Month: January 2013

  • Bodies are time machines

    Let me tell you about the most amazing person I know about.

    His name is Future Phil. 

    (No…not Phil of the Future. Different Phil.)

    Future Phil is awesome.  Future Phil does many extraordinary things, and he does them efficiently, in almost no time at all, and he does such a wide range of them.  Here are just a few.

    Future Phil reads books, starts them and finishes them in the same week, contemplates them and has no problem describing them later.  Future Phil never gets parking tickets or returns things late to the library.  He also keeps his car clean all the time, instead of having CDs and clothes and plates scattered all throughout it.  Future Phil doesn’t drink coffee late at night.  He cooks food that would make him sound awesome if he posted about it on facebook.  Future Phil doesn’t get irritated while he’s driving, ever.  Future Phil keeps his room clean and organized.  He rehabilitates his legs so that they are finally healthy.  Future Phil flosses.  He doesn’t get distracted while praying by his selfish darting thoughts. Also, he prays.  He catalogs everything he sees and does not drift idly by.  He talks to people he doesn’t know and doesn’t assume they will hate him.  Future Phil is a good friend who does things for people and doesn’t sink into hopes of great return.   

    Future Phil doesn’t screw up other people’s lives.   

    (Future Phil also gets a name change to Present Phil.) 

    Man. Future Phil sounds like such a great guy.

    I can’t wait to meet him.

  • If laughter were really tears

    I suppose this has to get done somehow or other.

    I am very confused about how to write about this because of it’s subject matter. It is about loneliness. And how does one write about loneliness, as though two people could experience it together? To experience true loneliness you cannot feel like you are connecting with someone.

    But I feel it must be addressed because it is so prevalent. Loneliness is everywhere. In people’s behaviors, in their faces, in your heart. It is one thing that people run from every day in one way or another.

    My 2012 itself was filled with many images of loneliness. Walking on train tracks in the middle of the night. A man in a mini-van slowed down next to me and asked me if I wanted to buy a bike for ten dollars. This on a very dark road amidst a sleeping city. In the summer I lay sprawled on the floor of a house in Michigan and didn’t move for some time. In the spring I rode my bike through night streets where music blared from houses swarming with people; I rode to a bar and looked through the window for someone who I knew was in another city, hoping they’d be there. One moment came when I was walking to a park near where I now live and I heard a woman ask a troupe of children following her ‘What makes that crunching noise?’ and in unison all the kids shouted ‘LEAVES!’ It broke my heart to hear. In the park I sat at a picnic table and read lying down and dogs came up to me and licked my face. I loved it but I sat up later and imagined the spatial location of every person I had ever known with respect to me in that park. I knew all the places they had gone meant they were learning so much and I wondered, how will they ever be able to convey it to me? Late at night in a car I gesticulated my hands wildly as I wanted to say something to someone but I didn’t know how to say it so I ended up not saying anything. I finished long books in coffee shops and closed them and left without saying a word to anyone. I drove to another city with a friend by miles of sunny farms as the thick night came on and we wandered the empty streets of the town in twilight.

    As much these images are images of some kind of loneliness, I do not think they are much representations of the true loneliness that humans experience. Being alone is not what primarily constitutes loneliness. It is a paltry reflection of the real thing, a mere trifle compared to the loneliness humans come to know. Being by oneself may make you feel lonely, a sort of sad desire for someone else, but this overlooks the fact that another person being in the room often does nothing to the problem. It may make us feel better, but if so we are so oblivious to what our loneliness actually is.

    I hope to find in the air of this empty room what I want to say; if I say it, I shall feel alone, if I don’t, just the same.

