Tired, sticky, and panting, I barely made it through the crowd just to catch my breath outside. Almost two years ago, I would play nervously to a very embarrassing fraction of this insane bodycount, a double digit denominator, maybe? I was lighting a cigarette against the paint-chipped wall of a frequented and endearingly dingy bar and scanning every face to find yours.
Maybe it’s selfish ––– but in the deepest, sludgefest, messiest crevice of my heart, I knew that more than anything, playing and singing things I wrote at a very depressing time in my life to an ever-changing mix of people is no longer as cathartic as it once was, because at one point, to me, it was all self-expression, and there was a time I knew this was my only self-defense against the temptation of self-combustion altogether: I was telling a very sad story that happened to be true, which happened to be mine, and it was the only way I knew how to say it and the only way I could have bounced back. Every time I listen to the words come out of my mouth, I would feel all the wounds close up a little bit. And now, it’s bizarre how what once was doesn’t really mean much to me, except what it brought to me in the long run.
After years dedicated to broadcasting my sadness, I realized all my scars were simply smoothed over and shiny and now exist to be cautionary tales ––– my aversion to emotional intimacy has been so fierce and unrelenting in the way it gnaws at my psyche and snarls at the glimmer of anything possibly good. My loneliness was the only constant, so much that it became a part of consciousness, something I’d only notice if I really thought about, like a comfy pair of socks, and I hid behind it because I knew that if I put myself out there ––– there are no take backs, no reset buttons, I forgot how to do this, disappointment is inevitable, and I am beyond repair, and either way constantly dream of being away ––– constantly giving into the impulse to run and fly out not knowing exactly what I’m running from, picking up the sticks of the devil once more, being ensnared by the bottom of wine bottles, anything that got me out of my own head was warmly welcome, even when it destroyed me, mostly when it destroyed me. Bumping faces with people I hardly knew, people I knew so well, to fill some void like it didn’t matter to me when all I wanted was to be liked beyond expectation and notoriety, which grosses me out each time I acknowledge it. Then I look in the mirror and remember I’m really no different from the thirteen year old piece of shit who ate lunch alone and refused the band-aid of someone to talk to.
Although it’s nice –– I looked at you and I felt the noise in my head disappear, and I stared at you talking animatedly from a distance. You waved back and took a drag and I processed all of this in a split second, when I realized happiness sincerely is a choice, and proceeded to walk in your direction.
Ever since I was younger, I’ve always found myself to be kind of self-aware to a fault. It’s kind of gross. I was quiet, but a know-it-all. When I was in grade school, I was pretentious, a smart-ass, I argued with a bunch of teachers fruitlessly –– the bulk of that stemming from feeling like I was too smart for religion class. Being too aware for the mandates of Catholic school society, whether that meant teachers who are paid to teach by the book, or high school girls dictating what was or was not cool.
Looking back, I’m pretty grossed out. I’m in a state of constant, silent disgust, but it’s mostly just internalized and bubbling and seeping out into the world. Intelligence is diligence, I think, way more than anything. I looked down on people who probably didn’t have the time to read, because they were probably having way more fun than me. It’s nice to feel like I’ve graduate from being a shit person, and to be aware of it. Or maybe I haven’t. I think I changed the most when, after periods of eating lunch either alone or surrounded by people who just didn't want to be alone, I made the weird subconscious choice to hang out with a girl who challenged me to think of myself and how I evaluated company ––– I never seemed to want to learn anything from anyone. I was always distant, because I felt I was fine on my own. I thought I could internalize everything, every single thought, and thought life was a bore, people were boring, school was boring, and I was okay keeping to myself because I had nothing to glean from anything or anyone else.
But then this girl (who I’ve known since I was 9, when she sent me my first email), she opened up the world, she schooled me intensively on things I didn’t even bother to know, she taught me how to be human, what empathy really felt like, what a struggle really was, how to laugh at yourself, that life isn’t about commanding respect so much as earning it, how to read (or truly savor) a book, how to carefully assess the beauty of the universe and how small of specks we really were in the general scheme of things. I allowed myself to love because I was sure that she did love me even a little. That was a part of me I can’t deny, even when it was intensely personal and private, I cannot deny her. But it feels so far away from me now, like a dream. And I can’t help but remember how it was, and I would definitely do it again, but I can only fondly look back because we’re hardly the same people, no longer high schoolers on the run from real life, real life crept on and caught us by the heels, and things definitely aren’t black and white as I thought they were.
