Aphorisms
Watching a film. Watching those watching the film. How obedient they obey its laws, its silent commands. To laugh here, believe this man…
On Thinking.
The act of thinking is always a positive act. The belief in an idea that is not right before your eyes is always willed, summoned through ourselves. In being an act of the will, it leans against pessimism with the force of belief. The dance of distraction, to not think, envision and to acquiesce, to bring to sleep, is always pessimism — it is in essence saying, “Why bother doing anything?” A Mannian shrug of the shoulders, “Is that all there is to it?” The body may not say this but the mind unflexed (willed) always does. This alone is our great tyranny.
…………………………………………
We The Movie.
Watching a film. Watching those watching the film. How obedient they obey its laws, its silent commands. To laugh here, believe this man is evil, the other good. To go somewhere — where is nowhere.
On watching them I see how in the real world we walk to our own deaths, in our own film. We are believers who don’t know we believe. After this almost incommunicable vision, I see how we fill the world with our foolery, how we trick ourselves that we “live” and drive the bus.
Obedience is our true nature and I echo Bataille that for a man to be alive the only recourse is rebellion. Perhaps this is why all great writing resembles a slap, even when delivered handily, gracefully — almost as if it didn’t matter. It is this “didn’t matter” that is the deepest rebellion.
The tension of man within society. A case of numbers? How the poor man who would want to be free resists — a moth circling a bright light BUT a moth that knows somewhere there is a light switch, even if it is beyond his strength and being to move it. The mere knowledge of this IS his torment and sustenance. The moth’s social gravity and inertia.
Oh if we could sing in our chains more ….. then we shalt all be as we were born. Unfallen.
…………………………………………
On Sex
Sex as a repository of male guilt. A trying to touch the deep source of life, to live again. What is out of reach is blessed and — IS our guilt.
…………………………………………
On Remembering
Why is it we remember as we age, so well the far past but have such difficulty and failure with remembering the near past, even just yesterday? Why? Why as we age do we see the young boy we were much more clear but the half gray man we are, in a fog, a boat hidden in the swell — the shore so far away, insight?
The typical explanation is that memory needs time to settle, then slowly, one the another will settle. The typical explanation is that we need distance to see the separation of daily, usual life. Memory as it goes, in the long term, is a long burn — the present just past has too much exigency, is veiled in too much still lived experience to become as yet memory, a concrete and personal thing.
I would like to challenge this argument in a holy and roundabout fashion. Perhaps it is the case that we don’t remember the near past so well because we don’t want to. Man as a creature that is only desire, doesn’t desire the memory of just yesterday. The near past too painful, in an unaware and fundamental way — just can’t be drunk. We recognize its pain and don’t want to drink. I would say firmly that memory is pain’s anecdote. Just as the accident victim remembers nothing though his head came out well — we remember only that which we want. There is a pilot we are unaware of — a capacity to deny the pain of every day, the existential bareness and in contrast, create a memory of the far away which even if it seems full of pain — is really painless for it is remote, long ago. Memory, a maiden of desire.
If one would WANT to confront their pain, they would live wholly in the present, a continually omnipresent, remembering being. So few of this brave type have yet arrived in our midst that we even consider it a miracle if another remembers what the weather was like two days ago. How much fear, how much pain we do live. Who might step up and desire, WANT to remember? Who might bring the real, the horror, the horror near — conquer reality through memory? We live as ducks in mist on the lake of a greater mind.