tragedy

(loosely connected thoughts)

To be frustrated, angry, confused, this is nothing new in life. Yet these emotions continue to surprise us. And the potency of pain never wears away. It bites just as hard or harder each time. Thinking "Oh, I've felt this before..." does nothing to lessen the hit. Familiarity with feeling does not diminish its impact.

Yes, we can now take anti-depressants, mood stabilizers, what have you to block a good amount of the pain of feeling, at the expense of doing just that, severing yourself from your own emotions. People on meds do commonly report feeling numb and emotionless. "Chemical imbalance." What they're really saying is that you have a disposition, the tendency, to predominant unhappiness. Detrimental to yourself and others. So you must artificially check your emotional lows (and highs) and re-condition yourself to manageable (acceptable) levels. But you can never "re-condition" it away.

Of course, I'm aware that life can be overwhelmingly good, too. But my point is about fate. Necessity. Somehow, I think, we have to come to terms with the fact that we are all fated to go through pain, anger, confusion, frustration, sadness, i.e. formidable unpleasantness, over and over, again and again, that we do not have the control our realist, individualistic, classically liberal ideology says we have. In America, in general, we strongly recognize in ourselves, through the cultural mirror of ideology, the rational subject, unbridled autonomy ("Be anything you want to be!" / "Land of opportunity!" / "You have the power to change anything!"), individuality, independence, and unique identity. But this is a mis-recognition of what we really are, and of the real conditions of life and living. A set-up for disappointment and an impediment to understanding.

We cannot simply free ourselves of the bad, i.e. ugly emotions and life's tragedies. We cannot simply change our mind or alter our perceptions about life's tragedies. We cannot be consoled by reason either. In fact, we know that it is often useless to say/think "Well, if I had only done such and such, this wouldn't have happened. Next time, I'll avoid it all." It can frustrate us forever. We must often just accept it. And simply making ourselves feel better (or, not as bad) about tragedy through perceptual reconditioning only ever works, in my experience, to avoid bad feelings and never really helps one reach a better understanding. But the bad--pain and suffering--are just as much a part of living as the good, and will always be. Of necessity. Did you forget? We are all fated to die. And we must live with this knowledge, or be lucky enough not to think about it, or perhaps have the good fortune to understand something of death (though nothing of the power to change it). And so it's all very tragic, isn't it?

But tragedy, since the Ancient Greeks (see: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, etc.), has also been a major source of enlightenment, wisdom, and meaning, in addition to distress.

There is something to the study of tragedy that I think can help me reach a meaningful understanding of the human condition and cope with life in a way that is not mere avoidance or false hope or quick and easy rationalization of life's tragedies, but an honest appraisal of them.

In my view, there is a challenge to not become so hardened and bitter towards life that you resign from creativity, and wonder, and from putting yourself out there to confront the world.

To live.

But this is all kind of bullshit isn't it? It's all just varying levels of sophisticated rationalization. What is not--poorly constructed or otherwise--a rationalization?

Tragic.

choosing a career

From "The Point of Departure, Chapter 5: The Long Walk"

I needed to free my mind to do what I had never done before—figure out what I really wanted from my career—but I had spent too long concentrating on projects that required intensive analytical thinking without any personal involvement. I found that I couldn’t just shut down the logic and dream for a while.

Our society just isn't built so that we can all take the time to figure out what we really want in life. It is so essential we maintain some expected level of productivity. Sometimes I get the feeling that I am a package moving through a production line. Especially in college I've made myself so busy with chasing "success" that to stop and rethink the idea of success is to lose ground in getting it. The day-to-day is a constant barrage of email, schoolwork, DEADLINES. One random obligation after the next is how life feels sometimes. Like you said, sometimes you have to reclaim your life because we often revert to autopilot in the face of routine expectations. We live in a system that aims to maximize time, output, profit. We are trained to quantify, calculate, reason. We are told that we must be productive.

What it all comes down to IMO is the "for the sake of..." What is all this productivity for the sake of?

Calculated optimization doesn't exactly leave a lot of room for people to reflect, to dwell, to think slowly. In fact, we often retreat into our busy lives to avoid thinking about something or other that bothers us. Our lives hum at a pace that makes it difficult to dwell and spend a lot of time thinking deeply about ourselves and the world. I resent that. Especially now that I am scrambling to complete law school applications, hoping that, since I have no idea what I want, a law degree will afford me more time and more options.

pessimism / optimism

Is the world a good place? Does it want us to be happy? Or is it a horrible place where we can only do our best to battle or avoid its "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune"?

People don't really have any business thinking that the world thinks, much less that it thinks about them. I try not to moralize the world.

Somehow we have the (mis)fortune of being materially configured such that we (1) have minds and (2) experience suffering, elation, hate, and desire in a world that is utterly unaware of itself and lacks all capacity to feel.