——————————————-
I’m very happy. I’ve never been closer to my family, I’m studying what I like, I’m currently on break, I have work later today, and I just had my mom’s old restaurant’s espresso machine restored after 7 years in storage after that whole deal with bankruptcy. I am constantly humbled by my job, the people I work with, how I work in one of the busiest places in the country (shudder) and serve people of all walks of life. I applied to a record store/cafe (stocked with things I could only afford if I sold my kidney) a couple of months ago, because I don’t like having too much free time at the expense of my sanity. A year ago, I was a liberal arts student in a school full of people exactly like me, privileged, judgmental, politically-correct smartasses, and now I’m a music major in an art school (eyeroll) which pushes me further into the realm of probably never having enough money ––– so what the fuck am I gonna do when this all blows over?
Is anyone ever really unique in a world where art is so accessible and everyone is trying to be someone? Will people really like my music as long as I make it? I never questioned myself, because I felt like I knew myself more than others, like that’s even a good thing ––– but most times I would sit in bed wondering if I really knew myself at all. I didn’t really know what I wanted a couple of months ago, but I wanted to challenge myself, and here we are. I work four times a week, and close the shop. It has taught me way more than school. People always ask me why I’m studying music if I already chose it. I have a record out, I play relatively often, and got started pretty early. I’d be lying if I didn’t think I was in a comfortable and enviable position as a musician, as a teenager, as a human being in messy, chaotic Manila. I am doing and studying what I love for money, but how much do I really love it? What kind of overblown ego sells their personal experience, and why do I still feel like the smallest person in the world? When I make coffee for people I don’t know and most possibly will never see again, I realize who I want to be. Not making coffee for the rest of my life really, or even making music, or even writing ––– but a good human being. What isn’t a big deal for me is a huge deal for the people I work with ––– and some of the most healing conversations are born out of pure curiosity, the cashiers are two ladies I talk to often about very random things: more than the availability of the older, harder-to-account-for records, or some random dude’s order, but about family, and getting home, and lives so different from mine, just trying to get by where minimum wage probably means nothing but is the only way to survive. I get to bond with them a bit more than the lazy coked-up people I go to class with, and while sharing a shift one of them told me she used to work for Bibingkinitan and she’d recall how they had so much business on Christmas. I remembered how my dad would drive all the way from the south to bring us bibingka while we studied so many years ago, but around this time of the year. Now she works at a high-end store indulging Filipino hipsters who have no idea what to do with their money. I can’t help but be proud. I mean, it’s not really a big deal, a jump from a stall to a different form of transactional comfort, but I can’t help but feel for her the kind of happy I could never feel for myself.
Fluorescent boxes dot surrounding structures, each far and beyond my reach –– behind them, stories I've never heard, people I'll never see, a network of light and sound and safety. Looking far off into the distance, these boxes become dots, all overwhelmingly distant and close. An organized form of the subjective, unquantifiable and silent notion of home.
I'm watching from my own box of light, carved into the crumbling concrete I've embraced my whole life. Often, I stare at the flurry of headlights that line the swathes of road beside me, hundreds of thousands of people pass by me every day, and I always try to humanise beyond the layers of glass that separate us. The badly planned grid of a city is a collective home, and every now and then I have urge to feel it more than ever.
Each trip inside the elevator feels like a thirty second catharsis, a two-way metal box of a portal that opens into the world and back home, and I get to be alone with my thoughts, even when I'd rather not be. Situations call for being pressed against other people making their own trips down, but ultimately still feeling alone when I realize that while I may live a few walls or ceilings away, I've never held a real conversation with anyone in this building. This is where I realize that distance is measured not by kilometers or inches, and intimacy is hardly ever proximity.
Not hidden, but tucked in ––– deep in the recesses of the day and mind, where I don’t look or notice, where the subconscious forms a habit of simultaneously digging and sealing ––– where people see but don’t touch, hover but don’t discuss, observe and realize that cooperation isn’t attempting to fix but understanding the process and notions of repair, unspoken.
–––
I’ve come to consider and question what common sense is.
That is, not in the vein of Aristotle or Descartes’ unraveling of human consciousness and the like, but my father’s ability to relegate the cause of most of my mistakes to a lack of common sense ––– what it really means, and what separates it from prejudice or superstition, even myth.
