After new lights

Let’s say that a door-to-door bible salesman has come down with a mysterious tropical disease and is now on the brink of death. Let’s say that we visit this salesman on his sick bed, which shall soon be his death bed. We note that, while writhing in agony, amid his moans, the man keeps murmuring a constant stream of invective. What is he saying? His speech is not clear enough for us to discern its content. WHY is he talking? WHO does he think he is addressing? WHAT is his message? Does this poor, sick, failing soul expect that the noise of his rant will reach an audience; will be comprehended; will even possibly live on, after his death?

One might answer: No, this man is just mumbling incoherently; he has no urgent communication, no secret warning, no gospel or philosophy to propound. He’s simply failing: he’s aflame with fever and probably hallucinating; so he’s like a somnambulist, talking in his sleep. His words are no more articulate than the growling of a beast. He’s babbling compulsively, automatically, without aim or intent beyond passing the blank before Lady Luck mutes him.

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I do not mention this depressing hypothetical for the purpose of developing a character in an upcoming play about a door-to-door bible vendor who visits the tropics and succumbs to a mysterious disease before even getting the chance to make one single sale. No, I only wanted to focus in on the salesman’s garbled frenzy, his breathless babble, to emphasize that this is exactly, exactly, exactly the way that I myself write in this public-private diary; thus, this is also the way that readers should take my transmissions.

It’s a pink plastic diary, with a broken gold lock in the shape of a heart, which glows. And I’m hoping to make a few sales before I expire.

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Speaking of expiry, I heard that one of the social networks is on its last leg: is this true?—is Google Plus about to fail? I heard that there was a massive security breach last Tuesday night (the ninety thousandth such breach to occur this fine year 2018), so the company decided to knife itself in the head. At the moment I write this, the network is still breathing, albeit with a death rattle; so I snapped a screen shot of my own page there (which I never use), to frame as a keepsake. So I’ll share it here – that way I won’t have to make a new image for this undeserving entry.

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[Pictured above: my JEE PLUS ULTRA page
before it died.]

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By the way, I only titled this entry “After new lights” because I wrote it after we installed the new lights in our playroom.

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And I just realized that I have not yet officially begun the entry. I got sidetracked by the story of the babbling bible-seller, which I only included as a set-up to explain my text’s lack-of-image. So, here now, I’ll start the entry proper:

Dear diary,

No reason. Forget reason. To love reason is to cheat on our free will.

But is free will against reason? Isn’t there an area on the map of action where free will and reason overlap? Yes, so it’s OK to find that your deeds coincided with reason, so long as you took no mind of reason while acting.

I am aware of the funniness of this attempt to reason thru to a reason-free expanse. We reasonable people are uncommonly jovial.

I awoke thinking: If humankind vanishes, what will have been our accomplishments? Will anything that we’ve brought about live on? And I thot about poetry. About the lesson learned from the palm at the end of the mind (in Wallace Stevens’ “Of Mere Being”):

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

And I thot further: THIS is the thing that will live on, after men go extinct. This poem. Especially if we etch it into a rock. Then some future species of alien creatures will find it.

But they won’t be able to read it. So it’ll just look like chicken scratch to them. (They understand the idiom chicken scratch because every species has chickens.) And this made me think about the Supreme Court Justices, and how people say:

“I like Judge So-&-So because he follows the Constitution, plain & simple; he just reads what it says, & he rules that way. He doesn’t try to CHANGE the Constitution.”

Now these same aliens who succeed us will find our Constitution as unintelligible as Wallace Stevens’ “Of Mere Being”; cuz, as Duchamp always sez, The viewer completes the work. Any artwork remains unfinished until a creative perceptor comes along and completes the masterpiece. For the exchange is made in the mind. The RELATIONSHIP is all. Otherwise we have just objects and subjects, and everything’s atomized and sad. Dull, boring: self-shackled.

So priests who say “I teach the Bible, plain and simple” are like those Justices who claim to be strictly obedient readers of law: unbiased receptacles into which the Constitution may be poured. They’re false lying con artists: deceivers. For words do not read themselves. Each reader’s mind completes the Bible. Each Judge’s mind fleshes out the Constitution.

But we all must agree on a set of guidelines before communication can occur; so we individually bow to language’s grammar & syntax, which are communal sports—we voluntarily play by the rules of these games, so as to be able to express our deep-personal selves more fully and strange. Everything is a payoff. That’s why the upcoming aliens got nothing from our rock: they didn’t bother to learn our lovely language – you put IN no effort, you get OUT no blessing.

But if following reason is like chaining yourself to a thunder-lizard, so that you’re forced to go wherever the beast wants to wander, then what is the state of pure, free will to be likened unto? What is volition? Even if, as we said above, it inadvertently overlaps reason, it is not bound to reason – is it? Is will a type of reason, a sort of lizard of its own? And is the attraction of reason for volition similar to the attraction of a large lizard to a little one?

I mean, if there’s a God, then the purpose of life is to please this God. But that’s like being a slave. No one wants that. So let’s assume there is no God. Now what? Are we devoid of purpose? I say no: we now get to manufacture our own purpose. But this act of purpose-making is indistinguishable from a meaningless life, for many minds; because to know that you yourself devised your own purpose, your own meaning, your own life-path, is like trying to fall in love with a tailor’s dummy: you must invest this mate with the personality that you desire to be beguiled by; and it’s hard to beguile the world’s inmost arch-devil, because one’s source is privy to all one’s tricks.

