have the nagging feeling that life is slipping me by even though i am productive, in the every day sense, that my actions have consequences for the ppl around me, even to people i have not met.
the sense that i do not have a life, that i do not matter, even though i kind of have a life and even without the sense of community nor with the closeknit friendships ive always had; i still go out several times a week.
this feeling must be based off the faulty illusion that we can “get it”, having achieved something, or experienced something, having it to keep forever. when in fact, even objects, which are the least objective of all, shift constantly, in imperceptible angles, adding up the way the butterfly wings kill entire weather patterns, though, the metaphor is more poetic than actual since complex systems can be expressed in tipping points graphically but not that is not equivalent to being instigated solely by such tiny singularities.
most of all though, what we have is memory. bergson in matter and memory hit the nail on the head — that ontology isnt so much about an experience but a hall of mirrors — experientially echoing in infinite recursion, each recall degrading in imperceptibly, adding up the way butterfly wings shift wind patterns, though, the insect is more poetic than aural, more whimsical than solid, more illusionary than alive… much like that cat of mr. schrodinger’s
i dont think my push to be alive!(tm) could be more actual, although it certainly could be more dramatic. there can’t be more hours in the day. and to be honest i kind of do hate going out. i also love to sleep. look forward to it throughout the day, only to stay up late at night like now.
one of the realisations that LSD gave emily dickinson was that the infinite singularity of the ALL could be found even in a closed space, in the non-all of her room in Amherst. yes, even in Amherst could butterfly wings penetrate walls, and having felt that insect from halfway around the world, she found she could witness it in all things. in the early church calls of the morning or the rocket symphony of a good and tender wine or the heavy walking beats of the bee gees. look at her poetry– YOU KNOW SHE SAW THE MARK OF BUTTERFLIES IN HYPHENS AND ELLIPSES TRAILING OFF THE PAGE IN RHAPSODIC SPLENDOR
so perhaps i need to get out more, or perhaps not. at this point, one life would interfere with another, and together they would not enrich one another. i think at this plateau, they offer the same experience, so i should just choose one and concentrate on that.
but they really dont —
i am mistaking syntagma for paradigms. it’s my mistake, and a common one. formal equivalence is not the same as ontological difference…. that difference being identity, and that kind of paradigmatic difference is what distinguishes a particular woman as soul mate rather than as just another stranger.
of course that’s the sadness about formal reductionisms, that classification at the level of meta promotes the illusion that we can be a soul mate to each and any, every and all– when in fact, to be soul mate is a completely different thing, from one soul to the next.
and of course, our human limitation will not allow us to swallow the whole ocean with our tiny little cups. in pouring more & more & MORE &MORE!, we lose what we have. that’s clear from chuang tzu, perhaps why emily stayed in her room, so as to not lose wings (even if she was only seeing her own pattern strewn across all her furniture and things).
so we seek butterflies out through formal equivalence, rather than gaining a unique deployment with each instance. perhaps this is a facet of a short-cut in cognition, to build patterns and build experience from within familiar patterns. yet we’ve each come across in ourselves and in others, a recognition that experience can be defined solely by patterns we see, when we rely on our syntagasms rather than on the uniqueness of each moment.
yet similiarly to grasp each moment as a uniqueness lends itself to another reductionism, that this can be grasped and is a thing to itself, like the last thing in itself… and this produces another syntagmasm, a meta map for experience that contains each and every, a freshness– so that we insist on finding a novelty in each moment, forcing a short sightedness. we forget to see the entire jet stream and only see butterflys flapping. not so bad, but then why walk with your head down, each foot swinging out. and walk into a pole? or wall? or another charles?
perhaps i am kidding myself. that there is a direction there, and that we can dictate how we surf. but if your walking feet don’t hypnotize then is it possible to see the moon as seperate from the finger pointing at it? bruce lee seemed to think so, and he had great balance though he did die young.
i am rejected, am rebuked, forced back, into the same position i was before, when i started writing this damned thing. yet now feels slightly different, degraded, altered, imperceptibly by me? by time? by metabolism? hallelujah! progress? or is this just another remix for the new year?
heidigger wrote that death encapsulates meaning, a life. that right before one died, when one was dying, then one could be most complete. and having an end point, knowing it’s lurking there, lets us wrap ourselves in meaning, and bring finality to what we do/did, a beauty that when standing on the hill, we can grasp, a beauty which might be lost if we lived for too many 10,000 years. perhaps making bruce a hero too, than if he passed on in bed, an old man filled with regret, living in the past.
so if he was right, with this “a life” we can have meaning, but meaning then, can only be individual, a prior-ity given to prioritize against all other possibilities, potentialities and signifieds… each and every, any and all vectors. that if individual then that precludes the possibility of universal meaning, even if meaning can be shared by the group, by societies, it cannot exist without “a life” and cannot persist without death. bruce’s fingering the moon is the moon to bruce, not to us. then how can the universe not end? how can it not be, unless its meaning was completely inhuman, beyond human and not-human ever at all?
which it obviously is, the way an ant colony understands one things, and ice cubes grasp another, completely foreign actualization.
that we should ride, like a gigantic purple moon over a crazy ocean made of foaming milk and styrofoam, that walt witman with his opium face should preside over an archway of marble halls in deafening revolution be how we find our place — like a daisy on a battlefield — this is spectacular, and betrays our ant colony mentality. but perhaps this is not a weakness at all; that our heads should be bowed when walking. but a strength, a persistence, that happiness is good health and a bad memory, so said the famous addict ingrid bergman, in her shadowy eyes — that one of the so called greatest movies could be just a torrid affair between an older man and a younger woman. that there isnt anything sublime about love, or our role in society, our conflict with the iron will of others…. like a badly painted wall we thinly veil our intentions and let our patterns tell us how to feel.
and can we hope or fear that and each passing moment might penetrate our blindless like a strangely seen roman empire superimposed on los angeles so tormenting horselover fat because only he can step out of that pattern and witness pinkly winking lights, children who fortell of the future, living among tapes, wires, and recorders and dying before the end of the world to the horror of those who hang onto prophecy but freeing us for perspicacity of having a second chance, that death is each moment and in our grasp a creation for each, that even when we hang onto a crystal ball, then can we desire its silence to free us from delphi, free us from expectations, from our patterns, from ourselves…
