iwanttobethevoid

[iwanttobethevoid]

I feel so disjointed. If you touched me, I would fall apart in your hands. Falling down, falling into chaos, into a space where signs mean something to someone, where they are held and kept, valued in such a way that life depends upon their stability. But life, which slips between your fingers, can only stand the love that changes as it sees. Strength and adaptability, fitting into the form of evolution, or shifting into greater understanding, loving.

I can only curve both ways, for valuing is arbitrary, the space occupied contingent. The less given the less results...

[iwanttobethevoid]

There is a root so deep I have to carve up every idea, every thought, every interest, every conceivable way of living in order to get to it. Somewhere down there, things exist. Mining, picking things apart, destroying them, inquiring. Yeah, it can be that. Pretty sure it can also just be passive listening though.

Like sometimes when I sit outside, I hear the wind roaring over the land, usually somewhere behind the highway. I'm not sure where it is coming from, only that when it comes it disturbs everything, the trees start to sound like crashing waves, and the beating of it seems to destroy the present moment entirely. It's all that exists, and that seems to be what freedom is. It becomes infinite, eternal, but always changing too. Then I will hear something else, a bird, a child laughing in a yard nearby. It cuts into that eternity, punctuates it. That's probably something like peace, a moment of it. Listening in peace, perhaps is easy. Can I listen all the time? If I do, what will I hear?

I'd like to know what is there, what is real. I don't think to grasp it, not anymore. Maybe just to release it everywhere. To let things flow through me. So that it doesn't stop in my life, it keeps going. No matter if it hurts or if it is ugly, if it is full of hate, there is nothing to correct about the way things are. Freeing, feeling, seeing. I think that is possible, I believe it is.

[iwanttobethevoid]

Life is like a lottery, so it seems. All of us, standing in vastly different places, arising out of nowheres, specific lines of space that carve through existence and then emptiness. The space we are, the space we stand within. At rare moments, those spaces are so similar, similar enough they appear to collide, to overlap. And it feels as though everything is real. That perfect reflection, that sense of falling through. Putting your hands against the existence of someone else, waiting for that resistance, that wall, that thing that stops you, and meeting only air as you fall, fall, fall into a perfect understanding, bask in the unfolding of an unseen side of the world that can only arise as it is birthed from the intersection of parallel worlds, colliding into one another, intersecting in their similarities to share their differences.

But most the time it is only suffocation, explanations, failure to be heard at all. Most the time I reach out and it is immediately obvious how far away I have become. But this is, of course, only differences in environment. It's too easy. Too fucking easy. We are too simple. We are so simple that it makes me want to peel my skin off and rip out my organs and eat them. Because if I do something so conceptually morbid perhaps it will feel less bodily than it does ritual. Or perhaps the absurdity will wake me up to the isolated shell of stupidity that is being alone. Because history is a kind of community and when you intersect over time, when you weave in, you are more real. Acting alone is a feeble attempt at living, it is young, it is weak and vapid and imaginary and not because it is abstract but because it is alone. We are so fucking simple, so predictable, so easy to morph, so easy to reshape and train. Adaptation means mirror. And I can shape myself into a thing that participates in this bullshit. To become a fucking part of it. Or to just fucking morph into the worlds of those around me.

Shape into anything. Shape just doesn't matter, it doesn't matter. But even if I decide to shape into nothing, it happens anyway. In the world not of the world is a fucking joke. You are the world. There is no getting out of it. And it has shape, it presses you into. I can't stop. God. God. God. STOP.

[iwanttobethevoid]

Somewhere in the mountains, high enough that the air is thin and cold and the snow is soft as down, the wet closeness of pain and tired sickness is unraveled, until everything is rarefied and clean. The mountains are big enough to dwarf the little lives below, the horizon expansive enough to prove the world can take in all the pain and still have enough space to spare for us to breathe. There is always more, if you look, more than me, more than you, more than all of us combined, more than all of that and everything, it continues, there is no reason to ask where or how much. It is not conceivable, the only conceivable thing was a limit or an unknown, neither of those things matter in the face of this.