There’s the obvious: don’t play with fire, don’t talk to strangers, preparation is better than a panacea, etcetera. I suppose the human race has suffered through enough collectively to feel the need to pass these along, so is my inability to consciously abide just disrespect, not just to my father, but also me spitting in the face of being born in an era where the lines have been drawn and the boundaries of discovery marked off? Where Icarus had drowned, could I have swam?
––––
Can anyone ever really be truly objective?
Where does humanity and demographic intersect? How would you find the strange in strangers if they remained so? Beyond the swathes of asphalt, grass and ocean that separate us all, not to mention concrete, glass, fabric, skin ––– what separates two people more than the direction they choose?
My sister and I are junctions in the crossroads of a failed marriage. My mother and father simply looked outwards and decided to move accordingly, in predetermined courses that were set from the day my mother’s mother instilled the value of empathy and spontaneity in her from the bottom a pot of shared soup, and my father’s father took a belt to show him pragmatic decisions are made to avoid pain ––– the differences only became irreconcilable at a certain point in time (hint: 1999). That it ever happened only reflects in our last names and our birth certificates, and it only ever really manifests in the car rides back and forth.
––––
The inevitability of loss is tricky. (Or so they say.)
What you don’t experience shapes you as much as what you do, but you can’t be broken up about losing something you’ve never felt or touched or seen. Sometimes imagining what could’ve been also restricts what could be ––– it’s nice to think about, a regular Board Game Sunday, annual ridiculous studio portraits, or maybe just the absence of the necessary territorial weekend arrangements and tuition disputes ––– there’s more to family than that I believe, the garden that has grown in the rift between is the happiness my parents would have never had if they had stayed together.
It’s common sense to want the pre-packaged, Hallmark version of stability, and I always thought that marriage and higher forms of commitment were wastes of time until I saw you dressed in caution tape and thought you were lovely, still. It was long ago, and so far away from me now. Every now and then, I find myself wondering if I’d ever look in your direction again, but I honestly don’t know where that is anymore. It’s common sense to just ask, but it’s also common sense to stay away. And that’s what worries me about common sense, it’s been tried and tested to produce the better choice, but there’s no guarantee about it being the right choice ––– so maybe if I take the supposed road less traveled and live my life the way I do without the slightest conscious consideration of where you’ll respectively be, maybe then we’ll find that we were moving in different directions towards each other anyway, maybe I’ll find you again.
Here I am, rooted around, caught in the sound and fury of a mouth shut, its reactionary corners. Of empty blanks and whatever the head and heart conjure in tandem. Pride on a platter, unloading that gun, veins in a tangle, blood in a rush, find me kneeling ––– breaking the habits that dot life as patterns, remembering devotion is less acquiescence, more understanding. Empty-handed, eternally grasping. Pale.
Your imagination makes for a comfy pedestal. Prismatic. Minds spin with the second-hands. Aching to be whole, insofar as wholeness goes, do I pick up the pieces or sow them as they gather dust in the bedside drawer?
Don’t contour the map of my life to your footsteps. Never leave keys for me under the mat. I don’t accept pretty words as emotional currency. You can meet me at the convenience store, you know which one. Buy a pack of menthols, a Twix bar, four beers, two paper cups, and sit on the curb. Sit beside me. Watch the roads fill up and wait on the framing light if you really want to see how I feel. Proximity is not the opposite of distance, at least not now.
Hi. I haven't been particularly lonely, at least not at this point in the past. Sure, I'm alone most of the time - which I usually enjoy. It may be habit or preference, but something that once was an inconvenience has proven to be a great skill as I've hit adulthood (or what my mother would call infinite puberty). I used to be extremely and undeniably lonely, searingly so. I wouldn't call it self-imposed, but something about the nature of how I preferred to spend my time and what interested me growing up always seemed to alienate people to the point of me being a little private, wary and initially standoffish (as you will preferably know and hopefully won't mind). But life has put me in my place, time and time again, and I’ve been broken into being open and to knowing I was a little shit.
I can only imagine who you are or why you are here, are you a longtime friend? Are you someone who I identify with on a viscerally intense level or do we barely even speak? Are you chancing upon this for the first time? Are you reading this as a totally neutral stranger with no idea we have been scheduled by the workings of the world to engage in shenanigans (yes) in the distant or close future?! (i.e. "this is a dumb article that made me think of you ––”, shopping for pens, healthy discussion on what radio station to patronize at the moment, tandem sneering)
Either way, from past, future, or present: here's to the hopefully exciting and pleasant (but sometimes exhausting, sometimes uncomfortable?) exercise of dealing with each other. I have not been good at dealing with anything. Recently (or yes, at this point in the past, this could be yesterday or a year ago) I've been trying to figure it all out, readying myself for what would really constitute commitment, devotion, or company on a more pragmatic scale. I have fucked up so many times. I hope you have too. I hope you know it’s okay to fuck up. I hope you remind me of the same thing.
