lights in the
trees,
white
in a violet
sky.
see it
beautiful
and meaningless.
eyes can't feed
the heart.
it takes a
kind of
love
at least.
another heart
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Sunday, July 18, 2010
The Animal in the Mirror
Would you rather be disliked for who you are, or liked for who you aren't?
What if your Eden had to be yours alone? Would an incomplete perfection be better than a complete imperfection? --Are you happy by yourself?
How much do we need each other? How much do we need to be understood? Aren't we only understood by an other? Plenty of people would have us believe that humans are really only animals, with only animal drives, animal needs. But animals don't seek meaning. Humans desire to be known, to be understood. Our hungers go far beyond food and sex--our sustenance comes from contact with each other; we reproduce ideas and dreams.
And yet some people are so hard to be around. We should try harder, for the sake of each other. Because, so far, we're really all we've got.
(but if we're a step beyond the animal, might there not be a step beyond the human? Why should it all stop with us? What is out there in the void, waiting to be born?)
What if your Eden had to be yours alone? Would an incomplete perfection be better than a complete imperfection? --Are you happy by yourself?
How much do we need each other? How much do we need to be understood? Aren't we only understood by an other? Plenty of people would have us believe that humans are really only animals, with only animal drives, animal needs. But animals don't seek meaning. Humans desire to be known, to be understood. Our hungers go far beyond food and sex--our sustenance comes from contact with each other; we reproduce ideas and dreams.
And yet some people are so hard to be around. We should try harder, for the sake of each other. Because, so far, we're really all we've got.
(but if we're a step beyond the animal, might there not be a step beyond the human? Why should it all stop with us? What is out there in the void, waiting to be born?)
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Smells LIke Self Expression
I've been reading the book Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream by Jay Stevens, and at one point, trying to explain the social forces active in the 60's, he writes "Strip away the decade's thick impasto of sex, drugs, rebellion, politics, music, and art, and what you find is a restless imperative to change, a 'will to change,' if you will, and one that could be as explanatory for the latter half of this century as Nietzsche's 'will to power' was for the first." Change was the zeitgeist. This made me wonder what we might consider the imperative is for us now, ten years into a new millennium. Perhaps we might say that it is the "will to express."
The most vital trends I see in our culture, and perhaps the entire globe's culture, for we are quite intertwined, all seem to involve self expression. Facebook, blogs, podcasts--social media, in toto, is about self expression. It is about sharing your interests, your passions, your opinions and ideas with others. It is a way of trying to rise above the faceless fray, of asserting your individuality, of connecting with others in a meaningful way. One could perhaps say that the "will to connect" better describes our era, but what is connection without understanding? Without mutual recognition? We need meaning, and the meaning of "me" is found in how I express myself.
In my first post I made joke of what I considered the rampant strain of narcissism running through the American psyche. And indeed there are plenty of people who, already believing that they are oh-so precious, subject the rest of us to what surely is proof of this. Reality TV survives on these people and their self-drama. But this is just a slightly pathological version of what even the most humble of us feels (which I made joke of in my second post). We want to be understood. We want to be recognized. We want significance. We want a world that has meaning so that our lives will have meaning.
Maybe, then, that's what this all really comes down to--a need to understand the universe and our place in it. Since Mr. Stevens mentioned Nietzsche in his quote above, let's bring in something else that Friedrich said: "God is dead." What he meant by that was that the time of mythologies, taken on faith, had passed. That we were in a new age (led by the then relatively new thing called science, which would play such a significant part in that 20th century will to power) that demanded evidence. Sadly, it was only empirical evidence that was accepted, and God isn't going to be found with a telescope or a gas spectrograph. So God died and left us alone. Alone with our drive for power and its subsequent world wars and environmental degradation.
But if there is a bright side to all of this, it is that we learn and grow and just maybe this "will to expression" is a reflection of our disillusionment with power. Maybe we are reaching out to each other to rediscover what was lost in our vicious turn away from the good, the true, and the beautiful. Nietzsche never meant that God, or if you prefer, Spirit, had died, only our notion of God as a personified parent figure. And evidence can reveal Spirit, just not empirical evidence--meaning evidence that can be gathered by the five senses or their extension. Just as mind transcends the physical, spirit transcends mind. Mind is the physical plus something more, spirit is mind (including the physical--it is taken up as a component, embraced) plus a new something more. The evidence for spirit, then, needs to be established intersubjectively--between two subjects, like you and me, because it is only through us that this transcendent something (Spirit) can be known. It can't be known merely through the physical, because the physical is only a component of it. All of nature is in Spirit, but not all of Spirit is in nature. Because it is nature plus something more, something transcendent to the physical.
