Loving Social Reflections

I had a very nice time tonight. Thank you to KP. It was a delightful evening.

I just love to be around other people.

I very much enjoyed my walk to and fro with my boy RG. We chatted, we purchased, we lived together. It is lovely to live with others. To live and to know that this isn't some silly circus. That this is all we have. Good stuff.

On the walk back Mr. G was able to provide some provocative comments on my current writing project and the reading project that I have chosen to take up. Who knows how to answer those questions. That is why it was so provocative. Because my current writing project isn't yet clear enough. And the way that my current reading applies isn't clear. My current project is alive. It shifts, it breathes as I think.

But I'm a little drunk. So now I will sleep. But thanks again. Dear. Ms. P. Thanks. Dear Mr. G. Thanks. Good night.

I just want to be full of love.

Soon I will write a post that will analyze the progression of my reading and writing over the last year. I think that my reading and writing has followed a certain logic. More specifically, I think that I have been trying to answer certain specific questions, each one leading to the next.

But my biggest question is, What is the big question that underlies all of my smaller questions?

I think the question is this: How do I lead a good life and help others do the same?

I think the answer is this: Transform, become something new.

So the question is this: How do I transform? How do I live a creative and original life?

All of my reading and writing, in one way or another, comes back to this question of personal transformation. I don't know the answer yet.

But I do know what I want the answer to revolve around: love.

I want to love. How do I love?

Social Reflections

Wherever I go
There I am
I am not a stranger
And this is not a strange land

I just roll and flip so hard sometimes in my mind. I feel myself in new places and I ask myself what I'm doing anywhere. I jive with my heart.

In this moment I'm craving very honest and brutal reflection. But can feel myself resisting clear explication of my feelings. I know what I'm feeling. And I'm not sure how I want to express it.

I finally finished Collingwood's The Principles of Art today. I then began writing in Part I.2. I published part I.1 because I felt that it was done and I was moving on to the rest of the project. No doubt, I am. But it has been a weird, solitary day. I did lots of practical things mixed with lots of impractical things. I did laundry and dishes. I ate food. I did lots of writing. I read a little bit of a novel. I cooked dinner. I watched a few tv shows. But I have had very little contact with the outside world, which is weird.

Because I suppose I opened up this post with this poem because of how I feel about my new social life in Seattle. I feel hopeful about it. I feel less shy than I did, less afraid than I did. Not that I was ever terrified or anything. Just that I was uncertain. Now I feel more certain that I'll meet new people and do fun things. But who knows how any of this will end up. It is just so interesting.

I don't want to feel like I'm a stranger in a strange land. Because the only land is my mind. Lol. I hate how solipsistic I am sometimes. I'm not. I swear. But at the same time I really think in terms of my thoughts. I think in terms of how I'm dealing with things. Other people are so important. But can be hard to come by. I suspect that when I go back to work tomorrow my head will be so much less focused on my own head. I just felt my shyness more so when I first started my job, first started my life here. Now I just want to be more assertive, do more things. It is still hard. Waiting will be such a large part of it all. Waiting for everything to happen. Waiting for everything. Waiting to die. Ummmmm. Who knows. I'm just so scattered sometimes. I try to think about my social life or where I'm going or where I am. I'm waiting to become a graduate student. I don't want to do it yet.

It is like the morning of September 7th. I was starting my first day at the U Bookstore. I took a really early bus because I wasn't sure how long it would take. So I got to the ave so early that I had time to go to a coffee shop. I went to Sureshot, a grimy cafe. I had a latte for there. They were playing a song by the band Stars. I knew it. I don't listen to Stars, but I have before. The lyrics went "All I want is one more chance to be young and wild and free." And it occurred to me that perhaps that is what I was doing in Seattle. Perhaps I just wanted to be young, to drink, to talk to strangers. To not care. To be free from something. To be free from myself? To be free from what? From determinism? Who knows. But that moment struck me then, and that moment sticks with me now. I hope I won't forget. September 7th, 2010. Sureshot. Stars. Youthful freedom. How old am I? When will I die?