I always seem to find myself either completely enthralled to the point of hypnosis or half out the door, both horrible extremes. I'm terribly fickle and moody. My attitude towards being in a relationship shifts from (would have "harmless" shots with attractive stranger) to (wouldn't even touch flirtation with a 10-foot pole). When I find myself drawn to someone enough to even consider anything more than a kiss or a conversation, it often opens up a whole treasure trove of insecurity, misplaced anger, vulnerability, denial, the propensity to both eyeroll and give in to flush, to space out and cackle, etc, the works.
I can also only imagine what attracts me to you. Do you smell like fabric conditioner like I always fantasized since childhood? You can be good-looking, but god forbid you smell horrible. Do you have endearingly large teeth? Do you like to crinkle your nose, and how do you explain what compels you to live? How do you feel about fast food? Do you care about me wearing sweatpants to the grocery and will you let me wander in the guise of finishing faster or follow me to the cheese aisle? What do you think about making out next to the old lady by the cereal and being above propriety? Can you look me straight in the eye and tell me what your childhood tastes like? Do you want to know what I taste like?
I always used to make lists about what I wanted in a lover. (I saw one I made when I was thirteen and it said: “must not laugh at my retainers, must not tell me not to play Heroes of Might and Magic, and must listen to good music”, but what good music is probably the opposite of what I honestly liked when I was thirteen.) Idealization always seemed to resonate with me, considering I watched a shitload of 90's/00's teen dramas and listened to sappy music 99% of the time. I will never admit out loud that I’ve always wanted to be swept off my feet, but I might admit that I have never had the chance allow to myself the fantasy. It’s strange to want and expect specific things. I don’t think that’s healthy. I want to be taken by surprise, and I want you to show me things I’ve never seen. I want you to describe the world you live in and how it shaped you. I want to know what got you through bad days. People will ask what makes you special and I will never even consider it, because the idea of the ordinary not being as beautiful ––– is such bullshit. How do you tie your shoes? What makes you cry? Is decency rewarding to you? Is obscurity alluring to you and in what sense? Are you looking for a specific feeling? There is charm in the unknown, there is charm in perfectly human qualities: respect, kindness, courage ––– that don't reflect in whatever the hell you wear or look like or listen to. I ask a lot of questions, and your mannerisms and your genetics and your upbringing and the cocktail of you could intoxicate me in a shotgun swallow or tiny sips, and I am a stumbly drunk.
Here is another list to skim through or skip: I am ridiculously passive, diplomatically dismissive, dense, easily frightened, flighty, indecisive, incredulously fond of making lists and putting myself down to a certain degree that won't preclude calling myself satan, combined with a self-righteous pride and a contradictory streak that has caused a lot of trouble. I have flaws you will nitpick, and I will annoy you with denial. But I will never condemn you for anything other than squeezing the toothpaste at the middle. I will always believe what you are capable of. I will always give you the benefit of the doubt, even if doubt is in surplus. I will never lie to you. I will always be open to compromise. I will always try to understand you. To value your opinion. To not jump to conclusions. To make things work even when all I want to do is pretend you don't exist, and to be patient even when you feel like pretending I don't. Because somewhere, you exist, we breathe the same air, and time and space and will conspire to bring me to you and vice versa in some way that we recognize each other as more than disposable pieces of flesh. Maybe I'll meet you ten years from now, maybe we've already met, maybe the vestigial remnant of my pretentious and obnoxious 18 year old self’s exercise in hypotheticals will have you shaking your head, or maybe this will remind you of a better time ––– or you may be reading this thinking of the first time you did. At some point in this plane of existence, whether rationally or irrationally, even if I don’t want to, I will give in, I will give in so easily, and I hope you love me for the furrow of my brow as much as the dimple on my cheek. I hope you love me not consumingly, but in a way that makes you feel whole as well.
