Oops

I had a post congratulating myself for 500 posts, but I have since realized that 95 of those posts were drafts. So really this is the 450th published post.

I feel pretty stupid for nit-picking over such things but for some reason I feel compelled to publish.

Some of us become pretty anxious about fixing pretty trivial errors that everyone (and the relentless march of history, and the cold churnings of the cosmos) will soon forget, or never notice in the first place.

More on Desire

Desire can be directed at a seemingly unlimited array of objects, but that array is artificially shortened by the preferences of the dominant culture: in this era, through the means of mass media. So desire is partially socially directed. 

Of course, one could desire to be free of the culture that values a limited array of desires that have lost their luster. Though such a desire runs the danger of never being fulfilled. 

I'm not so sure the Buddhist prescription of denying oneself desire is appropriate in this age. Those ideas were formed in another time, though I doubt I fully understand the deeper philosophy. And the philosophy itself seems so malleable that one can shape it to assist one's own purposes in a completely different context.  Besides I'm not so sure desire itself is so problematic, only when it is directed at unfulfillable or destructive objectives. 

One should be able to decouple one's own desires from one's own person and be able to honestly asses the merits and implications of such desires. Above all one should remain flexible with one's own motivations. Easier said than done certainly. But worth a try. 

Something to Say Somewhere Like Facebook

Learning to multitask by taking a shit and playing guitar at the same time.

Concerns from a Borderline Schizoid

It is very easy to hurt people. Perhaps in moments of thoughtlessness, we roll over the metaphorical toes of our peers simply by over-assertion of our opinions and dispositions. Take an individual dedicated to a strict schedule and a crystalline and linear conversational style and put that person in a room with another individual that may be scatter-brained, meandering, and genuinely unconcerned with structure of any kind and watch the tensions build.

As the room grows crowded, one begins to tuck in one's elbows to resist collision, yet the possibility remains of accidentally bumping into someone regardless of the precautions taken.  

The mere occupation of space becomes the displacement of someone else who could very well possess a just claim to that same space. I myself have found myself wishing I didn't have to take up any space at all. Extension can be so painful when one collides with others.

But then a paradox arises. That very environment you find yourself in often desires your engagement. People want to know you and - in an ironic twist - can be quite hurt when you refuse to engage. The more you diminish yourself out of fear that your positive presence may hurt another, the more you deprive those who wish to know you their points of interface.

Our social space seems to behave like our physical space. We see forces of attraction and repulsion and the strange turbulence that can arise from the resulting contradictions.

Hamlet understood that the more one over-analyzed the situation, the more paralyzed one would become when it came to action in regards to the situation ("to be or not to be" and such things). Well, he understood it perhaps too late and then everyone died! Certainly not the best solution to contemplate at the moment.

Biology can point to the beginning of a solution. Or less of a solution and more of a point of simple blind progress: living things grow rudders - fins, limbs, antennae, etc. - in order to navigate the physical world. Where are our social rudders? Does simply thinking about such matters help to chisel them out?

Yes, the era of the individual is over. This is the era of the social.

With a Sigh

The thing about desire is that it seems to be unlimited in its manifestations: it is activated upon every beautiful sight. And it has to be suppressed...more so in proportion to the amount of resources one lacks to fulfill it.

And us superfluous folk have to fight over its remains. And thus the daily cruelty that constitutes our social lives is explained.

Old Pictures Cont'd

For some, looking through old pictures is incredibly intoxicating and pleasurable. Nostalgia can envelope one in a warmth through remembrance. We do tend to discard the bad memories or at least dull them. And the good ones light up again somewhere in there.

But many times, what these old pictures remind me of is the soft violence with which we are torn from our loved ones and deposited into various pockets of material and social isolation to serve Capital. This drift and this deadness in my chest... I think of communities born out of displacement only to slowly dissolve once again, their constituents wandering, waiting to take root and make connections that are to be broken once again.

One misses everyone at once. One begins to entertain fantasies of a golden community reformed spontaneously out of all one's favorite acquaintances, family, friends, and other loved ones. Perhaps these sorts of naive fantasies form the basis of multiple cultures' conceptions of heaven and utopia. The accumulation of the Good.

Another night of wine and silly old man thoughts coming out of the head of a young adult. Dreaming of a mythical time in which "everything was beautiful and nothing hurt."

Let's Flood the Place with Guns

Another shooting. Another popping gasket in the machine.

There's great pain in being separated from the ones we love. Especially with the understanding they're not coming back.

I wonder how it feels to get shot. Pain itself must be the subjective experience of a community within us separating. A spear of metal wedges apart cells and they shout an electric "no" upon being divided, their peers removed from a collective living vessel of animated matter. Each of us a civilization consisting of civilizations. And we gather as individuals in civilizations to survive.

This one is old and weak. Each mass murderer a slow motion thread tearing in the fabric, removing other threads in the wake of its destruction...a loss of clustered integrity.

The Greeks knew their tragedy through their plays. We sense ours when we turn on the TV...if vaguely.