I only want to die in the face of it. I only wish I could feel a damn thing. Sacrifice.

I'm not sure what is left to try to feel. The cheap pleasure of simulated closeness. The hesitant way that words tumble out of my lips and the dull ache underneath them. The pathetic way my heart moves like a snake underneath my skin, sliding this way and that at the slightest word from someone else, to defend or strike or slide away, I think I'm strong enough but I know from experience it only takes a shovel or a gun or a steel tipped boot. And the little things become larger the less of them there are, until the world is small because there is so little of it and thoughts shrink with it.

The imagination is a mirror and right now it fits inside the palm of my hand. If I can understand beauty enough to feel that deep dread in me, that hate tipped in terror and shame, in jealousy and reverence; if I can fathom the smallest shred of God, of death, of how small I am amidst the horrible, awful pain of real life, then I know enough to shock myself into a moment of sacrifice. I know enough to understand that dying is not a choice for people like me, but if I live here, in a realm of sensitive ideas and delicate abstract emotions, I can only act on what little I can bear. Only shred my sensual life in service of the ideas that allow me to cleanly walk within the clouds and rip open the dry moisture of the sky. I wanted to see angels. I wanted to see God. I imagined heaven and ladders made of gold.

I imagined the world pouring out of bands of light, cutting through the haze and rippling atop the mountains. I could smell chai and vanilla and saffron before I knew what they were, only there were colors I could not name and faces that were realer than I would ever be. Before it could be torn away from me. Before I could fathom why people speak at all. Before I knew shame or bodies or touch. I imagined enough to fill lifetimes, enough to bind the world together in divine love, pouring over me, because I was young enough to be loved. Young enough to be loved without being anyone. Young enough to believe that you do not have to exist to understand what it means.

[iwanttobethevoid]

What remains the same is the lack of direction. That change recognizable as such, as something other than chaos, needs some anchor, some focal point. But I cannot find one. So it is change, and I am changing, everything changes, and in that it remains the same. But nothing changes, nothing can ever change because there is no focal point. There is nothing to change, nothing to be changed.

[iwanttobethevoid]

There isn't a point to expressing any of this, but I feel compelled. It makes me think about Marx and humans. About all of this shit we call culture. Is it for understanding? It seems like expression is everything. It is for what it is, evidence of what exists maybe. Everything seems like it is that. And it all collapses again until what I'm doing right now is another part of it. But it gets me nowhere, changes so little about me. Except that the mere act is something, so it does, and on and on and on I can't escape from that. But it doesn't change that I can't find someone to understand what I am saying. And it doesn't change that it is stupid of me to even seek that without trying to meet other people where they are at. It is a shouting into the void that is more expressive of my self-pity and sorry state than it is of anything else, because I've cut off contact with all but insulated ideas that do not matter to anyone but me. So I can't be frustrated about it, but I am, not for any real reason, but because I've put myself right there, in that place. It's all so fucking obvious.

The answer is too. Do other things, kid. Do things, just do them, things change, they always do. Do them until you don't think anymore, do them without anything else and keep trying to forget about thinking this way, because it doesn't matter if it is real, things are real too, so just pick the one that makes your life seem more meaningful.

[iwanttobethevoid]

I wonder what the difference is between writing fiction and writing philosophy. Fiction seems to more closely deal with things, in reflecting on the sense of them, the experience, how they unfold out of one another. In a sense, fiction is more concrete. Philosophy divorces itself from them to look at them, it pulls you away from the world and places you against it, even when it most screams to stay within. Wouldn't you learn more from reading a novel than an essay? Doesn't a novel take your somewhere...new? In a way that philosophy cannot, even as both are expressive, one of them has rules. Rules of reason, rules of direction, of building. But perhaps they both have rules, to be successfully the most of what they are.