All TBD. I will continue to wait. But sometimes it feels awfully uncomfortable. Awfully confusing.

Fighting For Love

I’m a lover, not a fighter. I often like this phrase. I often think of myself in this way. But the bottom line is that you have to fight for love. You’ve got to battle yourself and you’ve got to battle the world if you really want to love something and yourself.

The question: what came first, love or war? love or hate? Not the best question, because these things have likely always existed together in the same time and space. Whenever I write phrases like ‘time and space’ I feel so Modern and Western. Not in a good way. Just in the way of being enslaved to certain forms of rhetoric, certain phrases and concepts that serve as the ground for everything else I think. I’m not a physicist. Sometimes I wish I was. But that is enough of that digression. It is just a desire to escape the rhetoric of my time.

My main concern here is that there is a connection, a relationship, an affinity between love and struggle. Zizek talks about this. From what I hear, Plato also talked about it. A few moments ago I finished Mark Lilla’s book The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics. He closed the book by talking about ‘philotyranny’, by which he means that philosophers are inclined to support tyranny. He thinks this is so because the type of mind that is drawn to philosophical work is one that can fall victim to a tyranny within their own mind.

See, with Plato and some of the Greek philosophers, moderation and self-control were the most important things to struggle with. A philosopher’s mind is one that is likely to get carried away with itself. Because philosopher’s are so in love with the truth and with ideas, they have the potential to be carried away by their own ideas. But the thing with Plato is to have a ‘supreme self-awareness’ that prevents you from falling in love and being carried away by your own ideas.

But Mark Lilla seems to be suggesting that all the intellectuals he wrote about fell in love with their own ideas, gave in to the dangers of personal tyranny, and thus supported philosophical tyranny.

So then, if philosophers are those who love love, and love truth, then what do you have to fight for love? You guessed it: yourself. You have to fight your own love of truth and love of love so that you don’t become hateful.

Moderation is such an important lesson that I have yet to really actualize in my own life. But maybe I’m trying? I think I am. But it is hard.

Love and struggle are not dichotomous. They seem to be things that need each other and lead to one another. You’ve gotta fight for love, and struggle so that you don’t hate.

I don’t know if I really believe any of this, or if I really think any of this. But I do have such a curiosity about struggle and love that I want them to be compatible. And Lilla and his writing on Plato, and all of The Reckless Mind, leads me to think that perhaps they are compatible.

Loving Love and Reading About Violence

I am experiencing some tension right now between the themes of my reading and writing. The two themes that are troubling me the most are 1. my focus on zen, acceptance, and love, and 2. my focus on violence, anger, and war.

I’m a very loving person. I want to be a loving person. I like love a lot. I hope I am as loving as I hope I am. But violence occupies so much of my thought and reading, it is a strange predicament.

But generally I am struggling a little bit to feel the coherency of my reading. The most interesting part is that I can feel a coherence. To me my reading is following some kind of logic. I’m moving from book to book and from topic to topic. I think that I am reading in those directions because there are relationships. But it feels so hard for me to peg down or explain what the connections are. I don’t know how to explain what it is that I’m after on the whole. Mainly I guess because lately I am undergoing a lot of changes in my thinking. Lots of new ideas are coming to me.

But interestingly they don’t feel like brand new ideas. They don’t feel like huge turns or shifts. Sometimes there are big shifts. But for the most part I feel like it is growing in complexity and interconnectivity. I feel like there is a unified theme emerging in my mind. Perhaps this is where i feel the tension coming from.

I think the tension is coming from that I am starting to see Zen and love and war and struggle as compatible in some weird way. But this would make sense. I find nihilism to be a very positive thing that is full of a lot of love. I think nihilism somehow feels really good.

I want to be a really positive and loving person. Yet I find myself so preoccupied with questions about violence and struggle. Maybe that is a good thing. I think it is definitely good to identify love and compassion as the major things to come back to. But I also think that it is important to think about war and violence, seeing as how it happens so often.

So in reality I feel like my two major interests, love and war, are very compatible.