The curious thing about the tragedy as an art form was that certain thinkers saw it as both an end and a beginning...perhaps that strange paradoxical point at which the snake eats its tail. Nietzsche saw it as the offspring of the Apollonian and  Dionysian forces: the forces of light, form, and reason versus the forces of darkness, intoxication, and the primordial origin respectively. The work of art itself was an attempt to create and shape a controlled process of destruction, perhaps to come to terms with it.

Hegel saw a hyper-concentration of contradictory forces in which a thesis is met with an antithesis and after a certain threshold of countervailing forces, a new synthesis was formed which was to become the new thesis, a process whose zenith (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) could be construed to be tragedy.

So tragedy is quite horrific at first glance, but one take-away could be that to come to terms with it and move on, we must as a collective learn to go with the flow, even if it means plunging ourselves back into the primordial unknown after taking one last glance at the crumbling order.

The only problem is that after each great crisis many thinkers feel certain the end and the resulting new beginning is to come, only for the old system to recover and reconstitute itself with new symbols, postponing a genuine revolution.

Is there even such a thing as revolution? Or is it all simply a never-ending rollercoaster of waxing and waning waves of energy, their wavelengths oscillating across history into eternity?

Portland

The landscape of Portland is electric green, due in large part to the voluminous rainfall the city gets every year. There is a high density in vegetation and it permeates the grid; the neighborhood streets are covered in dead leaves. Moss grows everywhere: trees, roofs, sidewalks, much of it doesn't stay dry for long.

There's something happening in Portland, much like there is something happening in various (mostly urban) pockets around the country, and the spirit is probably analogous to what was happening in places like San Francisco in the 60's, though now the ideology is slightly more refined and weathered...less naive. It seems to be quietly spreading in places like Long Beach and Berkeley as well: semi-urban places where the money is less concentrated (though still present) but the landscape resists the isolation and resulting social alienation of the suburbs. 

The actual downtown area is mostly like other cities' downtown areas: there are pockets of resistance but as a whole and as a function of our current economic system, the city is dominated by the moneyed types. It is the only way to subsist in an area where the rent shoots sky-high in accordance with population saturation and the universal human desire to be where the action is. The wealth concentrates and shoots up in the form of sleek glass towers, much like the inverted version of a cave full of dripping stalactites. It is saddening to view high end businesses displaying huge colorful messages like "Peace, love, unity" in their windows, the product of the relentless marketing impulse to shapeshift to meet the surrounding conditions of its environment to draw in as much customers as possible. The messages, while nice on their face, merely reflect the sensibilities of the surrounding progressive neighborhoods and end up becoming contradicted by the very operations they are trying to promote: to sell aggressively in competition with others in the area and become enriched and as a consequence serve to further divide the surrounding environment. The homeless sit on the streets right outside, cups in hand, mostly ignored but occasionally recognized with nervous glances by much of the fashionably-dressed passerby. 

But just across the bridge amid the sprawling green neighborhoods lies the authenticity I've been hearing about. This arrangement reminds me of Long Beach: centralized concentrated wealth surrounded by neighborhoods where this "new stuff" springs up in shoots like the first greenery out of a winter thaw. All of the most earnest restaurants are supplied locally by nearby organic farms. The underlying ideology is familiar: conserve energy while taking care to take from the environment with minimal disruption, while attempting to share the wealth with even distribution and re-injecting it into the places from where it was taken, as opposed to extracting as much of it as possible and then moving on when stores are exhausted, which is an impulse that has gotten us in so much trouble today. Such an ideology reflects an inversion of values that have become corrupt, values that upon taken to their extremes, only served to destroy. Small restaurant owners now experiment with communal seating and flexible pay-what-you can price sets, all indicative of a deeper instinct to mend a social fabric that has been frayed. And such trends are at least rubbing off on the larger commercial businesses, which is good enough of an effect for now. Though more must be certainly done. 

The winters are colder with much more rainfall than California, but I definitely want to go back and learn more, as well as continue to understand the other areas around the world that embody such ideas, and grow due to the magnetism their cultures generate. It is the best one can do at the moment. 

Name Change

Yep, signing with a new name now. Simpler and probably more appropriate. And it will be consistent with a philosophy blog I've been working on, though I've been procrastinating on that so we'll see how it goes.

Storm

Tonight it is hard to sleep for no particular reason. I listen to the wind outside howling. Waves and waves of compressed air particles flowing up and over the hillside. The weather can get angry out here; a glance outside can reveal furious clouds billowing out over what suddenly look like hardened mountains, almost as if they are crashing up and over the mountains and throwing themselves into the sky in a rage.

And that all precipitates a system of dark clouds that upon arriving plunge the land into silence and stillness and snow gently begins to fall. 

The Hunter

We got into the warmth of the barn and they were all chatting jovially over right wing politics, cursing Obama and the debt among other things. I ignored most of it; I had almost decided not to come because of how outnumbered I’d be in terms of political sensibility. I didn’t want to be surrounded by the right wing toxicity that I find so distasteful.