[iwanttobethevoid]

Sometimes I can feel a rise in me that immediately dies before it begins. It as though I weakly reach out, but recoil in the face of futility. As though that seeking happens only when I forget enough to try again, and when I remember all movement is taken from me. Or in the reverse, as though I remember something lost long ago for a fleeting moment before I am lost in the confused haze of unraveled hopes that fade off into nothing and disappear within my movement like wisps of smoke.

I can see hope only in undisturbed water. So one theory I have found myself returning to time and time again is that immobility, stasis, will allow the water to remain so clear that I can memorize its contents. That if I allow it to settle enough everything will be revealed to me. Or the smoke will settle in thick bars and solidify before me. That patience and intentional inaction will create a firm path through dead reality to some place I can live.

But silence is one of the most difficult things to find. Noise is everywhere, even in the quiet without others around, anxiety can rise up to take their place. And in its absence, obligation, need.

Remembering, forgetting, all kinds of rules to guide which of each. But it is all ultimately that same smoke.

[iwanttobethevoid]

In philosophy there are certain base assumptions that create starting points (usually value oriented assumptions)...and then they create form, usually forms that map onto reality in some conceptual way. But those formal structures are different iterations of the same type of patterns that then overlap with other patterns in other philosophy...and it all turns into conceptual repetition. People seem similar. As though through life you see how base conditions and starting assumptions create patterns that have slight variations, and it is only a matter of time before new information becomes old information and is added to the rest. Though this should not matter because content is what matters...but content insofar as it becomes explicable seems to die a bit, as though a boundary while making something navigable also can kill what makes something a living thing (what even makes a thing a living thing to begin with though? A certain type of reflexivity in which a thing is self-reflective/replicating?). And the starting point is, of course, human contact with things to begin with. That world is already limited by what our minds are able to paint, and those same minds react to the situation, reflect it, live out our history and our old ways of thinking. How we feel cycles through, becomes a bit more bearable or sometimes worse, maybe a moment of joy. But all of that shuffles around and shifts and reacts to the environment, especially as we close ourselves off (when you hear nothing for days and then hear a sound, it assaults you. You touch nothing for days and textures become violent). We are so malleable, it confuses me where any kind of actual being rests in that mess of reaction (though of course, being is probably just exactly that anyway, in the reaction). How can it be proven that any one of us is alive, or what is being alive to begin with? Why would it even need to be proven?

Do you ever feel as though it is impossible to communicate anything actually? As though there is no one who is able to reach through the veil that separates you from things and actually show themselves as another creature who has experiences at all, much less experiences similar enough to your own that they could actually speak with you. With that you who sits further back than the other iterations of you, if that is even something aside from a kind of base feeling (most of the time I think that 'seat' is empty entirely, there is only this illusion that we really exist and behind it nothing, fragments or collections that some sense of existence emerges from and that our feelings grab onto as we interpret reality in a narrative). My key question here is if there is anything at all that might separate a reaction from an action, or if they are ultimately the same thing. And why would it matter? Action cannot be disconnected from reaction in the same way humans are not separable from other animals but by hazy definition...is the only difference where the reaction comes from? Can a reaction come from a 'someone', from a 'reason'? Is the only difference what we, as biased creatures, deem worthy of being called 'human' or 'agential'? I think that there is some mistake in my thinking that there must be some kind of dynamic and unpredictable movement to life. That there must be something other than the basic sum of our experiences played out on the canvas of cells with which we were born. These are all baseless expectations, probably ones formed before I even knew they were being formed. So there is nothing to be confused by or disappointed about.