    Loneliness comes because you grow up only once, and because you cannot reach into the past, you can show nothing of its real quality in the present. Combined with the fact that things change, you will end up lost in the past in some way. Suppose one day while young you dug for treasure in your backyard with a friend. In this sole experience you have become something enormous: you have shown a draw to mystery, an effort to find, some level of perseverance for your eye on the prize. Your actions could be understood for decades on this action alone: the pursuit of a girl, an interest in genealogies, an insistence on finding a sock, the reading of long books, and so much else. It is this sole experience, that of the searcher for lost treasure, which etches that deep purposive image of the person’s soul. Suppose now, however, that the treasure hunter could somehow step into a world where everything were found; or at least, where no one ever cared to search for anything that was lost. There are two options: one, he can search for treasure anyway, in which case he will experience loneliness, or two, he can abandon looking for treasure, in which case he will be lonely too. There are no other options.

    The treasure hunter is thus lonely in his new world. Why? Because he knows there is a possible world – world A – in which treasure is sought and found, and everyone sees why, and that is what allows it to be sought and found. He knows this is a possible world because he has experienced it. It is thus in his imagination and spirit that he is lonely, and not in the room he is in. He knows lives in other worlds, the person he is with does not. Sometimes, however, the treasure hunter may grow so far remote, come to travel through so many new worlds, that he forgets about world A. Is he still lonely? Yes. He does not know he is lonely, but he is. And I feel that he will never truly feel known again without feeling that something is missing, a squinting look as he dimly smiles over the applause at his latest triumph that something has been lost.

    I think this isn’t quite right yet, though; for there is more than the mere possibility that a man forgets. It is intrinsic that the man forgets. For as a man enters a world where people do not understand Y even though the man loves Y, it is not that the man goes on knowing he loves Y and if only other people would let him he would do Y. For here people understand Z and so the man becomes and does some variant of Z. It is thus not possible to even know he loves Y himself, for he cannot do what is misunderstood, especially if it is some action involving other people who know and understand what Y is (like dancing). Thus as we get further and further away from the past, it slowly dissolves into a mysterious nothing. The man is thus lonely for himself. He is not even alone with Y; he is alone without Y. He had Y; he thus knows it is possible in the present without truly knowing if it is possible in the present. For the only present we truly know is possible is the actual one. Even as we think of the other possible presents, we think of them as a kind of forgetting, as a world the world itself has decided to ignore, and so we cannot truly ‘remember’; our memory (even in the present) is of the actual world. We remember from the outside in. A man without what he was is thus not only lonely for himself, he is – as each moment continues – lonely for his self who is lonely for himself.

    Think of the olympic athlete who went up on a high mountain on a remote island to train by a great master for their sport. For ten years they trained as no one has trained, so as to be the greatest ever, to ensure the most spectacular performance the world has seen. Upon returning, however, they find that the sport has been cancelled, and no one cares remotely about it anymore. This person is not only lonely to others for not seeing who they are in the present, they are lonely to themself for a past they will never know if they could have had. Others do not know how hard the olympian trained, the passion and will power they have for their sport; but the olympian does not know a life in which they came and conquered the olympics. It is thus not only that others do not know them; they also do not even know themself. But a present that erases the self they could have been means the person cannot even utter ‘I could have been X.’ They do not know if they could have been X. The only way to know would for the world to have gone differently. They are thus not only lonely to themself, they do not know if the self is there to be lonely to.

    If there is a great singer who loses their voice and then moves to be around entirely new people, they will be unknown. We have lost so many voices. Perhaps you will say ‘I was a great singer’ to someone, but that is not be seen; that is to be heard say what you see of yourself. And to be heard is not to be seen.

    But to put it all this way is in a way misleading. For to put it in terms of treasure hunting and singing makes it seem like if we found all new people and started treasure hunting and singing around them comfortably we would be known. But this ignores that our past is irrecoverable by the nature of itself, not just in what it contains. When you meet people when you are twenty all they know is that you are a second old; whatever effects from your past you can still produce in the present, you cannot produce the past.

