familiar?

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1992 // they/them

fascinated with where the veil is thin.

[screamingiminlovewithyou]

what is it about men’s hands. i’m serious. they..

[zerogate]

Prometheus’ fire is symbolic of the main antagonist in Cynic philosophy: nomoi, or conventions. The primary problem with convention, society, or civilization is that it distances us from natural ways of living where we are most free and self-sufficient. This happens not only in a behavioral way, where what we do changes; it also happens in an epistemic way, where the values and concepts that we use to see the world and understand it become artificial and alien to our natural ways of being. In other words, convention might make living naturally seem not only undoable but also unthinkable.

Cynics held that humans have everything they need to live well in their natural bodies, if only they train themselves well (DL VI.70). Beans and vegetables can nourish the body better than cakes and meat. Your body can acclimate to cold and heat, without any need for air conditioning or fire—after all, when the seasons are too extreme, you can move south for heat or north for cold. And when lusting for companionship, you always have your hand. There is nothing that the body cannot satisfy while living in nature. And yet Prometheus and civilization convinced humanity of the lie that they need civilization to live well. Cynics did everything they could to deprogram that lie. Their hero was Herakles (Dio Chrysostom, Or. 8). He wore his own cloak, of finest Nemean design. He carried his own staff, albeit more club-like. And he owned nothing that he could not take on his journeys to slay monsters. He had a purpose. He lived naturally. He was free.

The primary Cynic values are autarkeia and eleutheria, or roughly self-sufficiency and freedom. To flourish in life was to live as a natural human animal, which preserved autonomy and maximized freedom. Cynics judged everything in their lives by this standard. They could ask: Does this character trait, thing, or practice make me freer and more selfsufficient? Negative answers meant leaving that behind. Affirmative answers meant living that with conviction.

-- Andreas Elpidorou (ed.), The History and Philosophy of Boredom

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[funeral]

In the sepulchre of the pale Nazarene, humanity guards its last divinity. Every promise is unfulfilled. There is no light save perchance in death. One torture more, one more throb of the heart, and after it nothing. The grave opens, a little flesh falls in, and the weeds of forgetfulness which soon hide the tomb grow eternally about its vanities. And still the voice of the living, of the just and of the unjust, of kings, of felons and of beasts, will be raised unsilenced, until humanity, unsatisfied as before and yet impatient for the peace which life has disturbed, is tossed at last, with its shattered globe and forgotten gods, to fertilize the furrows of space where worlds ferment.

Edgar Saltus, The Anatomy of Negation

[funeral]

Existential isolation cuts beneath other forms of isolation. No matter how closely we relate to another individual, there remains a final unbridgeable gap. Each of us enters into existence alone and must depart from it alone. Each individual since the dawn of consciousness created a primary self (transcendental ego) by permitting consciousness to curl back upon itself and to differentiate a self from the remainder of the world. Only after that does the individual, now "self-conscious," begin to constitute other selves. Beneath this act . . . there is a fundamental loneliness; the individual cannot escape the knowledge that (1) he constitutes others and (2) he can never fully share his consciousness with others.

Rollo May and Irvin Yalom in Current Psychotherapies, ed. Raymond Corsini