But now I find it difficult to see things as living at all, they appear dead already in a sense. And I recognize that our malleability also means a kind of strength...for arbitrary decisions to feed ourselves some goal plucked from nowhere and give ourselves conditions that more benefit our state of being and guide us in some sort of singular direction. We can train ourselves like dogs and this works insofar as our conditions allow particular methods to take root. Living probably happens somewhere in there, where you just take things in, focus on them and don't really think much about the why behind it because a true draw, a true life probably looks to the things themselves. That seems to be living 'inside' somehow, getting involved. In terms of 'options' it seems to me that there is some kind of hope... So long as that singular direction is supported enough by conditions to not dissipate into air. So long as you are able to take hold of your body and rewire emotions to feed themselves off of your goals. Maybe you have the right history to give your direction some kind of weight (losing one's family in a fire, deciding to fight fires). Maybe you never thought about questioning a dream that you had and held for most of your life (momentum build up). Maybe you have such intense willpower that nothing particularly matters about why you make a choice, rather you just make them and then events occur and you continue doing whatever because it happens to be along the way (apathetic momentum/going with the flow). So long as that can occur, perhaps that is a choice, or I don't know, something. It can happen I suppose is the point.

Have you ever gotten the hint of the idea that there is something alive out there, or something beyond the boundary of this mess that is humanity? I suppose that sounds idealistic and idiotic. Part of me thinks this idea merely comes from lack of information at a young age and the inability to fit the information I had into an appropriate context. But really it can go both ways and you could say that as one learns more, expectations generated by past experience prime assumptions to fit with what one knows whereas possibility denies that things must be the case in the way one assumes, even when your sample size of patterns and content grows. But then when you do get more information...it appears everything fits. Which is probably a good thing I suppose...it all fits together in some wonderful cosmic dance or whatever. Even the truly absurd things, the 'unreasonable' ones, appear to reflect only that what is rational and what cannot be rationalized fit into the same pattern of existing things. That they boast the same formal nature, only differing in content (Things that appear to contradict usually do only because of a lack of information or because they are dependent upon one another. In the same way that life is recognized in the context of its end as a boundary and in the same way that absolute existence must include negation or else there is nothing by which it can be defined). But that whole seems dead somehow...I am unsure why. Perhaps too much similarity, or perhaps not enough in the right ways. Most likely though, my vision is coming at things from an angle that is incomplete.

I get the sense in mass movements of history, there is something like human life that expresses itself, where people have been curious about the world around them and learned about how the world moved. Learned about the inner workings of plants and rivers and the structures of nature that they moved inside of and depended on and were simply aware of the existence in it. And then that information was passed along to other people, in small acts, ways that people didn't particularly pay attention to. Human life was woven into reality in that way; what it meant to be the kind of thing we are was the things we did, and it still is insofar as we live it and most of all it seems when we do not notice, but simply persist with all that that involves. And perhaps those small acts of humanity have been gathered up by people who have seen them, and then those people have made things that reveal entire worlds built of them by way of artistic means...or philosophy, or simply in their life itself. Then, of course, those people who do that in the right conditions for attention are lauded as geniuses, but maybe all they did was focus in the right way on something that could have been anything, and arranged it into the actual underlying thread that seems largely ignored in living consciousness (But then isn't that more of that 'narrative', but on a mass level, the narrative individuals make that creates an identity where there is only a sleeping kind of reactivity that does not realize itself at all?).

