I've been having what the galactic champion in "litotes in appallingly bad taste"* might call a bad week (month, year). But the last few days, especially -- though I've also encountered some random acts of unaccountable kindness, which my trauma-impaired state of mind has prevented me from reacting to in an optimally appreciative way. That same state of mind (or mental affliction) has had me making decisions reminiscent of one of those experiences in which you're attempting to navigate an unfamiliar city, and every turn seems to be the wrong one. (Or one of those experiments in which you give a hallucinogen to a rat, and then put it into a maze to rival the labyrinth of the Minotaur. I've never, for the record, taken any form of hallucinogen, and I hope I'm no closer to the order rodentia than most of my fellow humans -- and hope also that compassion for animals, if not for humans, has prevailed to put a stop to those abominable testimonials to Skinner -- but it does have that laboratory feel to it.)
There seem to be anima (plural of "animus;" not spirits from a Hayazaki movie) everywhere. I suppose nearly everyone on this unspeakable and incommunicable plane is frustrated, angry and afraid, and for very understandable reasons. "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner," according to Sartre, so that may have to be the final word -- though I'd rather have had one from a Christian theologian than the inventor of existentialism. A good one direct from scripture is the title of this post, and it couldn't come from a better source.
My last post was a "clamo ad te" in the form of a book report, and a cry of frustration I quickly opted to delete, though the author of the book was quite gracious about it. This post is an expression of exhaustion and Weltschmerz, more than any personal anguish. Anguish doesn't seem to do any good. One has to leave it in the hands of the Ultimate Decider (not George Bush). And for me, anyway, Robert Burns is a more appealing non-scriptural literary source than the author of "les Jeux sont Faits." The last line of one of Burns' more famous products was simply: "Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be afraid."
* Zaphod Beeblebrox, possibly; he seems like a plausible candidate
Why you need memory to have free will
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This is so obvious once I explain it to you, you’ll wonder why no one else
ever mentions it. I’ve pointed out a number of times before that
consciousnes...
1 week ago
Strange how though we find ourselves on different sides of the planet our weeks have followed a similar bent, though mine was nought but wholly self-imposed, self-medicated and, blissfully, self-extricated - I sit here, lemming-like, now, waiting to see which way to jump. Down is not an option.
ReplyDeleteWell, if there's one modality of existence that seems to be definitively geographically invariant (because it's just ubiquitous, if you exclude as data points the wealthy, the powerful and the catatonic), it would have to be awareness of misery and affliction. Anyway, you have: 1) my commiseration; 2) my felicitations on your admirable state of self-extrication, one to which I wish I could likewise lay claim; and 3) my strongest support for your aversion to saltatory motion in *that* particular direction. You don't want to reduce the global population of literate English speakers by 5%. :)
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