Even if you're just an idea in my head, past/future me will always love you in the way that I should have always loved ––– I am constantly trying to better myself, to grow and heal, so I can be ready to love someone completely the way I never did. I don't want to be selfish enough to continue to follow through with things I know won't really fit. I am currently at the borders of teenage naiveté and the hollowed brink of adulthood. I'm writing this for myself and you so I may better understand what it means to truly be capable of loving someone wholeheartedly only when I've grown to realize how that could be. So rest assured that I won't/don't love you because of loneliness, but because of you, whoever you are, and I hope you love me back, and I hope I know what love really means by then.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
–– George Santayana
There is much to ponder over the existence of humankind, or at least the modern humankind we identify with anatomically, merely a dot or a speck in a timeline of the multi-billion year existence of the Earth. According to Richard Dawkins’ chronicle of human life, The Ancestor’s Tale, this period of time is said to be anywhere from 160,000 to 200,000 years, and if carbon dating is to be believed, if historians, biologists, and archaeologists ––– (experts) are to be believed ––– we have undergone and are still undergoing a significant and constant evolution as a species since the documented origin of life on Earth: an estimated 4 billion years ago.
Putting these figures into perspective: estimates that we as a species have been scrambling to make ––– out of a constant and insecure urge to grasp, touch, and search for tangible evidence all in further attempts to rationalize our existence, the modern man has been around for 0.000005 percent of life’s existence on Earth, at least relative to “time”: hinged on man’s own meticulous nature to compartmentalize and organize the abstract into the digestibly familiar and immediate ––– thus revolutions become years, a rotation is a day further broken down into clockwork and circular motion enough to feel a sense of routine and home in this Earth.
A cyclical theory of time is explained by Kimberly Hutchings in Chris Hughes’ ominously titled The Recycling of Time and the End of History to be contingent on retrograde.
“[…]based on classical cosmology, where all aspects of the world are temporally organized in a cyclical pattern of birth and death, rise and fall, growth and decay, and structured in relation to the movement of the planets.”
Yet the question remains: did the laws of Physics conspire that we may be able to exist? Are we vain enough to believe that the universe and subsequently the Earth was premeditated and created to house us and that we are then the predetermined pioneers of this universe? Or is this penchant for rationalization just a coping mechanism to cushion the blow at the thought of our existence being merely incidental?
Taking all of this into consideration, in hindsight, even with mankind’s gradual evolution ––– morally and intellectually, coupled with insistence on relentless discovery, documentation, and analysis that has arguably led to the foundation of civilization and history (as we know it) over the course of the 200,000 years that have come to pass, the presence of mistakes and innovation withstanding –– what is it in the nature of mankind that causes history to constantly repeat itself?
Dawkins laments on this, framing it with the musings of Mark Twain on human patterns in history:
“This appetite for pattern affronts those who insist that, as Mark Twain will also be found to have said, 'History is usually a random, messy affair', going nowhere and following no rules. The second connected temptation is the vanity of the present: of seeing the past as aimed at our own time, as though the characters in history's play had nothing better to do with their lives than foreshadow us.”
Explanation comes in cautionary tales. It has been said numerous times: do not overreach, curb curiosity and know your place. Christianity’s origin story says as much ––– Adam and his manifested ribcage and/or wife, Eve, fell out of God’s favor due to the trickery of what would now be considered a snake piquing their interest in the only thing they couldn’t question, and thus eating from the tree of forbidden fruit, they then felt shame. The Greeks, through the tale of Pandora (created by Zeus to be the first woman) and her inquisitive opening of a box that simply contained all the ills of the world had the same kind of moralistic and puritanical tone. Of course, many more exist ––– Noah’s ark, the story of Icarus, Midas’ touch, etc. The inevitable and insatiable sense curiosity has driven us into a penchant for wars, greed, opulence, a thirst for power, yet after the same cycles (tradition vs. progress, class struggles, the death of high civilizations: Babylon, Rome, Egypt, etc.), consequently the thought leads to history itself serving as warning. Dawkins opines: “the historian is tempted to scour the past for patterns that repeat themselves[…].”
In Muqaddimah, normally translated as The Introduction to History (1377), Ibn Khaldun – Muslim philosopher, notable pioneer of sociology and the cyclical theory of history also wrote:
“History is an art of valuable doctrine, numerous in advantages and honourable in purpose; it informs us about bygone nations in the context of their habits, the prophets in the context of their lives and kings in the context of their states and politics, so those who seek the guidance of the past in either worldly or religious matters may have that advantage.”