You see, I think I assumed that conversations could happen after an established deep rooted understanding when one grows up to be an adult. That all the things so obviously clear and fascinating were a given, and that there was an entire world of things to talk about after that fascination had been affirmed. That as an adult you are given more tools by which to communicate and share those mysterious bits of knowledge about the depths of the human tradition and the world in which creatures like us live in and have made. A world in which humans as creatures simply understood something very fundamental about our own existences that bound us together as similar enough not to trip over ourselves and create our own problems through misunderstandings and holding to concepts that survive simply because they are old. But it seems instead as though there are multitudinous versions of death. Little deaths, of dreams or of pictures of a reality that is good enough not to fuck up someone's mind later on. Deaths of possible ways a person could live, or deaths of a reality one could have had if they had been afforded the opportunity...to act yeah, but sometimes to even understand what might have been possible. And then bodily death, or death of possibilities afforded by body parts functioning, or by owning particular things. Even minuscule deaths, where a word or idea could have grown but it was killed instead by a conceptual environment. It seems like we are excellent at creating places for things to die, because we are all bad at listening. And I think I am as well. Bad at doing anything but reacting to things, even when making those arbitrary decisions to act, it seems to go nowhere. Even turning off the mind, it remains difficult to stay open to experiences, and truly experience them. They all appear distant because they remain untouched by most it seems, except in those isolated pockets into which people have retreated...probably to protect themselves, or to choke out the twisted understandings in which we all react based off of our pain. I don't really know.

One guess I have is that human contact in similar experience, rooted ones, those create worlds in which the entire concept of a world can be repainted. If little deaths are multitudinous, it seems little lives would be as well, in that life and death, if they are changes in form, cannot be unbound from one another. So then maybe to 'wake up' to prove that something else is real is a way of proving that oneself is real by finding a mirror somewhere in reality and seeing that one can be a mirror for someone else and see a mirror in someone else. Thus why I see this entire thought process as being the result of hollow interactions...I think that all it takes to flip it is talking to the right people, and for some reason it seems that people who seem to understand one another hardly cross paths. There is a great risk in others as well...because we are mirrors I suppose. Of being killed, probably by accident or misunderstanding, or of dying more. We live in a thick sludge of human minds though, even when speaking with no one. It seems finding a pocket of 'freedom' somewhere is one of our only hopes for survival.

#similarity #difference #reactivity #reflexivity #life #death #people #humanity #care #world #nihilism #subjectivity #perception #identity #change

[iwanttobethevoid]

If I do not need more reflections of my mind, then the obvious solution is to study something tangible (not these concepts that I've steeped myself in). But I can tell that I would be unsatisfied with that. There is a strange kind of draw to concepts. Some moments when I dwell on them I feel I am mining. The wall usually isn't an actual wall, rather it is the floor, the floor that I am trying to break so that I can fall out of the world entirely until I hit a new ground.

But then I think that this supposed 'progress' is likely the formation of intuitions. It feels a bit like being trapped. Unless you hold to the idea that conceptual exploration has a basis in something that truly reflects the world in some way, it reflects the structure of the human mind.

Worse than this is that all of our perceptions are the same way. Nothing escapes this particular line of thought. But we can interact with things...(if you think things exist), and this is probably the surest way to get beat over the head with difference, with 'reality'.

Reason likes to boast its own properties. Like mathematics, the idea is that systems have their own life; that you explore them. The only problem is that complexity and applicability to reality are no judge of if this is true exploration. Delusions can be just as complex and apply just as readily due to the nature of exploration being conceptual, formal. Formal exploration maps on with formal accuracy...which doesn't seem to matter.

But then I don't think I can escape the attraction to that (and it isn't one or the other). But in a way it is one or the other. To the things themselves is another way of saying "go live your life", and thinking about it all the time is one of the most distant ways of living. In a sense though, I think that there is no satisfaction without it. Inside of me, I'm always looking for another floor, and evidently when I'm not doing that, I'm thinking about thinking about doing it. Like now, thinking about thinking about it. Wondering about why I am thinking about it in this way. Trying to inquire into the structure of what I am doing to such an extent that I can break myself down and tear up those preconceived notions that deaden the inquiry process.

Breathe enough life into it to start mining again, as though there is a point to it. Because if I don't do it I will suffer and look for it in other things, and come back empty and sad. But then doing it seems...pointless. Not doing it is non-optional and doing it seems pointless. Especially given that I cannot 'create' anything real. Really what people like this do is make imaginary structures that map onto reality. Each has advantages and weaknesses, but really no one is ultimately superior or more accurate because none of them 'report' reality. Their job isn't to root you, it's to act as an opener. As a reflexive structure that serves as a guide, and through which you navigate. This is very obvious to everyone and doesn't even need saying, but they are not concrete. They don't intend to be and will not be. This is why this entire field is easily called useless.