But I think this also has to do with the essay that I’m working on. Unfortunately I have not yet settled on a title for this essay. And I’m still in the working stages of it. It seems as if it may have the potential to become quite a large piece of writing. It seems like it could be bringing together quite a lot of my interests. Just as I always try to do, I’m trying to bring together more things than I have before. I don’t like this title I just came up with. Before I had called it ‘Art and Intellectual Insurrection’, I’ve called it ‘The Artist and the Will to Empathy’. Right now I just came up with ‘Art, Zen, and Intellectual Insurrection: Finding Personal and Social Change Through an Expressive Existence’. Whatever. I am getting at some things in this essay. I want to talk about art as a way to live a better life and potentially as a way to life a politically and socially meaningful life. I want artists to somehow change culture for the better. And I want Zen to be a thing. But all of this is so out of wack. Neuroplasticity, Zen, history, war and violence, Collingwood, Foucualt, Zizek, Searle, all these things and people are coming together for me in this essay. I can only feel it bubbling though. My writing is still at such an early stage. But I’m gonna do it soon. Because I think this will help me reconcile a lot of the interests that are feeling disjointed at this point.

Doesn't Everyone Just Want Everyone/Someone to Love Them?

So I was just thinking about a few things. For one thing, I was looking at an online dating website where there is a section called "I Saw U." People go on this section and they write about how they saw someone in a certain part of the city and they say things like "oh I was walking on such and such street and saw you with your such and such dress and you looked great and we smiled but I didn't say hello. Lets hang out." Or they say something like "oh I was at this concert and we danced together but you left before I could get your name. Lets get coffee?"

It is basically a place where people can vent the frustrations that come from having fantasies of attractive people. What they are like. What they do. Who they are. How great it would be to know them. How great would it be to know them?

Not knowing people, yet seeing them, is so strange. All those clothes and styles. All that presentation and allure.

This also reminded me of a novel that I read a while ago. But I seriously cannot remember what it was. Maybe it was a short story. But in any case it is bothering me.

But the idea expressed in the fiction was this: that everyone wanted someone who would love them and care for them, and that there were so many hundreds of thousands of people in this world, that everyone should love everyone and someone. But people didn't want everyone to love them. That there were all these people who could satisfy each other's loneliness, but that that isn't how it goes.

How are there so many people in the world, and so many of them potentially lonely, yet so few of them able to find each other? What comes between these people? What prevents them from finding one another and feeling less lonely? At the very least they could feel alone together. Which sounds better.

This part of this website reminds me of what it is like to see beautiful strangers that you think you want to know. And that makes me think of how concepts get in the way of people. We think people are beautiful, or that their clothes or hair are great, that they look charming or exciting. People look certain ways.

But when we get to know someone do they still look those ways to us? Yeah, I guess people can still look certain ways when you get to know them. But it is different from how they look when we don't know them.

What I'm getting at is that when we actually meet someone they feel a certain way. They don't just look certain ways, they feel like something. They have a palpable shape in our lives and in our minds. Something about simulation and mental modeling.... People feel a way in my mind.

But I dunno. I find it all very odd and frustrating. The masses of people all around me and the difficulties of getting to know them.

I also wish that I could remember who wrote this thing that I'm thinking of. Who wrote about this loneliness that no one is assuaging. Why don't all these lonely people come together?

Because it is too easy to say what you don't like. Too easy to say that this or that person isn't your type or whatever.

This was a spur of the moment post. Who knows what I'm talking about.

Oh and then I googled all the novels I have read recently, which isn't many, and found the passage. It is from Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart, which is probably my favorite novel I have read this year. Great novel.

If you care to search on google books, you can find the passage on page 179 of Sputnik Sweetheart.

Why do people have to be so lonely? Why do people have to not connect with each other? Why is it so hard to feel close to other people? Lots of reasons. I suspect language and mental modeling have something to do with it. Depersonalization, as a super loose idea. Who knows. But I want more connections. Maybe I should be more talkative and loving. I already am I think. But maybe I should be pushing myself harder to be loving and talkative.

Here I go.