    This doubles over the fact that we are not mere slices of time, that many facts about us cannot be rooted in an individual moment of our life, no matter at which point of it. There are facts about us which require not moment x, y, or q, but x-y-and-q-together. The quality ‘cowardice’ may take a split second as we turn and run in fear the moment we see the spider. But remember that we have put words on meaning so we can point to them, and that this leaves quite a few meanings unpointed to. So perhaps it is from one experience in life all the way down twists, turns, travails, tangles, tricks, and tussles that all of those experiences in a row are something in itself, a new meaning. I think this is in part why people write novels; there is a meaning they can’t say unless they say a lot of little meanings in a row. Thus the very specific quality of Rabbit Angstrom can’t be said somewhere else. Even if his meaning, the meaning of the novel which contains him, is that he despairs, prides himself, cheats, runs, returns, those meanings themselves reduplicated somewhere else always lose something, are always not Rabbit, are another meaning. And so it is with long-winded meanings in your life. Your present is thus always the creation of a new word. It is whatever word could be used to designate your life from start to the present moment. And at the end its meaning is sui generis, a meaning the only right answer to which could be given by the living of it.

    And yet – if a man is continually left behind, continually forgotten and re-invented – what is he at the end of life? A bundle of unspoken possibilities, impossible even to find if they could have ever been spoken? Lonely for pasts that left the man’s life a stutter that never formed into a word? Who is the man whose loves never take form?

     

    It should be evident from all this that there is no real individual: individuals come and go in relation to communities. Communities allow us to be this way or that, and encourage us to grow in ways that are perhaps alien to us. It is this ‘license of others’ that makes people form societies around all the weird things they like: star trek societies, cliff jumping societies, bell-ringer societies, hoola hoop societies, and every other random thing you can imagine. You find this rule over and over again for a truth, an activity, a pursuit: it is done together, or not at all. So many things in your life have you sacrificed in order to relate to others. You thus became more known, but not without a price of unknownness; we must even pay for our flight from loneliness with a whole new loneliness.

    This is in essence why I think pop culture exists. Pop culture is the easiest, most prevalent way to feel like we all know each other. That we all watch the same movies and listen to the same music makes us feel together in some way. And this is the reason why people act shocked when they find you have not experienced some facet of pop culture that they have. ‘You haven’t seen The Godfather?!’ ‘You don’t listen to The Beatles?!’ ‘You don’t know that commercial?!’ These are rhetorical devices used to try to convince you ’Do these activities, they are normal, they are what we all should do.’ And behind that is the idea: ’I don’t want to be alone. We should all do the same things so we can all be known.’

    That loneliness comes with the movement between communities perhaps makes the modern world a lonelier place usual. For the world is set up into high school – college – the real world, a planned transition of communities across the most important stages of your life. And the communities of the workplace, church, and home are all always changing because that is what happens. People leave. With the malleability of community comes sudden fluctuations in how known an individual is (as the change takes place), and across time, as they pass through more and more communities, people stretch into beings thin as ghosts.

    Everything I’ve talked about so far is on the macro-level, covering life transitions, the summation of experience over time, coming to know different people, habits, life-cultures, and the like. But this only refers to the loneliness of our lives from the top down, as though if we watched the film of our life across time someone could maybe get to know us. But what is true of the big pieces is even true of the small pieces.

    Every day is a frenzy of a spiritual activity within the mind. Even on days we do nothing, we are resting or becoming restless, becoming more loving or less loving, more known or less known, all while calmly commanding our self-pivoting location atop our small mass of obedient limbs.

    I think in this case the things that are most obvious are the things we notice the least. But the fact is that you are always in a state of radical spiritual change. Every moment is leaving such an imprint on you such that if you were to always be trying to weigh it, you would be overcome and would barely go or look anywhere. The typical solution is to only think about what meanings things have imprinted on us every few months, or perhaps every few years. One time I was driving on a road I’ve driven a thousand times and I turned my head to my left and saw a homeless person investigating a shopping cart filled with bags. Around this area there are a lot of homeless people, but this scene meant so much to me. It in that very tiny moment practically overwhelmed me. Just by turning my head to the left in that moment I had become more, my life a little bigger, a little vaster, a little harder to communicate. For then I thought, when I next see someone, am I going to mention this? What would I say? More likely I will see someone and start a conversation about something else and this won’t work into the logic of that conversation. There will be no reason to mention it. And perhaps the experience wouldn’t make sense to them based on who they think I am; their perception of it would be a misperception.