You can live by thinking about it, but you also stop yourself from doing so. But then I ought to grow up and recognize that what one does with one's time does not matter outside of being consistent. Outside of living 'in it' and you can still live 'in it' like this. When did I stop doing that? Perhaps that is the true struggle.

#reflexivity #perception #subjectivity #life #nihilism

[iwanttobethevoid]

Emptiness is that reflexivity. The ability to stand in relation to something else as 'not-this', the ability to step back (and in a sense isn't that what our consciousness is? Our recognition of what already occurs everywhere all the time?). Language is also this, every act of ours is this. Emptiness is reflexivity because it cancels out. It is both the same thing and a different thing, and change can only occur with some level of both, and so it is empty. Empty in that everything cannot be everything without it, and emptiness is only that when everything stands in relation to itself (and is nothing outside of things doing so).

#emptiness #reflexivity #identity #language #change

[iwanttobethevoid]

That kind of world cannot be kept in one person, it cannot be created alone. Perhaps those lauded as geniuses are the people who were able to take the unconscious threads of this and weave it into some living thing that could finally take up conscious space in the sick world.

I never thought that it had to be made, and I am a weak person who struggles to see anything. So I think that as much as I hope for those things to have their dues paid to them, more than that my only desire is to be in that world. Perhaps unconsciously I have known this, and yet I have failed to create it.

But this is likely why I want to create something. Some great thing in which I must pull together the living parts of us so that they lay before me, speaking all on their own.

But again, one person cannot do this. Why? Because one person acting alone creates the reflection of their mind, that's why. And I don't need more reflections of mine.

#people #humanity #world

[iwanttobethevoid]

The disappointment probably comes from it's unconscious nature. Perhaps what I was looking for was a world of it, a space in which it overflowed from everyone. Where every word that poured from a person's mouth expressed it: life, human life. I wanted to understand it, I wanted to understand what they knew about the world, for them to teach me how to look at rocks and trees. For them to show me how the water moved and where it came from. For them to be older than me and know more. For them to be in love with other people, and with the place where they lived. For them to treat me like an open question and dazzle me with the roots of our civilization, of our shared lives.

I wanted to take my rightful place in the river of living things and serve out my time ever unfolding, with the stories before spilling out from the holy space inside of me where I had kept them, making their way into my every waking action and breathing the complete tapestry of human history into the swell of silence.

#world #people #humanity

[iwanttobethevoid]

The movements I saw happened only as humans slept. This is something I did see from leaving this place. The unconscious movements that occur in small acts, small acts done when we live in them, and when we do not see them. Those create sweeps over time. Those are largely invisible to us, but work inside of all of us, and I think in that sense, they really aren't us. Only a little bit emerges between the lives of people at a time, and only large movements take place in bigger contexts. Understanding reaches across decades and sometimes centuries, tracking the same form of thought or act through time, the universality of humanity. What it means to be the thing that we are.

Yeah, you can find it in there somewhere.

I need to quit being so negative...

#humanity #people

[iwanttobethevoid]

And you know what, I had no idea, no clue as a kid that it was so difficult to be understood. That it was so difficult to have conversations. That it was so difficult to just barely manage to make it alongside other humans. That most of our discourse and love takes place in wild confusion. That our dramas, our plotlines, our movements through time are punctuated by a bucketload of misunderstandings that can generally be solved with either more information or better listening. Be that to nature, to conditions, to history, to yourself, to other people, whatever...it is frankly, hilarious. It's funny. I guess I see that now? It's really fucking funny, why are we like this?