It could then be said that if committing the same mistakes is a given –– the wheres and the whens and simple matter of fact causes and effects now observable by paper documentation, the follow through is described as what Imadaldin Al-Jubouri in the History of Islamic Philosophy divides Ibn Khaldun’s theory into two: the “historical manifest and the historical gist.” History should then no longer be considered simply the chronological record of important events, but also the examination and scrutiny of context: social behavior, political ideology and setting, environments ––– and what that could tell us about human social life, then and in general, “deal[ing] with civilization, savagery and tribalism, with the various ways in which people obtain power over each other, and their results, with states and their hierarchies and with the people’s occupations, lifestyles, sciences, handicrafts and everything else that takes place in that environment under various circumstances.”
Why then, at least when confronted with our own burdens, things tragically familiar in Philippine and third-world society: the constant re-election of crooks and Midas’ emulations that result in consequent and constant overthrows as fallbacks, the inescapable influence of our former captors, the inability to rise from poverty, the endless relegation to workingman roles in society and this world in general that don’t seem to alienate us enough (whether in factories or foreign states) do we notice these blatant patterns but find ourselves (as history has come to show) unable to shake them? How do we build towards anything with the raking thought of inevitability at the back of our collective head?
The Four Noble Truths in Buddhism paint a picture of cyclical suffering in the idea of the Samsara. A Boddhitsava is an ordinary being who walks in the way of Buddha, aspiring towards the path of enlightenment, yet we as beings constantly experience return without choice where birth and death do not mark the beginning nor end of existence and just wandering from womb to womb is the nature of it all. Enlightenment, in essence, defined as the wish to end this cycle: in whatever life we lead, we experience some sort of suffering (pain, separation from loved ones, sickness, ineptness, error), but the true suffering is constant rebirth the endlessness of it all, the inability to end the prison of constant suffering inseparable from happiness ––– thus enlightenment is the ability to separate ourselves, hence complete aversion and liberation of the mind from attachment is the key. Understanding is then the goal. Picking this apart even more, we are then tasked to just accept and take humanity and inevitable failings as they are. What then do we accept, that the thirst for education, discovery, explanations, and rationales and the futures we constantly build are for naught and simply put: futile?
Do we subscribe then, to what Dr. Chris Hughes says to be Aristotelian and Machiavellian in thought ––– the cyclical nature of history hinged on the fact that no social or political theory is stable and it is because of this that we constantly rebuild?
Putting this and the earlier warnings of overstepping the bounds of power and curiosity in lore into perspective, humanity always seems finds some way to restart. In our little microscopic neck of the woods, there have been two (or to some, three) People Power Revolutions, reminiscent of Robespierre and the French Revolution, then reminiscent of Brutus, the rape of Lucretia and injustice playing a role in overthrow of the last king of what was thought to be the indestructible Roman Empire, but again, human folly and inability to know what to do with power always seems to ruin what seems to be final and indestructible –– and the corruption of the Roman Republic, instability, division, among other things (and well, Attila the Hun) overall drove the nail in the coffin of the Roman Empire.
It is just immensely better put in Edward Gibbon’s iconic chronicle The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:
“The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the cause of the destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time or accident and removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight. The story of the ruin is simple and obvious: and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire was destroyed we should rather be surprised that it has subsisted for so long.”
It has been more than a thousand years since the fall of Rome, and we are still in relatively the same place and plane of thought. The laughable notion of world peace still ceases to exist. Wars happen. The West (the United States, at this point in time, is the hegemon takes the cake) is still on a mission to civilize, because democracy must work for everyone and whatever the status quo is laughably touted as the universal truth, and we are again engaged in a war of ideas ––– religion, politics, perspective. Two supreme and extreme ideologies can never co-exist and one system will never be enough.
The historian Oswald Spengler, another pioneer of this whole cyclical mumbo-jumbo, relates this all of this stuff to a notion of a “high culture” (mentioned earlier, think Babylon, think Egypt, think Mayans and Aztecs, think Rome) –– high cultures/civilizations end according to another predetermined pattern, likened to the cycle of weather (spring, summer, fall, winter –– death), as what defines these cultures seem to be a unifying idea, infused in art, in science, in politics –– Egypt with the “Path” and idea of a soul, the Greeks and Romans with the “point-present”: democracy, neighborhoods, domesticity, and the West as we know it with the “Faustian” –– changing the world, reaching for the stars, the ultimate search we have come to know, the eventual hypothesis would then mean the end of what we believe to be true. It follows then that if existence were incidental, it would also be pointless. I know that coming to terms with that would spell enlightenment to the Buddhists, and a quarter life crisis to normal people. But to be inherently free from the bounds of history and therefore the workings of the world ––– is that possible?