    We are thus always adding to ourselves, but it is always a smaller portion that is being added in the minds of others. Our life is a landscape expanding spiritually every second. But the only kind of map we have to give others – words – do not match the landscape. We thus become more and more unknown.

    I remember a moment from earlier this year where I was alone in my house brushing my teeth thinking about a friend of mine. He had done a lot that day and it must have been very fulfilling. He spent it with others and they must have had a good time. That was good. Meanwhile I stayed at home and didn’t really do anything. So: I’m not really ‘needed’. I was walking through the living room at this point and felt a sudden urge to do something objective in the world that would show I am needed. All these little things I do: read Updike, Kierkegaard, Wright, read Italian – no one needs those. I do those things for myself. So to be needed I have do something I don’t want to do, but will show others that people depend on me, and that they should depend on me too. I hit the kitchen and then realized the enormous draw of romance. In that case someone likes you: and all those silly little things you do ‘just for yourself’ – well, someone likes them. They like that you do those things even though they don’t need them. What an attractive concept – someone telling us exactly how we are is wonderful, for no particular reason.

    This struck me as a sort of explanatory concept. I could now understand why people are so romantically driven. They don’t want have to do things ‘the hard way’, where they have to go out of their way to show they are important. They want to keep about their business and feel that anyway.

    Within fifteen feet of walking space I had suddenly become inwardly disgusted with the idea of romance. So much spiritual land in such little physical space! And after that I went downstairs and went to bed, a very different person than the last time someone had seen me. But I haven’t talked to anyone about it since, because it is simply very hard to report yourself.

    I was rifling through old notebooks looking for something a few weeks ago and I found a note of mine from years ago. It was a note about a time I was walking along the street to class, always a time of deep meditation for me. All it said was that I stopped at a sidewalk corner and looked at the block behind me and realized how much my life had changed since the last sidewalk corner. Then I kept walking.

    The social world is in fact built on a host of precarious myths. To be friends with someone you have to pretend that as much happened to you in-between seeing each other didn’t actually happen. That you are, in some sense, the same person as the last time you saw them. To be friends with someone you have to forget all the lessons of object permanence you learn as an infant; you must forget that they have been other places, growing bigger, more private, more indescribable. Every time you leave a person’s presence your friendship begins quickly dying. Every interaction with them is thus subtle CPR; it might not seem that way, but when you see someone you haven’t seen in a long time and you perceive your friendship is dead, you can infer back to when that started, the last time you saw each other. It started the moment they walked out that door, the same way you leave your current friends as you part.

    To keep this myth of social connection going you can’t experience too much on your own and realize you’re doing it. Being social is a sort of agreement that you accept or you don’t. If you are a part of the agreement you are obligated to not become too big, something that you wouldn’t be able to relate to others. If you become too complicated or expansive, that breaks down the myth that we know each other, since you realize how much of you you haven’t gotten out, and you therefore have trouble buying into the myth of social unity. But we need the myth of social unity because we don’t want to be lonely, so we stay small enough to keep ourselves unaware of the distance between ourselves and others.

    An important part of believing you’re known is forgetting yourself; forget yourself and you’ll forget you’re unknown. You won’t even know the you that others don’t. Nights of insanity and hysteria, lying down to sleep thinking, forget, forget, wake up new.

    The better your memory, the more your loneliness.

    The odd part about all this is how one moment of connection with another person (which, because of our inwardness, is only a half-connection) becomes a part of our loneliness with respect to a third person. Each moment of creation – supposedly a fight against loneliness – is burying you with respect to everywhere and everyone else.

    How do we find ourselves in the midst of this? If we base our actions on others’ perceptions, we in some sense are basing who we are on others’ perceptions. And thus others’ perceptions of us slowly become our self-perception as well. But if others’ perceptions of us are mistaken, do we then end up with a mistaken self-perception? And if you have a mistaken perception of yourself, then you can’t even see yourself, and you must ask, is there anything really to see? The only way to be visible is to put yourself into the world, and putting yourself into the world slowly turns you invisible. What would a true life look like?