But a combination of the gin I had before and the anonymity of being amidst a crowd whose din rose harmlessly into the barn’s rafters left me feeling a bit more easy than I anticipated. It was easy to ignore much of the rhetoric, and being among peers and somewhat intoxicated, the men were cheerful and playful and not too resentful. Initially they regarded us with suspicion; the young raise red flags almost by default among the conservative-minded. But they became increasingly comfortable with us. Some of them anyways. Others wore closed faces, but it wasn’t too offensive.

 The beers and spirits flowed easy. We walked out to the cold and viewed the white light dying behind the clouds, urinating out beyond the halo of light around the barn with our backs to the giant Irish wolf hound barreling into us for attention. And then back into the warmth and the light of the barn.

We caught the host in the back of the barn amidst boxes and boxes of ammunition, pouring himself another drink and lighting a fat cigar. We asked about the wicked-looking assault rifles he had sitting on his back workbench, and he dove into a discussion over weapon function, assuring us that he selected weapons carefully for varying range and utility. He had three assault rifles and a handgun in that corner of the barn alone, and an ungodly amount of weapons in the house, at least a few in every room.

He picked up a loaded variation of an Aug and showed us the sights and action, cigar in his mouth pouring out smoke in between swigs of whiskey. His voice had that Clint Eastwood rasp and his face had the same sour expression. He got to talking about hunting.

“Oh yeah I’ve lived on deer and elk meat for years at a time. It can keep you and your family fed if you do it right.

The head is a hard target to hit. A very small area. I’ve seen guys blow off the bottom jaw and the elk is still alive. You’ve got to go for the chest area. If not the heart, you can get the lungs when the bullet mushrooms. Does all sorts of damage in there. If you hit the heart you lose a good portion of some of the best meat. And you’ve got to get the thing bled fast, if not the good flank meat can go really go to hell.

After a while you develop an ethos, you see. You’re out there stalking this thing for 4 hours. You’re exhausted, he’s getting worn down. It is a game of attrition. I’ve seen these elk do things that I never thought they could do. This one would circle around several times and then jump some six feet off to the side out of nowhere and then the chase would be on again. We’d continue that all day. You’d be exhausted near the end, wondering if you can really do it. It gets to where you reach this understanding. He yields and you take him down and it’s as if he’s giving you permission and you thank him for the struggle. At that point even dressing down your kill seems like an impossible task. But you do it. You get through it. And then you look yourself in the mirror in the morning and you feel like a man.

And yeah, I’ve killed a lot of things. You get good at it and it gets pretty fun.”

This man was a warrior. The kind of guy that reads into killing like many guys read into fixing machinery: analyzing it and judging it on merit in terms of how effective and skillful one can be. The reverse of a surgeon perhaps, distilling destruction and deconstruction into a profession and an art, making virtue out of the economy of shutting down a living thing. And doing so with maximum effectiveness was seen to be a mark of strength, or of greatness at its peak.

As horrified as I was (looking at deer all month, I found myself enraptured by the sheer beauty of their construction, and could not imagine wanting to kill one, much less hurt one) I found the man quite endearing in a strange way. Perhaps it was a dark part in me that I suppressed so long ago (but never destroyed) that allowed me to comprehend his position and relate to him, as radically different my own sensibility is. It was his sincerity that was so endearing, his seriousness and his commitment to his own ethos, his own authenticity so to speak, that I could recognize and relate to. Unlike many of those right wing types, who derive their identities from propaganda and military movies, he had a firm conviction that he was ready to back up. And he probably could kill a man.

And there are people like this all over the country, crouching in their homes and clutching their firearms, ready for a break in state legitimacy. Such is the warrior phase in the life cycle of civilizations, when the systematic machinations of businessmen break down and the chieftan strongmen rise and seek to take with force what they believe to be theirs.

Better to attempt to communicate with and connect with such people. There is a lot of hot talk about another civil war between the red and blue cultures. But I don’t think it is that simple. And I think we all know who would win in a fight. 

Grey

It rained all night and it has been drizzling off and on all morning.

Everything is yellow, brown, and grey. In the valley below the fog waxes and wanes, lapping at the trees below, and then within seconds surges up the hill to cover the house. Dark mountains that were partially obscured by low clouds now vanish.

Pockets of air of varying temperatures and condensing water vapors...ecological systems giving birth to these phenomena...the mountains and the air passing over them and bodies of water, forming ghostly oceans that rise and recede. Great beauty.

It feels like a gyp, here at the end of November and dismal rain instead of beautiful snow. At least there's the fog.

Arctic ice the size of the continental US melted this month. It feels strange to be sitting out here thinking of such things, isolated up on this hill looking out over the valley, all so peaceful and majestic yet under the impression that we are doing a terrible amount of damage to the very carefully-tuned environment we’ve found ourselves surviving in.

And yet the machine churns on almost of its own accord.