In the end, we want to ride. We don’t want to drive. We want to be fastened into a roller coaster that was built by an off-the-rails architect. We want the ride to be safe, but we want the ride to be scary. We want the feeling of unpredictability, of spontaneous danger, of “anything can happen!”—yet we want to be able to ride this same ride again—& then again & again, so that we can learn all its curves. Feel the sensation of falling; then master this fear. Repetition leads to recognition and eventually expectation, which shrivels into boredom: this is the way that we toggle between anxiety and mastery.

So I just scientifically proved why being a genius is so tedious. But, still, nobody wants to be a second-rate soul or mere slave to the elements. (Actually we all secretly yearn to remain in slavery, which is why we worship God: we atheists most of all, for we don’t even let WORDS sully our Ineffable.) No, slavery is for the birds. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and the birds roll thru it like a coaster. They ride the high country. We devils go wherever our free-will drags us. That’s why they call us fallen angels. Fuck flying: we FALL. That way we know exactly where we’re headed. Straight down. Altho it’s ever the same trip, at least it’s our volition that’s manning the fuselage.

But that’s why God, alias Doom, put us in checkmate by crafting Hell: for it’s a bottomless pit; that way we’re forced to swerve while falling, and this swerving is basically our old familiar roller coaster turned on its side. So you can’t escape freedom. You can’t outrun your own velocity. Your natural romance is a cage called WILL. Even in total freefall, your atoms interpret themselves as floating in space, spinning in semi-fixed orbits: and everything appears regular, even harmonious; which is why those lizards who inhabit your inwards call your spheres’ discord “music”.

P.S.

Who’d have ever thot that, once humankind invented a way to record & display audiovisual phenomena, the most popular teleplay subject would be monsters! Back before movies existed, I was always afraid of them. The last thing I wanted was to film them. But when motion pictures invaded time & space, kapow: monsters sprang up everywhere. (Like mushrooms on the corpse of an honest priest.) Nowadays we are not limited to fearing the potential presence of hideous monsters, but we can actually witness them creeping about and harassing people.

I wonder why we didn’t proceed in the opposite direction. I mean, instead of trying to scare ourselves more, I wonder why we didn’t try to lift up our spirits: inspire ourselves to achieve more harmonious living. — Where’s the cinematic equivalent of wisdom literature? (HINT: If you answer, “Here it is,” or “There it is,” or cite this or that movie, I’ll only reply: That’s not strong enough.)

When he was demanded by the Church Fathers, when the kingdom of God should come, Jesus answered them and said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, ‘Lo here!’ or, ‘Lo there!’ for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
     And he said unto the disciples, “The days will come, when ye shall desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and ye shall not see it. And they shall say to you, ‘See here’; or, ‘See there’: go not after them, nor follow them. For as the lightning, that lighteneth out of the one part under heaven, shineth unto the other part under heaven; so shall also the Son of man be in his day.” (Luke 17:20)

P.P.S.

Another thing we talked about at my mom’s on Saturday, yet again, was what time we all hit the hay. It was 9:30 p.m. and my brother said, “Wow it’s 9:30 already; we should probably be getting going,” meaning that he and his wife should now leave the party and try to get some sleep at their own house, because they recently became the brand-new parents of a tiny little baby who cries all the time cuz it wants to be fed: it does not yet keep regular hours like a proper businessperson.

And I said, “It’s 9:30, really? I’m normally asleep by now.” And my mom gasped and clutched her pearls and said:

“You really go to sleep so early, Bryan?”

And I said, “Yeah, normally, by now I’d have been asleep for one half-hour already. Cuz I go to bed at 9. But I wake up early: I’m usually up at 3 or 4, doing work.” Then someone else gasped & said:

“You have to begin working that early?”

& I said, “No, I don’t have to: I want to. I’d rather spend time writing than sleeping. I hope they don’t therefore revoke my citizenship.”

Then someone up in the balcony said: “You claim that you spend your time writing. Well then WHAT do you write?”

& I said, “Nothing. Just blog entries. I have no plans for more books, & I wouldn’t pursue any other serious writing anyway, at this point, because I think my mind is fried.”

Then someone said: “You mean you ended up frying your brain with DRUGS!?!?”

And I said, “No, I’ve never done drugs. I mean I’m fried mentally because this world has no appeal for me anymore, and I hold no appeal to this world either. It’s all so obvious where everything’s going. There’s no hope left. It’s clear that money-culture won the day. I’m now biding my time writing blog posts that no one will read, just to run out the clock. We’ll all be in jail or dead soon. Or worse: hospitalized. And those who aren’t thrust into the direst poverty will prove to be the dullest souls hitherto. For that’s how humans have shown that they prefer to organize themselves: Instate a system that lures the least creative beings to the top. It’s like we’re trying to weed out divinity from our species. Cast the spirit into torment. Apotheosize la cucaracha.”

And I said a lot of other things, too, which left everyone with the sweetest dreams that evening.