December 6, 2010

• Snow falls

  He wrote a book on how to be a successful author, but no one bought it.

  Everyone who disagrees with doing philosophy disagrees for philosophical reasons.

  The man had rushed to the book with vigor, but as he sat his head drooped over the text; it was a long, tedious work, and the answer he had so desperately thought it would provide was never on the next page.  

  I am not living with a sufficient level of honesty; which is to say, I am not living at all.

  Humans hate one another.  They see certain people, and they don’t care for the rules any longer; that person must die.  The narrowing of eyes, scoffing when heads are turned, leering and peering – what a disastrous mistake, that this person got let into reality.  It is a consuming hatred, one that burns within.  This is one of the things that humans can feel; we must take a note, and not forget it.   

  Hearing about other people’s lives is like reading fiction; we consider the characters objectively, not like we would analyze ourselves. 

  Life – such a narrow escape through the clutches of nature!  We are like a thief, bolting around each next corner as we are chased by the authorities.  What are a marvel and a miracle that we are alive.

  The snow falls gently, no rush, we shall coat the earth eventually.  It is a very calming effect.  What have we ever worried about?  Ahhhh.  

  Winter: the season of ”what a beautiful day inside it is today!”

  What do I want to remember?  Such random things become the montage of our lives.  Why did I remember him saying that thing? 

  Fiction is very misleading because we see all the lines, and know that what happens next is already there, we just have to get to it.  But the future is very different from that, much blacker, much scarier; we live at the cusp of reality, always scything our way one stroke at a time into the darkness, from the created into the uncreated, filling out reality’s edges, finding how it is the story goes. 

  You may think that it is inside who the man truly is.  But if he does not act it on the outside, what does it matter that it is inside?  How can the inside be what a man truly is?  However, if it would get lost, if action cannot say who we are, maybe we are just inside.  Maybe we are just created, as what we know ourselves to be, but we never get put on display. 

  So are we secrets or not?

  A secret is something only one person knows.  You can never tell another person a secret; the telling undoes its secrecy.

  To be something only you can see, what a marvelous thing that would be.  Would that not be beautiful?  If you were God, would you give people lives?  Would it not feel wonderful to say to someone, “Here. Here you go, this is for you.  You.”  The speaking of ‘You’, that is the gift.

  Marriage, that is the giving of something to someone from what already Is – your life.  But to make you at all is to make from what is Not into what Is. 

  Are we made by our circumstances?  Some people may think we are determined, the world is set up already: there are buildings here, and a system in place, and that’s how you become who you are.  But what if there were lots of ways you could respond to your circumstances, to this system, to this place?  Maybe there were lots of roads, and you picked a specific one; we are quite underdetermined by our circumstances.

  Seasons shine different sorts of spotlights on people, revealing their chameleonic glows; they are magical in the summer, that girl at the carnival that seems so special, the beauty of summer nights, how you never want it to end.  The winter spotlight makes people seem peculiarly alive; their opaque breath shows how they are a drastic invasion into the still and silent scenery of snow and icicles. 

  I want to be alive.  I want to find the unexpected.  Children have such a greater capacity for life.  We shrink it down down down until we don’t know what to do.  We just think about it all the time, but in that way thinking is not a power.  Thinking becomes a magnetic force, one that will always hold you down to thinking about the you you will never be. 

  We live in a fog, unless we act.  If you don’t see it through you will never see at all.

  There are two extremes of people, those who are sickly and soberly logical, and those that die to be alive, who are full of passion and emotion.  I prefer the latter to the former.

  What is a story?  How do people talk?  What is the unexpected?  Is it more internal, or more things that happen that we don’t control, and how characters respond to that?  Characters – what kind of humans are there? for those are the characters. 

  This is all abstract.  You know the details of your life, I never will. 

  We do wish for certain shapes of life, that people would say certain things, be certain ways, and we would get really happy, because then we could respond the way we always wanted to.  But this makes a good situation in reverse; you can try to say the things and be the way that will allow other people to break out into who they always wanted to be. 

  It’s a very hard thing to draw the stories out of someone.  You have to say just the thing that will make them recall it; otherwise, they will not think of it, and then they won’t tell it to you.

  The snow falls, how gentle, how inspiring; I couldn’t have painted this reality.  From the Not into the Is.  How interesting and difficult it is to be a human, and yet to watch this wintry world washes all this worry away.

  • 4:53 am
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