It is as though we enter life armed with vague notions of it that come from our histories haunting the underlying models in our minds. They fill in the blanks like our mind does our vision and then you have a world full of your own expectations, unable to understand anything but that. So you're just blind, all a bit blind. Annoying that then we have the gall to call that 'personality' as though our inability to see things is some kind of individuating gift, when it differentiates us only in that it limits us in what we can interact with.

It's funny, because I used to think that people predominantly argued over actual problems. That problems could be real. That we didn't cause all of them ourselves. What's disgusting to me about this is that 'problems' are the entire human race jacking off to itself in this kind of mind orgy in which we slither up against our slimy misunderstandings. Like when your internal monologue berates yourself but really isn't listening in on your own personal pains? Yeah, that's us, on a mass level. It's living in one large human mind, a mind that creates the conditions in which it moves and battles against them, but just can't manage to get outside of them. That's just...very disgusting to me, the lack of diversity.

I think this is why I so often seek to get out of it. But there is hardly any out when your life is tied to it somehow. The liberating parts of nature are perhaps their simply being, and being in such a way that they do not create the conditions by nature of your nature and by way of idiotically hilariously avoidable things. They do what they do because they do and it isn't more complex than that.

And sure, humans do that too, but the difference is there is an alternative to our stupid problem making lives. And we are terrible at it. We struggle to do it all the time. Most of our lives appear to be comprised of that struggling. Struggling against ourselves.

I imagined there was an entire world after that!! Do you not see what I am talking about? I mean a world in which you can see problems, real problems, ones we did not create, but ones that arise. A world in which people work together to solve them and a world in which conversations occur on the daily, I mean the ones where people mutually understand and feel heard. Conversations in which there is freedom in the sense that you can talk to anyone at any time and listening is so naturally woven in that bridges are built and built again and again with fear being a kind of foreign entity because within your own species there is a deep understanding of the meaning of existing as a member of it.

But nah, most of us live in this just...fucking hilarious anxiety that is simultaneously pleasurable (in that you are so special and the only one!) and horrible (in that you are all alone and you cannot be assured that anyone has experiences like you do). It is funny, see?

#humanity #people #care #world

[iwanttobethevoid]

I've seen people say that intelligent people are sad, but I think that anyone who has a quality alienating them probably would be. And I think having an alienating quality would force you to think out and in, because you are alienated. So maybe smart people are smart people because they started out as odd people who were not readily accepted by those around them and had some kind of funny bullshit going on with their head enabling them to think in layers (in whatever direction their particular breed of smart person layers go).

Or maybe it's that when you think 'out' in the first place it's hard as hell to get 'in', to believe that all that is real and that it is worth caring about. But one thing I am certain of now, it's that intelligence really doesn't seem to matter much in the grand scheme of things. Things are easier or harder, sure, but to what end? It doesn't get you to a different place in reality. Your experiences can still be fractured or whole, they can be distant or close. Your particular trait will interact with your environment in the same way any other trait might. That is to say, some intelligent people will find that their trait fits well with their environments and others will not. Intelligence is not good for everything, it cannot surmount all situations.

Basically, intelligence doesn't make anyone special. It's random, like any other quality. None of the qualities we as creatures possess seem particularly special, they are subject to the conditions in which they arise just like the beings that live out those qualities. To be intelligent does not mean that intelligence will ever have an opportunity to be put to any use, to be beautiful does not entail that one will be loved, to be athletic ha, that one often times means destroying the thing that set you apart in the first place. It seems like this strange game of destruction in which things are preyed upon and eaten and then destroyed and all that doesn't seem very important to the actual living that happens.

Oh right, unless you get lucky. The lucky ones have a nice little mesh of ability and condition that facilitates "The Chosen One" type vibes, and really that's just a point of view (and you can make it too!!). And then you get idolized (this one is more chance) because "oh my god,,,, they have a thing and used it??? in a particular way???". Which is usually pretty inspiring and great and all that, but it is not special.