Which is all to say that reality TV may just be a manifestation of our hunger for meaning. In celebrating ourselves, in sharing ourselves with each other, we may be chasing the transcendent. We may all be blogging Spirit into our lives. We may be seing people's evolution from role identities, where the person defines himself by his place in his society, to an ego identity, where the person is first and foremost an individual with his own agency, free to define himself however he chooses. And from there further development beyond the ego, beyond the personal, even. Today's "look at me" culture may be a slight detour on the road toward the infinite. Toward our true identity. All little gods, coming home.
The most vital trends I see in our culture, and perhaps the entire globe's culture, for we are quite intertwined, all seem to involve self expression. Facebook, blogs, podcasts--social media, in toto, is about self expression. It is about sharing your interests, your passions, your opinions and ideas with others. It is a way of trying to rise above the faceless fray, of asserting your individuality, of connecting with others in a meaningful way. One could perhaps say that the "will to connect" better describes our era, but what is connection without understanding? Without mutual recognition? We need meaning, and the meaning of "me" is found in how I express myself.
In my first post I made joke of what I considered the rampant strain of narcissism running through the American psyche. And indeed there are plenty of people who, already believing that they are oh-so precious, subject the rest of us to what surely is proof of this. Reality TV survives on these people and their self-drama. But this is just a slightly pathological version of what even the most humble of us feels (which I made joke of in my second post). We want to be understood. We want to be recognized. We want significance. We want a world that has meaning so that our lives will have meaning.
Maybe, then, that's what this all really comes down to--a need to understand the universe and our place in it. Since Mr. Stevens mentioned Nietzsche in his quote above, let's bring in something else that Friedrich said: "God is dead." What he meant by that was that the time of mythologies, taken on faith, had passed. That we were in a new age (led by the then relatively new thing called science, which would play such a significant part in that 20th century will to power) that demanded evidence. Sadly, it was only empirical evidence that was accepted, and God isn't going to be found with a telescope or a gas spectrograph. So God died and left us alone. Alone with our drive for power and its subsequent world wars and environmental degradation.
But if there is a bright side to all of this, it is that we learn and grow and just maybe this "will to expression" is a reflection of our disillusionment with power. Maybe we are reaching out to each other to rediscover what was lost in our vicious turn away from the good, the true, and the beautiful. Nietzsche never meant that God, or if you prefer, Spirit, had died, only our notion of God as a personified parent figure. And evidence can reveal Spirit, just not empirical evidence--meaning evidence that can be gathered by the five senses or their extension. Just as mind transcends the physical, spirit transcends mind. Mind is the physical plus something more, spirit is mind (including the physical--it is taken up as a component, embraced) plus a new something more. The evidence for spirit, then, needs to be established intersubjectively--between two subjects, like you and me, because it is only through us that this transcendent something (Spirit) can be known. It can't be known merely through the physical, because the physical is only a component of it. All of nature is in Spirit, but not all of Spirit is in nature. Because it is nature plus something more, something transcendent to the physical.
Which is all to say that reality TV may just be a manifestation of our hunger for meaning. In celebrating ourselves, in sharing ourselves with each other, we may be chasing the transcendent. We may all be blogging Spirit into our lives. We may be seing people's evolution from role identities, where the person defines himself by his place in his society, to an ego identity, where the person is first and foremost an individual with his own agency, free to define himself however he chooses. And from there further development beyond the ego, beyond the personal, even. Today's "look at me" culture may be a slight detour on the road toward the infinite. Toward our true identity. All little gods, coming home.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Here's a picture I found on flickr of the Verde River. My friends and I canoe this sometimes (the picture under my profile is of me on the Verde several years ago), and I've gone by this spot before. Bald eagles nest in this area, and because of this it is protected. One time we forgot where we were and got out of our canoes around this spot, and sure enough a helicopter quickly showed up to keep us from pillaging bald eagle scalps.
Me All The Time
Disregard that last post about these things being for narcissists. I'm one post in and drunk with the glory of my own ideas and their (potentially) world wide dissemination. This is great, bring it on. There is no zeal like the zeal of the newly converted. Hello world, this is me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)