(A paraphrased version of a story told by Kierkegaard, set hundreds of years ago)
A theatre full of people catches fire. The only person who notices happens to be part of the act, a clown. The clown runs out on stage and yells to the people, the theatre is on fire, everyone needs to leave, etc. They laugh, and then shortly after burn to death.
This is how the world will end.
.
.
(A paraphrased excerpt from Faulkner's As I Lay Dying...)
It takes two people to be born, but only one people to die.
This is how the world will end.
.
.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Father's Day, 3 AM
The weight of the ever-present question mark is upon me this night.
The infinite regression of self-awareness that sometimes rears its head during idle thought, during reflective moments, is like a nameless void that consumes my conjectures, my assumptions, my very identity.
Existence itself seems to cry out for justification, then continues on anyway when I return its plea with a blank stare, with confused speech, with my own cry for meaning.
God has his hand on my shoulder, I know it. It is faint, but it is never ceasing, and some days I can't bring myself to turn around, to face duty and purpose, and I continue on anyway.
It is this night like many others that I beg for motivation, for feeling. For it is feeling that I lack; I know that which I must know, but knowledge is nothing without love, nothing without feeling.
I walk in this life sometimes apathetic and unthinking, not unforgiving or uncaring, but distracted. The other times I know- I know presently, and feel my knowledge extend backwards in time, yet it was not then that I thought this, it is now, and then I was distracted. What existence has this knowledge, and what claim do I have upon it, and what claim do I have that it makes a difference in relation to love? They say you must believe, they say you must know these things, and you are somehow different. I say, these things are there to be known, and you must act.
And yet action is so, so very difficult. The laws of inertia are like fascist grips upon my soul, upon my very being; I long to stay, to remain, to avoid that one thing in this life that cannot be avoided, change.
I love my daughter.
I love my daughter; she is a person.
I love my daughter, she is a person. A human being I will raise, a human being that will learn about this swirling ocean of chaos and madness we refer to as the human condition, more popularly as life. But what do I know? That which I have learned I have learned to regard with cynicism and skepticism. The reality of knowledge itself is like a hummingbird, there in such vivid beauty for only moments, then gone, and was it there? Yes. I must answer so.
The most sinister element of life, of us, is that the complications only show their ugly heads when sought after, and many, many people stare at reflections on the wall of a cave. But is it good? Is the vision of fire beautiful enough to warrant the headache and heartache that accompany it? Shadows cause the same, and perhaps to the chained the pain is as difficult; but how can I know, I only see superficiality.
God asks that we do what we must, what we can, and asks that we have the right attitude. My understanding is that a compassionate, understanding, and equally uncertain person is what humanity needs. I can only hope that I am right to think I should give her what I have. I can only hope that the beauty seeping through the cracks of this ugly wall that lies at the edge of my understanding will reveal itself to her. I can only hope that she understands what I understand, which is to say I hope she understands that which she cannot understand is necessarily so. The vast field of knowledge has no boundaries, only time and fatigue prevent us from going further. And so our life is staring out into the distance.
I love my daughter, and my duty is to strive to bring up a better woman than I am a man. So be it.
The weight of the question mark is heavy upon me.
The infinite regression of self-awareness that sometimes rears its head during idle thought, during reflective moments, is like a nameless void that consumes my conjectures, my assumptions, my very identity.
Existence itself seems to cry out for justification, then continues on anyway when I return its plea with a blank stare, with confused speech, with my own cry for meaning.
God has his hand on my shoulder, I know it. It is faint, but it is never ceasing, and some days I can't bring myself to turn around, to face duty and purpose, and I continue on anyway.
It is this night like many others that I beg for motivation, for feeling. For it is feeling that I lack; I know that which I must know, but knowledge is nothing without love, nothing without feeling.
I walk in this life sometimes apathetic and unthinking, not unforgiving or uncaring, but distracted. The other times I know- I know presently, and feel my knowledge extend backwards in time, yet it was not then that I thought this, it is now, and then I was distracted. What existence has this knowledge, and what claim do I have upon it, and what claim do I have that it makes a difference in relation to love? They say you must believe, they say you must know these things, and you are somehow different. I say, these things are there to be known, and you must act.
And yet action is so, so very difficult. The laws of inertia are like fascist grips upon my soul, upon my very being; I long to stay, to remain, to avoid that one thing in this life that cannot be avoided, change.
I love my daughter.
I love my daughter; she is a person.