Sometimes it is very helpful, sometimes very loving, but it is not special. And that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that it isn't special. Those who live in life know only what they do, it's the outside that hurts.

Pretty sure you need some sort of direction to get in. You can just pick one, that's fine, sometimes life can give you choices, then you feel good because you can make a choice rather than pluck a dream out of thin air rooted in nothing but sheer desire (this is more of that distance, the one that people feel uncomfortable about because they don't really know where it comes from -> 'maybe it's genius!!').

But say you don't have much of that, you're like one of Dostoevsky's side characters who is a nice bag of qualities smashed into a lukewarm situation with no aspirations and crystal awareness of a neutral situation.

Then what? Sit down on the ground and think nothing for hours until the cosmic bliss of existence blesses you with its unitary presence and you ascend into the eternal love of God? I guess, but only if you can do that, and to be honest being open to anything at all takes an enormous leap of faith. It takes energy to make that leap. Conditions help or hurt how much that leap sticks.

Conditions help or hurt how much that leap sticks.

Same for when you pick a random one out of thin air like one of those geniuses. It's difficult to have faith in air. It's difficult to reinforce it with stories. It's difficult to rely on narratives when understanding them to be tools rather than the fabric of movement. Kids get it better. It isn't that you are pretending to be a dog to have fun, it's that you're a dog right now. It's harder to do that when you get older.

I'm tired of knowing where this is coming from. I'm tired of not caring if things are accurate because 'everybody knows' and because it doesn't much matter anyway. And sure, yeah, everything does. So what? It matters in the same way if I died right now, that would matter. I'm really fine with that bit, I think it's the living that's just ??? Okay. Great. I want to do something. Why can't I do anything? Why isn't this going anywhere? Why does nothing that makes sense seem to report new information????

#people #identity #life #nihilism

[iwanttobethevoid]

You can tell something is experiencing when there is evidence of it taking those things in, when it becomes its environment (right?). I can say this both confidently and with some level of skepticism. Why? Because it makes no sense. Because the moment at which you best reflect what is around you is the moment you most stand against it as a 'different' thing, as a living thing. Your attention outward, your emotional ties being all wrapped up in it...it means you are connected to it, that you, yourself, can pay attention to it. That you are immersed. As opposed to the 'dead' who stand far away and cannot manage to talk about things that do not concern them (the day to day). You can't even get into the picture because you see it as a picture, much less arise from within it like that.

They always make fun of those people who document their day, the food they ate, the things they saw...But isn't that kind of consistency attractive? That kind of holistic puzzle where the pieces are snapshots of a reality that you 'figure out', by seeing how they look out, you look in. Some kind of subtle art; where you piece together the things that they like, the things that they avoid.

Listening in on the silent frustrations, the connections, glimpses to a world in which that person has relationships with others, others who you do not know. I've seen a lot of lookers who look at lookers and they always find the people who provide the most windows, those are the ones who appear the most real. The ones who are able to pry themselves open and put some bare experiences out on the writing slab and really 'connect' to themselves and other things.

Maybe they're brave.

Everyone agreed when you asked "Is insecurity really unattractive?" that it was. That confidence is attractive (but they were careful, not all confidence, all the time), and maybe it's confidence to talk about the minuscule details of your life.

But I also think panic stirs things up, like a pot boiling too long, it spills over the sides and it all comes out if you want it to or not. Fear hones in on you because it requires you to protect yourself, and then it is obsessive and you can't see a damn thing anymore; it's all you, you, you, you failing, you looking bad, you awkwardly stumbling around, you being watched by everyone who knows what you're thinking, you dying, you showing them you're unstable, you being trapped, etc.

I guess there's another thing that takes you out of the 'Immersive Experience'.

It starts to get disgusting when you think about it. Probably because of the distance. I think we as creatures feel worse when we get further away from things. And that's what it is to think about them like this, stepping away.

#reflexivity #repetition #identity #humanity #world #people #death #life