Philosophy, again

Knee-deep in words right now.  Research papers at night and speeches all day.  It's extraordinary to see the suspension of disbelief which some students have, jarringly contrasted to the iron-clad prison of ideology to which other students chain themselves.

My favorite moment of the day came after a student presented his speech on Nietzsche, and another student said, "wow, he was pretty hopeful, huh?"  Now THAT is what I'm talking about.  Nietzsche was hopeful?  Yes!  He was!  He was an idealist!  He saw the potential of humankind and held out hope for anyone to be enlightened at any time (even though he recognized that most people are stupid and greedy and don't want to think and move like herd animals).  BUT ... this presenter didn't approach Nietzsche as a god-hating misanthrope.  He talked almost exclusively about The Birth of Tragedy and how art and music transcend the dreary bullshit in life and elevate people to something ... beyond.  He talked about the intoxication (which no one but me seemed to notice) that music and art can induce.  And while this kid was speaking ... he believed in it.  And even though I was already a believer in Nietzsche on every level, he made me love this profound German, syphilitic, church-bashing, misunderstood thinker even more for a while.

All I want to do is induce reciprocal learning.  I realize that notion may sound naive or nerdy or whatever, but I don't really care.  Teaching should be transcendent every single day.  No joke.  Even if that transcendency (a word?) is only for a little while (55 minutes to be exact), it's worth my time and effort.  Always.

As a side note, even though a handful of the papers I've read tried to tell me that their philosopher was a hypocrite or failed or sucked in general, I know the incredible impact these philosophers have made on society.  If the works speak to people, who cares if the writer achieved his or her goals?  (Except for Ben Franklin who I increasingly hate every time I hear anything about his life - so he's off the list in the future.)  Their brilliance is in identifying the fundamental struggles we all face.  And those of us who live in the intellectual realm every day understand the importance of expressing our ideology, even if we can't reach our own ideological bar.

I can still try.   I can still contemplate.  I can still live out my version of the struggle.  Life is good.

Philosophy: The Breakfast Cereal

I fucking love philosophy.  Does that make me weird?  Probably.  Is it additionally weird that I love the darkest of the philosophers like Nietzsche and Kafka and Sartre and Camus and Vonnegut and Thompson and Orwell and Pessoa and Morrissey?

I don't care!!  Fornication with odd ideas is a good strategy - no strings attached.  I can read about all these different ideologies without prejudice and learn about misanthropy and idealism and happiness and morbidity and failure and introspection and the cold and broken hallelujah.  And in doing so, I can feel a solidarity with all those feelings without feeling too alone or too crazy, because other intellectual people share both my bliss and my neuroses.  It's comforting, even when it's disturbing.  If Nietzsche, a guy who was dealing with tertiary syphilis and the utter betrayal of those closest to him, could declare at the end of his life that:  “The most spiritual men, as the strongest, find their happiness where others would find their destruction: in the labyrinth, in hardness against themselves and others, in experiments. Their joy is self-conquest: asceticism becomes in them nature, need, and instinct. Difficult tasks are a privilege to them; to play with burdens that crush others, a recreation. Knowledge-a form of asceticism. They are the most venerable kind of man: that does not preclude their being the most cheerful and the kindliest ” -
well, then I can handle my personal shit.

So when Morrissey occasionally reminds me that "time's tide with smother you" - it makes me more ready for the suffocation of life, because I remember not only his sweet voice, but also the idea that all the shit that happens in life IS smothering me.  I just have to find a way to breathe.  And when I can't find a way to breathe anymore ... well, I'll be done with it all.  Camus will finally be speaking a truth about suicide which I can celebrate.  Even though he couldn't follow through with the ultimate exit, that doesn't mean it's impossible or even implausible for other people who are at the end of their road.  I suppose it you're still alive, you're not yet at the end of your road.