We forget to put a human face on the passage of time. History is chronological record of time, relative to what we experience as humans. Acquiescing to the idea that life is pointless would result in the fear to do anything worthwhile, but to be idle though is such a chore. After all, to sit by yourself, reflect on your purpose, and to watch the second hand make its way in a Samsara-like endless return is a bore in itself and waiting always feels like a lifetime.
“When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour.”
––– Albert Einstein
Relativity is substantiated by numerous equations that make my head hurt. But to make relativity simple is to note how the world works not in theories, but to see how this explanation of the workings of space and time affect us. Earlier, I questioned the purpose of mankind and the notion that the universe exists to house us and that the laws of Physics move simply to support our way of life. Yet, we as humans cannot even agree on which laws of Physics work for us, Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum physics do not agree with each other on a theoretical basis.
I can’t really explain why, but I tried reading The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which explains superstring theory which supposedly takes those two colliding theories and makes them agree, and until now I am clueless and unable to finish it and understand it fully, but Greene gives way to the fact that even the most complex of theories, even relativity (movement of lightbeams) E=mc and all, is really through tangible perspective, like so ––– in driving on a highway through swathes of forestry, trees appear to be moving to the driver, but stationary to a sitting hiker. The dashboard of a car may appear stationary to the driver, but is seen to be moving by the hiker. “These are such basic and intuitive properties of how the world works that we hardly take note of them,” he says. This is simply how light moves to frame all the goings on that you may see it this way. Even special relativity (which now takes into consideration, all of time, gravitational fields, distance, and motion) states that observers in relative motion will all have different perceptions of time –– two wristwatches tick at a different rate and “hence will not agree on the amount of time that elapses between chosen events.”
Once you put a human face on anything, anything can be at least mildly understood. Even time, space, distance, the circular motion of absolutely everything you know in the way the world works, the nature of this whole cyclical stuff, just living and breathing and experiencing life as it is, is to the core, a rationale of the way the world works. We have endless cycles of summer and rain (winter, spring, summer, and fall –– not Spengler’s but the real Western kind don’t apply here). Such is the life of a human that writes its own history. Yielding to the inevitability of cycles renders one a lack of purpose, and yet forgetting history makes one akin to a mayfly –– 24 hours to live and no where to be or nothing to really go about, waking up unaware of who and what you are. To be unfortunate enough to not be deliberately secluded would be, according to the observations Jesuit Jacob Baegert’s An Account of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the California Peninsula, akin to being an aboriginal Californian:
“No Californian is acquainted with the events that occurred in the country prior to his birth, nor does he even know who his parents were if he should happen to have lost them during his infancy—The Californians—believed that California constituted the whole world, and they themselves its sole inhabitants; for they went to nobody, and nobody came to see them, each little people remaining within the limits of its small district.”
The battle of history is like as Khaldun hoped, reinterpretation. The battle of mankind is existence, to make concrete sense of all the knowledge we’ve acquired over the 200,000 of years of all the mistakes and follow-throughs we’ve ever made. But then to quote Walter Benjamin quoting Karl Kraus, “Origin is the goal.” To figure this out would therefore be the ultimate end-all to the ceaseless wax-winged flight to the sun. There is a collection of essays on Theodor Adorno by Robert Hullot-Kentor that I tried to read in the hopes of my essay being about other things less abstract than the cyclical nature of this orbital earth, its introduction is titled “Origin is the Goal” and it starts with a quote from William Faulkner:
There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
Nobel prize speech, (1950)
Works Cited:
Dawkins, Richard. The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. Boston: Houghton Muffin, 2004. Print.
Al-Jubouri, I.M.N. History of Islamic Philosophy: With View of Greek Philosophy and Early History of Islam. Hertfordshire: Bright Pen, 2004. Print.
The Dalai Lama. The Four Noble Truths. London: Thorsons, 1998. Print.
Hughes, Chris. “The Recycling of Time and The End of History.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. 8.1 (2011): 10-37. Web.
Hutchings, Kimberly. Time and World Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Print.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. III. Paris:Baudry’s European Library, 1840. Google Books. Web.
Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: An Abridged Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Google Books. Web.
Baegert, Jacob. An Account of the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the California Peninsula. [Rau, Charles, tr]. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Library, 2005. Google Books. Web.
Greene, Brian. The Elegant Universe. New York: Random House, 2000. Print.
