Insight.

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

-Proverbs 22:6

 

Of course, this proverb is universally applicable. Drug addicts, criminals, sexual aggressors, and the like also bear the yoke of inculcation, for time and repetition are the inimitable friends of routine, just as routine is the inimitable foe of freedom. We hear the cliché that children are innocent and it is true. But what is innocence if not the relative of naiveté, ignorance, impressionability, and vulnerability? The ancients understood that to introduce a habit into the early life of a child is to impress upon him or her a life-style. Well, what if in those impressionable years the wrong message was sent?[1] What if the wrong habit was exercised by the child’s confusion and the world’s disinterest? What does this say about choice? About free-will? What if this habit became a source of some distorted form of pleasure, a pleasure which should have been fostered properly and handled with care but instead was neglected and mal-handled. Idle hands are the devil’s playground, and idle minds craft megaliths. The search for that source is unending, whether it be an attraction to the process of searching, or a magnetism to the façade of a skin-deep objectification, this is a learned thing; it’s some distorted form of training.

---

[1] Let’s not get bogged down by unnecessary narratives. Let’s not ask questions like “what is wrong and what is right?” These questions are not beneficial, for those born within the superstructure are its very byproduct; even the counter-culture is a part of the dialectic.

Ouroboros: the Tale of a Tail.

 

 Here we are, trying by way of echolocation to find that which has haunted us from the beginning of recorded history: meaning. We open our mouths and send out signals sonar-like to learn about the world through the reverberations. What does this mean you ask? Well what does anything mean is what I respond. But we are choking on our own tales and becoming desensitized to the vibrations and frequencies we ourselves spit out just a short time ago. little animals with big brains, confused about why we act a certain way, why we see things in a specific manner, why we hear things with a particular ear; we’re all screaming—screaming by way of conscience and consciousness and conscientiousness—bemoaning cosmic moral imperatives and vast cultural superstructures, weaving through the fingers of that great lightning, and dragging the stone over the scales of that awesome monolith; the dragon-mountain: the episteme.

episteme

 

But that ironed-scaled dragon-mountain eats its own tail; it has always and will always devour itself. And so will we. So will we stretch our pouting lips over our own heads and swallow. This is our process, our nature, our destiny. Or at least we tell ourselves such a story. After all it seems right and it feels good. However, it’s not completely fulfilling: that great mental massage. Though we are placated from time to time, it never lasts and we are never truly satisfied, so we must squeeze harder and rub faster in order to reach that seemingly out-of-reach pinnacle, the spark’s origin, the scorched mountaintop. At least we have the hymns of ancient lords to hum while we climb. At least we have the ancient traditions to guide us through lightning’s splintered fingers. Thank the heavens for discourse! And, if we do not like any of it we have new ones too! Like technology and progress. We will find our way yet! But don’t we already know what’s going to happen? About what you ask? We’ll just come back to that original haunting question—you know—the one about meaning. After all, the dragon does eat its own tail.

Apophasis/Apostrophe

          D’you recall ever having a great Idea? An idea so potent as to send chills up your spine? But then you think of it again and again, and you really and truly start to consider it; you start to parse it out. D’you ever think that you’re unique, that you’re idea is fresh, like you have something to offer the planet other than a narrative, (not to mention a narrative that has been told countless times before: you’re born, you live, you do stuff while live-ing, you die)? Does that feeling of uniqueness ever come back to try to persuade you, try to make you a part of its team; team unique, teamU. There is no U in team. I had an idea once, but I’m not going to tell you what it wa(i)s. I’ve removed it, like a crumpled up memory tossed into the wastebasket of my mind; it’s gone. But I’ve made you stare at this paragraph, and I should tell you that it’s a puzzle, a myth, an idea.

Rush Hour Existentialism.

Where am I going?

 

Nowhere. I am going nowhere, stuck here in my own specific superstructure of time, space, history, energy, and culture. Sitting here in traffic, watching the other side of the highway; watching cars chase each other in that psychosexual Freudian-accordion dance of mechanized war. Where are they going? Somewhere. Somewhere other than here.

 

What time is it. It’s not a question. It’s a feeling I get while sitting on the exit ramp; a state of mind I enter while staring at the pink sun-eating clouds on the horizon, watching as a white Suburban flies in front of me, watching him, her, whoever move up one car length and advance a millisecond in the space-time continuum of rush-hour exit-ramp pole-position, watching the oblivious gaze of the driver who I see now is a fat man in a football jersey, a man who has just maneuvered into twenty-seventh (instead of twenty-eighth) place in line at a red light: that perfect analogue for the end of one’s life. Do you see it? Let’s pack it in folks, sit impatiently, inch forward ever so slightly, and sigh in that especially touristy way over the performances of artifice you only hear on drive-time radio.

 

The light turns green and you realize that a third of your life is gone,

(if you’re lucky).