Maybe all of us bleak thinkers are simply idealists, drowning in the shit of humanity.  We see the potential, and then we see people not living up to that potential.  That's a crushing weight to bear.  As Salinger so aptly said, we're all a bunch of goddamn phonies.  The worst part is that we KNOW we are, but we just can't help it.  And us idealists are just like, "really?  Ya fuckers?  Is this what's happening?"  And yep.  People are still doing their shitty, mean, acts every day.  To themselves and to other people.

But I want to believe.  I see your guns and bombs and insults, and I raise you with truth and respect and tolerance.  Get it together, people.

Let me leave you with another idealist, mr e e cummings:

“Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it's there and sitting down

on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity

i hate you”

Photos on an Appliance - No Substitute for Life

“We think in generalities, but we live in detail.”  Alfred North Whitehead. 

Everybody thinks; some of us just do it more than others.  One of the things people are encouraged to think about is what they want from life.  According to many psychologists, one of the ways to achieve our goals is to visualize them - imagine ourselves doing the things we want to do or being in the places we want to be. 

I visualize these things every day.  I daydream about the alternate versions of my life and imagine ways I could change the toxic pieces which hamper my happiness.  Many years ago, I started using my refrigerator as Ground Zero for my visualizations.  Whenever I found a picture of Tuscany or California beaches or resorts in Thailand or even just of beautiful flowers, I taped them to my refrigerator.  Inspirational quotes about change and happiness made an appearance too.  Words have power, right?  The right phrase is a motivational tool, yes?

No.

Yesterday, I accidentally ripped one of them, so I took it off.  But as the whole surface of the refrigerator was basically a collage, others causally ripped too.  Then I noticed that not only were the pictures frayed, they were dirty –  and underneath the pictures, the fridge itself was pretty dirty, because (and this part is what killed me) some of those pictures have been taped to my refrigerator for like five years.  No exaggeration.  And I haven’t been to any of those places.  And I am not inspired by those sayings.  They actually kind of make me feel bad about myself, because I can’t do those things. 

So I ripped them all off.   And then I spent an hour or more scrubbing the outside of the refrigerator to clean off the gunk.  I had to take a razor blade to scrape off the tape, because it had been there so long.  It was probably a little manic of me to tear it all off and attack it with a razor, but at what point do we just forget the dreams and succumb to the mundane elements of life?  As it turns out, dreaming about things just makes me sad.  So now my fridge is clean, and I can see the surface for the first time in several years.   I like it better this way.  While it may have had character (I don’t know; it might have just looked tacky), it certainly wasn’t changing my life or anything.  I like the starkness of it now; it’s not pretending to be something it isn’t, which is a lesson I need to learn for myself.

I Used to Be a Tree

Once upon a time, I walked like a tree.  I was upright and strong.  The sun made me powerful and glorious.  (I swear to god, it did.)  And then something happened.  I woke up one day and I was bent over - hunched into a terrible version of my sun-bathed and sun-drenched former self.  I have gone from a relaxed, fun, spontaneous girl to a tense, fun-sucking, pre-planned robot.  I hate this version of myself.  If I met myself today, I'd excuse myself to leave and talk to other people.

I walk around in a permanent muscles-clenched state of partial psychosis, I swear to god.  It's kind of ridiculous.  I don't want to, you must believe me.  I don't want to be tense and unhappy and neurotic - it's just that I don't know how to stop it.   I don't know how to hand over the keys to god or whatever and stop worrying about all the stupid, trivial shit in life.

The thing is, I don't think the "shit" is "trivial".  I feel like everything matters somehow, and it makes me so sad that I can't make it better.  I will use my exact current circumstances as an example:  I am sitting at my kitchen table alternately writing this blog entry and reading the New York Times.  My children are off on childhood expeditions of one kind or another.  My husband (who is usually not home) is sitting in his bedroom not talking to me.  My life is solitary.  Those "little" things make for a very lonely existence.  When I have no one to share my life with, I am tense and strung out and deluded.

---

I just stopped writing for a while and stared at a candle on my table   What is the use of all this?  What a waste of my time.