It’s essentially like a dream, a dream I keep waking up from but can't seem to escape.
The connotation of the word dream always seems to be positive. Meh. You know how when you’re in a dream, you’re in one place, and suddenly a second or a minute later you’re somewhere else –––– without moving, or knowing how you got there? Essentially it’s the same thing, the daily… motions I go through. I’m here, and then I’m there, I blink, and I’m somewhere else. I’m awake, and aware, but it’s all cyclical. It feels cyclical. Essentially like sleepwalking.
I blink, I’m in the backseat of a car. Blink, I’m in a classroom, blink, I feel the cold granite tile underneath me and the beads of shower water weave through strands of my hair. Blink, it’s morning. Blink, fuck this.
It’s like a different kind of autopilot, like you don’t have to tell yourself to breathe or blink ––– but all the synapses in my brain just have this fluidity where I am just devoid of any kind of conscious thought ––– I make my coffee, I put on my shoes, I take my notes down, I’m sitting on my bed, about to well, go to bed, and well, I just.. I wake up.
Sure, I’m awake, but before I sleep, I really wake up, like I literally get around to actually thinking, and I think ––– what have I done today that can be considered really worthwhile? And I get around to thinking about the burden of existence, stupid, ambitious and abstract ideas, just lying down in bed on the brink of midnight until the slightest peek of dawn escapes my blinds. Am I just a gear in the clockwork of this Earth? I mean, fuck, sure, that sounds important, but really it makes me feel so miniscule and both full and utterly bereft of purpose. Like, if by some weird voodoo magic, if I was written out of existence, the fabric of the universe would probably go haywire, but that would be just an incidental casualty, because if you really saw how my life panned out on a daily basis, it wouldn’t have been much of a loss.
Blink, I’m in front of a television set, occupied and restless –––– and I feel like art imitates life and life imitates art and it’s cyclical, but it’s a nice, beautiful kind of cycle. Like the Ptolemaic model, or major scales moving only in octaves, the energy borne of circular motion ––– or… clockwork.
Sometimes, I feel. It doesn’t matter what or how, I just do. Feel, like a verb. Through every single sense ––– I see the streetlights framing the grain of the road when I open the car window, I taste the simplest joy of ultra-processed death in a fast food takeout box, I hear that Mustang Sally bass line when I’m really listening, I smell heaven in my linens when I take them out of the laundry basket. And I feel, I feel the unmistakable warmth of your breath when I don’t realize, when the hum of air conditioning finally lulls me to sleep, I feel the crater on my pillow where your head used to be, and I bolt this consciousness. I take it back, free me from this sharp pain, and take me back to apathy, take me back to avoidance.
Because I used to move my finger from blemish to blemish, tracing some kind of system in your skin, and I used to tremble when you whispered into my nape thinking I was asleep, and I used to feel the singular focus and nature of longing, I used to melt and mold myself everyday to accommodate every crevice of the fractures in your heart, in your life, in your mind. The fluidity of desire, the fluidity of my personhood –––– it was all gone, it’s all gone, now I’m a rigid shell of who I used to be, moving in a gross, repetitive and predictable pattern, unrealized and more of a demographic than anything else.
I used to relish in delusion, in your supposedly underserved attention, while you relished in the affirmation of the heat of my cheeks, and an affectionate rush of blood and a faster pulse ––– of the state of undress, physically and emotionally. The dynamic and push-pull feeling of loving less/more.
Blink, I’m tying your shoes, blink, you’re walking away.
I don’t want you back. I’m comfortable. I’m realized. Fake it til you make it. Good posture makes you seem like a confident person, why the hell not, right?
My mother said once that time stops for nobody, or did my father say that? Or was it Jesus, or Buddha, or Pablo Neruda, or Chicken Soup for The Tardy….
I don’t want to embark on some soul-searching, Drops of Jupiter, manic pixie life changing trip to France or something. I don't need a fucking coming-of-age self-actualization triggering plot device. I don’t need that. I don’t need some sort of off-the-grid catalytic fissure in my life.
I want to be whole again, but I want to find it in the bottom of a good cup of coffee, or the froth of an ice-cold beer with a few who have stuck with me, through the rumble of train arrivals and departures ––– the cyclical life ––– I am slowly finding dimensions, eclipsing you, these brief moments of feeling, enjoyment, dare I say excitement. Someone else’s car stereo. New cycles. Intersections.
I need to find the beauty in clockwork, once more, if not endlessly.