It's just a category error to ascribe any kind of mind or morality to the world. If you expect the world to be nice, you will die thinking it hates you -- or else you will develop rationalizations for why you must be "tested" in such horrible ways. But, having lost all expectation that the world regards you at all in any manner, the issue becomes a non-issue and you are free to get on with things, or do whatever it is you do to cope.

Even if hell exists and we're in it, hell itself does not punish. It can be punishment, but cannot punish. Punishment is deliberate -- only by conscious design or purpose. The world is indifferent. It doesn't have a mind to mind us -- much less punish us.

The world is a giant operant conditioning chamber complete with random reinforcement and certain death, and as a species we face extinction or evolution, a fate that is, I'd say, largely out of our control. That much is certain.

Bottom line is: A bit of pessimism might be a call to action, but too much is completely disabling.

"Antonio Gramsci famously called for 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will': the one the spur to action, the other the resilience to believe that such action will result in meaningful change even in the face of adversity."

poem

In a picturesque park down a scenic path,
One shoe follows the other
Treading the cobblestone
Passing pairs of feet walking the opposite direction.
All are determined to get where they are going.

Sun pierces through a web of branches;
Moon casts an eerie glow.
Flower to flower a butterfly dances;
Blanket upon blanket falls the snow.

Feet march on
To the café,
To the library,
To the playing fields,
Where whole bodies wait to greet them.

better left to the experts: a rather critical look at myself

It's usually extremely difficult for me to describe my self, but I felt rather lucid just now-

One thing about me: I used to be terribly critical of other people in that I had/have a hard time listening to anybody without an intense questioning of a person's motivations. I never decided to be critical, it was automatic. And let me tell you, I used to find pure motivation (my own made up standard for acceptable motivation) to be virtually nonexistent. ...either that or I used to just project my own impure motivations onto everyone else. At any rate, I was also big into seeking approval from....everyone, so even while I was hugely critical of character I would still try to be universally well-liked. I used to be so worried about what other people thought of me that if I couldn't say something perfect I'd say nothing at all. And so, I was pretty much set up for social disappointment. I was your model "nice-guy." Well, to an extent, I still am. These are terrible habits that were formed in me (no doubt the result of some childhood trauma...just kidding) and, combined with what used to be my basically virginal and prude-ish personality, I tended towards social gawkiness and, sometimes, self-isolation. We can call this one of my "hang-ups."

Well, I grew a bit between middle and high school and a lot between high school and university. But growth hasn't been automatic. For me, this growth is born (with great pain, as is customary of birth) out of conscious every day determinations to mold my self into something I can respect. Nearing who I want to be has been a painfully slow process. I often battle regression. And I'm afraid I will never be satisfied. Maybe I can at least keep dissatisfaction in check. But my hope will continue to be that I will one day feel like I am completely who I want to be and only ever have to work on maintaining that.

My work is before me. My work is my life, and vice-versa.
I am my work.

I am art and artist. Life is creativity with limits.

This theme has been echoing around in my head for awhile. Case in point, something I wrote in January of this year:

for knowing so clearly what i think will raise the quality of my life, i am terrible at getting what i want. felt like i was getting somewhere for a while there, but then my momentum petered out. still going, but slowly. which might as well be not-at-all, 'cause life seems like it's going to be short. i don't generally regret things because i don't generally have any cause to regret them. but if my present were my past, i think i'd regret it right now. yet i feel attached to this situation, to "my life." not sentimentally attached, but tied down. i don't want to be a "product" of my life. i don't want to do the same things over and over and i don't want to just react. i think this is what disillusioned middle-age must be like. wanting other things in life, yet feeling resigned to your current family, job, friends, lifestyle -- things that pull from you your energy to create and leave you feeling tired and reluctant about life.

i've read it in books and even in song lyrics the idea that a person is an artist and a work of art. you are your medium. make of it what you will. when i think about things this way i feel like i get why some people dress differently, absurdly, or wear ridiculous make-up or get tattoos and piercings or walk with character or do those creative things that no one appreciates in the same way that they themselves do. they are artists. and they are performance art.

i don't think everyone is an artist.

At least my preoccupation with my own self-development is consistent. However, I reject the idea that I am running around in circles and that, as the popular saying goes, I have "come full circle." I patently reject the idea.

I may approach this same idea any number of times, but never do I close a circle in my thinking. Each time, my "angle of approach" is different, if only slightly. So my thinking travels in spirals, not circles. And this is important because I do not believe that all this reflection is worthless. I am going somewhere, if slowly. Spiraling upwards.

I am art and artist. Life is creativity with limits.

"A man’s character is his fate."
~Heraclitus

"In the end, we get what we are."