    We are beings that are given the capacity to feel great loneliness at the same time we feel no sense of self. What is it that is even alone? You just end up a fleeting feeling of loneliness, unable to dock itself to anything, a man who claims he’s lost but isn’t sure he was on his way anywhere.

    The present is a paradoxical and perplexing place. It seems at the same moment the oddest place to be and the only place we could possibly be. To be in the present you must in some way be immediately forgetting the moment before it. But that moment must in some way still be with you for the present to not be a place of total shock to you. We thus take much knowledge with us to something that is in fact an entirely new place, a moment never before here. But our knowledge of it is always partial, for it includes ourselves and others, things we hardly know. And its most deeply locked secrets are what it could have been; much of the world is lost by never happening. But it still radiates a spiritual intensity bright to ourselves, invisible to others, that we thus pretend is not even there at all; in this way we feel the absence of the present. The way the present by definition includes everything, but because it has been lost never even arrived. The silence of others and ourselves when we know there is so much to say and learn but we don’t know what; pauses are the awkwardness of the necessity of loneliness. That we are in a place we are not: the present wasn’t empty, it never arrived; our pregnancies do not end in miscarriages, but in realizations we never conceived. By being around others we continue to hope for what could never be true. To be a human is to be faced with ever-present questions we are unaware of and to hope for answers that will never come, because they do not exist.

    Whatever rules we come up with for living, they can’t be based on what the world really is, because we don’t know what the world really is.

    There have been three levels of loneliness so far: the macro-level, the micro-level, and then the social level of creation that happens in-between those. And how the middle-level influences the upward and downward levels such that we don’t really know what loneliness means anymore because we don’t know what we mean anymore. I feel like there are so many other senses of loneliness, but I honestly don’t know what words to say about them.

    We long to be known and create the next moment of the world together. Ever wonder what would finally be good if we fixed the big problems, the slavery, the hunger, the violence and wars? It would just be knowing each other. For even if all those problems were solved, none of the things I’ve mentioned would be taken care of. They are essential features of the world based on there being activities, communities, minds, and time. They vanish only in forgetting them, and that would only make you alone from yourself, for these things are what humans are.

    I know some people who don’t like talking about these things because they’re depressing, and they think we should spend our time trying to be happy. I guess I’m not really that interested in happiness. I think your goal should be to love truth and to love other people. If I was just happy, I wouldn’t be very happy. I feel bad because I feel like that’s a pretty annoying sentence to read. But it’s true. And that’s why I write this: I write because it’s true and because if you want to love people, you have to know how. And how can you know how to love people if you don’t know how lives work? I figure the more dimensions of life you know about the more you can love other people.

    It’s important to incorporate loneliness and unknowability into your relationships. The best way to see someone accurately is to know that you do not see them accurately. When they talk listen to a time where it feels like they left a lot unsaid. It’s crazy the amount of information we condense into a single sentence. Last week I overheard a man in a coffee shop say ‘I lived in northern California for two years’ and then move on in the conversation. He didn’t even talk about what he did there. And since we’re getting older, getting bigger, never slowing down, you’ll find that people do this all the time. They will say a single sentence and you’ll find it left so much unsaid, so much they’d say if we lived forever, if they thought words could take you there, if we weren’t so used to our loneliness. Take the image from that sentence and brand it into your heart about that person. They spoke only a sentence, but it spoke of something they love, a time you didn’t know them, a time that shows how deep they stretch in time and spirit, how they are alone before God, that their perception of the world is something you could never know.

    In some way each person must address the crisis of being alone, whether before God or by themself. Being before God does not do much to help loneliness. He can’t experience your thoughts any more than anyone else can; to think he could would be to assert that God is identical to yourself. Maybe he knows about them, but he is not alone with them in the same way you are. And in a way, if God is everywhere, you cannot be alone with him in the way you can be with another person. Another person can focus on only you; God is always with the seven other billion humans too.

