.  If you wish to do otherwise, please, appeal to my reason.

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1. Perhaps we would be better off saying "an appeal to seriousness"?
2. No pun intended.
3. Some may argue that my appeal to reason fell short, but then that begs two very important questions: First, what did I follow that was not reasoning?  Secondly, how was the other person to pronounced judgment that my reasoning was flawed?
4. Here I will assume we are working with a second connotation that reason is a judgment based on intellectual thought processes.
5. David Hume (26 April 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a British philosopher who believed that we could not be certain of the causality of anything.  We can only believe that a certain event caused another one, but it is not possible for humans to state this with full certitude.
6. This is when we take our observations and blow them up to encompass the whole.  It is not perfect, I would argue, but in the end it is all we really have.

[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.

 

-    T.S. Elliot

 

Now it's over I'm dead and I haven't done anything that I want (now it's over) Or, I'm still alive and there's nothing I want to do

 

-- They Might be Giants

 

Born into the latter days of a falling Empire[1], we stare out into the sunlight and wonder what is to be done, not for the world or our loved ones, though we comtemplate those things as well.  But we wonder what is to be done with us.  Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, we wonder exactly how we are to make our psyche work for us.  Like the time I was handed that gift and I didn’t know what it was for or perhaps being given a sweater two sizes too big and hearing some benign relative say, “Oh you’ll grow into it.  You’ll see.”  This is the story of our psyche.  Some of us pack it away in boxes condemned to sit upon some lonely shelf.  Some of us fiddle with it too early and don’t understand the meaning as we gaze at it hoping that the instructions will come to us.  Who knows what is to be done with a psyche?

 

Our work fulfills and frightens us.  We believe ourselves up to no task, but upon taking it and with a healthy dose of encouragement we move through.  But where is the psyche in all this?  Where is the gift of long ago, given to us by the cosmos or God or something else?

 

The psyche is that which must be what it is and always has been; an enigma unlocked by faith and hope and all the pithy platitudes of our elders.  We are born to be happy and never satisfied.  At the back the darkness beckons us and we shut it out.  The question is are we living in the house of chaos with the God standing outside or are we in the house  of God with the chaos at our door?  I do not know.  It is not for us to know perhaps, and that is what drives us … somewhere.

 

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[1] As to which direction this empire might turn is anybody’s guess and at the singularity of that point both terrifying and exhilarating.

Economic crisis and its roots (unedited)

It is, one can assume, easy to have libertarian leanings.  Nothing seems more obvious.  In fact we all wish we could have such leanings.  We all wish that we could cut ourselves off financially, emotionally, and intellectually from those around us.  Our Libertarian friends believe this to be just what the doctor ordered.  Forget those banks or deadbeats who let us down.  It is their fault, let them suffer the consequences.  Well, unless you have been hiding your money in your mattress or are named Ted Kaczynski, you will probably see the error in this argument. 

“No man is an island,” as John Donne put it.[1]  This of course is a most unpleasant realization to people.  We like to think of ourselves as self-sufficient.[2]  We would like to believe this myth and we do adhere to it with a religious fervor.  We hold to the religion of self-sufficiency in our neighborhoods, our marriages, and even our churches.  When I was younger and at college, I found church much duller because I would go to church but never get involved.  It was never that I wasn’t a Christian, it was just that I didn’t care.

Apathy breeds apathy, and it is ironic that something that can only produce more of itself should be so prodigious.  It is also odd to see just how fired up people can become about apathy.  However, we must remember that apathy is a black hole and that even though nature is ambivalent towards a vacuum, human nature abhors it.  Structure and order are our gods.  Each age finds it in a new form and visage.  Long ago, it was Baal worship, then the work’s-based-righteous Christianity (which as much to say, not Christianity on our terms), and today it is the evolution without thought.  It is hard to say what it will be tomorrow.

Our politics is the same way.  When things go right, we complain that too many politicians get in the way.  When things go wrong, we are outraged that politicians didn’t get in the way.  Even on the individual scale, everyone is a libertarian, until bad things happen.  It is interesting just how many people decry everyone else’s government waste, but not their own.

I share the blame.  Mute to the impending doom in our shiny cities, like Roman edifices covered in marble, but built on inferior and temporary materials; I should’ve spoken against such evident crises.  This too is congratulatory.  We know the truth, why do we not follow it?  We know how to build happy places, why do we not care?  How many things would we nail to a cross, hoping against hope for a resurrection?  That is where the rules come in and the laws and the structure and the order.  We bury alive our humanity for the sake of happiness on own terms.  We are not even honest about the whole thing.  If you would deny God, and neighbor, and a moral law inside you that is one thing; but please, let us be honest about it.  Let us be joyful in our muck and mire; and not try and cover it up with fancy names and silly systems.

And so we are, like it or not, condemned to share a ship with people that we may find unpleasant; but we cannot say that their plight is not our own.

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[1] Unless you have seen “About a Boy.” Then the obvious answer is Jon bon Jovi.

[2] A comical lie on par with that the financial crisis was caused by other people and had nothing to do with ourselves.