I love my daughter, she is a person. A human being I will raise, a human being that will learn about this swirling ocean of chaos and madness we refer to as the human condition, more popularly as life. But what do I know? That which I have learned I have learned to regard with cynicism and skepticism. The reality of knowledge itself is like a hummingbird, there in such vivid beauty for only moments, then gone, and was it there? Yes. I must answer so.
The most sinister element of life, of us, is that the complications only show their ugly heads when sought after, and many, many people stare at reflections on the wall of a cave. But is it good? Is the vision of fire beautiful enough to warrant the headache and heartache that accompany it? Shadows cause the same, and perhaps to the chained the pain is as difficult; but how can I know, I only see superficiality.
God asks that we do what we must, what we can, and asks that we have the right attitude. My understanding is that a compassionate, understanding, and equally uncertain person is what humanity needs. I can only hope that I am right to think I should give her what I have. I can only hope that the beauty seeping through the cracks of this ugly wall that lies at the edge of my understanding will reveal itself to her. I can only hope that she understands what I understand, which is to say I hope she understands that which she cannot understand is necessarily so. The vast field of knowledge has no boundaries, only time and fatigue prevent us from going further. And so our life is staring out into the distance.
I love my daughter, and my duty is to strive to bring up a better woman than I am a man. So be it.
The weight of the question mark is heavy upon me.
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Dreams
They are peculiar things, dreams. Over the years I've had some pretty strange ones, and one can't help but be curious as to what they mean. If psychologists weren't so damn expensive, I'd probably have gone to see a few. It's hard to bring to mind many of the dreams that I remember remembering, if that makes sense, but here are a couple that I used to have quite often, reoccurring dreams I had for years.
In one, I wake up in my bedroom at my parents house, in the basement. Everyone else sleeps on the second floor, but somehow when I wake up I know that something terrible has happened. I explore the house only to find my family dead, and the deed done by some creature I could never really imagine, and never ended up visualizing. I would spend the rest of my dream trying to catch this thing and stop it, only to continue finding people dead. I'd end up in a small town a few miles away from my house, where I spent much of my waking life, with friends from the area, trying to find these monsters, and never catching up to them- only witnessing the death they leave in their wake. I wake up.
The second was much more simple, and shorter, and also varied a bit from time to time. The basic premise of the dream was that at the beginning I have figured out how to fly; it takes some sort of mental effort that makes sense in the dream, but that I could never explain. The first part of the dream was basically me flying, sometimes I'd be doing spectacular things like fighting crime or committing it, other times I'd be doing nothing in particular other than just flying around. But inevitably in these dreams I would lose the ability to fly, seemingly due to fatigue, but a fatigue I couldn't really understand. I would spend the rest of the dream trying to remember how I was doing it; running and jumping, falling on my face. People would come and go, puzzled at my behavior, and of course unbelieving when I tried to explain it. As a feeling of hopelessness crawled over me, it seemed to pull me out of sleep. There were many times in these dreams where I almost realized that I was dreaming, coming very close to lucid dreaming, but always falling short.
I have no idea what these dreams mean, but I find it interesting that these are the only dreams I have had on a reoccurring basis, and both dreams have a basic theme of futility. Ah well, maybe I'll never understand.
In one, I wake up in my bedroom at my parents house, in the basement. Everyone else sleeps on the second floor, but somehow when I wake up I know that something terrible has happened. I explore the house only to find my family dead, and the deed done by some creature I could never really imagine, and never ended up visualizing. I would spend the rest of my dream trying to catch this thing and stop it, only to continue finding people dead. I'd end up in a small town a few miles away from my house, where I spent much of my waking life, with friends from the area, trying to find these monsters, and never catching up to them- only witnessing the death they leave in their wake. I wake up.
The second was much more simple, and shorter, and also varied a bit from time to time. The basic premise of the dream was that at the beginning I have figured out how to fly; it takes some sort of mental effort that makes sense in the dream, but that I could never explain. The first part of the dream was basically me flying, sometimes I'd be doing spectacular things like fighting crime or committing it, other times I'd be doing nothing in particular other than just flying around. But inevitably in these dreams I would lose the ability to fly, seemingly due to fatigue, but a fatigue I couldn't really understand. I would spend the rest of the dream trying to remember how I was doing it; running and jumping, falling on my face. People would come and go, puzzled at my behavior, and of course unbelieving when I tried to explain it. As a feeling of hopelessness crawled over me, it seemed to pull me out of sleep. There were many times in these dreams where I almost realized that I was dreaming, coming very close to lucid dreaming, but always falling short.
I have no idea what these dreams mean, but I find it interesting that these are the only dreams I have had on a reoccurring basis, and both dreams have a basic theme of futility. Ah well, maybe I'll never understand.
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