Clarity

"Oh, grassy glades! oh, ever vernal endless landscapes in the soul; in ye, — though long parched by the dead drought of the earthy life, — in ye, men yet may roll, like young horses in new morning clover; and for some few fleeting moments, feel the cool dew of the life immortal on them. Would to God these blessed calms would last. But the mingled, mingling threads of life are woven by warp and woof: calms crossed by storms, a storm for every calm. There is no steady unretracing progress in this life..."

- Herman Melville, "Moby Dick"

Almost everything I have said sound entirely like something from T.S. Eliot's Lovesong of Alfred Prufrock and it makes a certain sense. Back in the time when I was starting out it was the first thing I was inspired by. A friend sent the poem to me, annotated and excitedly footnoted, and with every forlon statement by Eliot there was also ambiguous humour. It's found in Twain and it's found in Einstein's more irreverent statements. It's the edge of reason, and it is where profound thought not only begins to seem futile, but worthy of the wittiest responses. It is inevitable that seriousness will be met with humour, and that in turn can be met with a snort of contempt or a recognition that after all this whole debacle started from somewhere and we must want to hold onto this life for reasons other than it being profound or beautiful. This is perhaps why I never quite took philosophers seriously to begin with. They lack a certain empathy and sense of humour. And what is life without these things?

The truth might be that all of these things can exist betwixt each other. We might have to forget about all the superfluous details that we seem so eager to possess. The truth might be that the closer we are, and the less we have, the more bound for a greater sense of cause we are. There is such depth of humour, creativity, musical variability, and even scientific genius which is unbounded and does not fit in with existing structures. This is true; too true. The reason I write is that the wolf never gets any praise, and the wild, undaunted poets are never remembered. The storytellers who linger in communities and offer such meaning in the words the unravel, and the musicians who do not remember the name even of the chords they play, but know what they sing. Maybe the reason I write is that we have come so far with our discovery but we never looks inwards so that we could look outside of ourselves. Because when we look inwards we recognise that we are all the same and that this period is just rupture, just us trying to tell ourselves that we can make life our own and be something all by ourselves. 

We have no cause to believe in the ramblings of Rene Descartes or the subjectivity of Sigmund Freud. These ideas which exist only as ideas and thus do have a certain aspect of reality but not full reign. The unconscious merely patterns itself on the world it inhabits and is part of, while the subconscious is- pardon me- a bullshit detector for the inherent madness in human consciousness at this moment. The reader might have wondered at the many varying degrees of mental illness appearing like a spectrum of increasing intensity. Ask yourself the question: what exactly do we think we are doing, and why? And ask the further question: if we all believe ourselves to be individuals and this is not really the case, have we not just spent decades avoiding reality, watching the refracted light appear through some people of what lies intensely glowing beneath surface. This might be true.