    All this makes me think God isn’t even interested in the rescue of individuals (hence the unanswerability of the question, who am I?) as much as he is in the rescue of communities. Perhaps loneliness is something there had to be in order to create the possibility of community, of people trying hard to know and love each other, of sharing things amidst such chaos and confusion. We are lost in history; perhaps we are meant to be lost. Perhaps we will only be raised together.

    The human heart is the stage for the creation of the world; it is the place where you must face the steady stream of sensations that only you know about. God gave you being alone; will you still smile? Amidst unanswerable questions, will you still raise your hands? What of this world would you throw out? You were alone and are alone and either there is a God or not and what are you going to do in the place of you no one else can see?

    It is a deep joy and sadness to exist, all at once.

  • ‘Follow this turnpike on Twitter’

    Thoughts from the road.

    At the rest stop thought: A prisoner almost running into the president in the hallway saying ‘Pardon me’. 

    There should be fun fact signs on the side of the road to start people’s conversations. Lots of bored road trippers out there. ‘What? Blue fin tuna fish can swim 72 MPH? Dude, I wonder if we could get a tuna to race a cheetah.’

    Toll booths are like if you had to give a person money if they asked you for it as you walk by them on the street. You’re just walking by and they say ‘That will be five dollars’.  And you have to obey them because they’re wearing a meaningless vest and because someone’s holding a videocamera in your face. And because some stupid person out there sold them the sidewalk because they were stupid.

    You know how the race horses stampede out of the gate all nervously eyeing each other and trying to get the best position? I think coming out of toll booths is the closest humans get to what that feels like. 

    Road trips are like monopoly and the signs are like the cards. ‘Speed fines double’ ‘Adopt a highway!’ ‘Road Repairs’  Then the tolls are the luxury tax and you wind up at a hotel.

    But you don’t really make money on a road trip.  I guess it’s not really like monopoly.

    But there are free parking areas on the side of the road. If only they were playing by house rules.

    That bottom Pringle chip really takes a beating.

    No one talks about warming up to their activity as much as writers. ‘I turn off my phone and get out my pad and paper and sit by the window and I breathe. I can’t think of anything for awhile so I decide to make some coffee.  A crisp, Jamaican blend, with a dash of soy milk.’  You don’t hear football players saying ‘Then I put on my cleats. I can feel the game is going to be hard. But I stand up anyway. I turn off my cell phone. Can’t take calls during the game, you know.  Then I start walking, but I need some gatorade first. Lemon Lime flavor. I love that stuff.’

    Sign at rest area: ‘stp txting whle drvng – keep your thumbs on the wheel!’  Do they have any idea how hard it is to text with only your index fingers? Bad advice sign, bad advice.

    I think of cars with a headlight out as pirate cars.

    I wonder if the deer know about the deer crossing signs.  ‘Ok guys, starting from this sign we can cross for the next two miles. And don’t feel objectified by how awesome the leaping deer looks on the sign. You’re beautiful just the way you are.’

    Maybe it’s the deer that tell the city workers where to put the signs. ‘Yeah, right about here. We have a subdivision for about the next mile and then a school right after that. Two miles should be good.’

    I wonder if there were any deer lobbyists when they did the huge highway stimulus in the middle of the 20th century.  I mean, rather rude of us barging into their homes just like that.  Think if you groggily woke up scratching your butt in the morning on your way to the bathroom and then a horde of elk stampeded through the hallway between you and the bathroom.  It would seem pretty annoying. 

    I am sure there was some sympathetic soul who upon hearing the highway legislation in congress raised his hand to his chest and cried, ‘Oh deer’. 

    You didn’t think you had so many thoughts about deer. But then you take a road trip and you find out that there’s a lot of time to think.  

    Then I wanted to call someone to tell them all this but they didn’t pick up.  I thought, oh well, maybe I’ll just tell them later.  But then I thought maybe it will get to be too much later and I’ll start to forget it all and it will seem appropriate to talk about other things instead.  Maybe this part is one of those parts that’s just for me.

    I am still writing my reflections on 2012. I know, it’s late. Call me Tristram Shandy. I haven’t been busy enough to write them yet.