New blog. I couldn't let the title of my old e-mail discussion group go after all these years, so I created this blog as it's namesake. I've been thinking about deleting the Yahoo group for a while now. I found out pretty fast that I'm not the sort of person who can manage an e-mail discussion group. I don't know why. Most of the time I'm too inside of that dynamic to fathom why because I can't observe me as a stranger while I'm busy being the observer. Tunnel vision.
That's not really a joke. I get so single-minded about some stuff that the world literally goes away. Worse, or maybe better, I have pretty much rearranged my life to let it be so.
Maybe that's why I became fascinated with Jean Paul Sartre's book Being and Nothingness. He wrote about topics and subjects that drew my attention before I read him in a powerful way. The way I read his material indicated that being and nothingness were intimately related in a way I deeply understood. I'm relatively sure I projected my opinion upon what he was writing, but on the other hand, it kept seeming that he meant to write the same stuff I was projecting upon the stuff he wrote. By the time I finished reading the entire 800 pages of his translated work I actually had the gall to conclude that I understood what both of us meant.
The odd part of it is that I still do think I understand what Sartre intended to communicate, and it wasn't exactly about philosophy. Wittgenstein might agree. I've never read that much of Wittgenstein and probably won't. I've read various pundit's comments and reviews of his stuff, and concluded that he was right to say there's no such thing as philosophy. I keep returning to solipsism. I don't like to. I keep getting the feeling from people that they think it's a copout, and that's bad.
I don't think it's bad. To me that's just the nature of the abstract worlds we all create as a way of feeling important. A way of giving ourselves false hope that what we put our faith in will save us from the terror. The horrible thing is that we know deep down through repetitive, redundant eternal experience that our defense against the terror won't succeed. Paradoxically, and simultaneously, it's not even supposed to.
Any extemporaneous attitude I conjure as a coping device that carries a torch for some imagined salvation, appears simultaneously to push my perpetual lust for safety from the terror even further away. That's what solipsism means to me. The strategies I employ as a defense against the terror points to the futility of using nothingness as the ground for being. If I stop denying that the perceived world is not me, I lose consciousness and fall back into the cosmic soup.
Cosmic soup? Not exactly. There is another metaphor I use as a descriptor for non-being. It's probably the result of being raised in the Bible Belt. It's the metaphor of an innocent babe in swaddling clothes. It's not really a place as much as a state of being. It's not a conscious state of being, because anything I could say about it is not of the experience itself, but a retrospective consideration. What I experience in real time as that innocent child-like entity wrapped in a grey softness that's sort of like lamb's wool. That's the "swaddling clothes" reference. That's being inside the terror and not seeing it as such.
It's when I'm not inside the terror that it scares me deeply and persistently. No rest for the weary. Whatever it is that I am be-leaves itself acorn to oak to be when it's not inside the cosmic soup, that IS the terror.
I'm really trying to describe something here, but I'm not real happy that I'm portraying the thing-in-itself as an essence that can't be contaminated by exposure to the assumptions upon it's careactor, but it don't consciously know that except by abstracting the apparent reasons of their presupposed model of behavior without possessing any reasons of their own.
The hypothetical "reason" I can't describe what I want to is that any description I offer is unnecessary for anyone soul that has consciously been aware of themselves as that innocence (inner sense). It's too unadorned to offer a construction of something that only is what it is when there is nothing else to turn it into as a source for re-member-ing. It's a meme. A me-me. A doppelganger and it's shadowy friend. It's a temporary product of me and thee. When two or more of us are together and we're me-and-thee-ing like crazy.
That's why the Gospel of Thomas saying indicates by it's brevity the humorous wisdom of "Be passerby." In another wisdom book by the Chinese culture, "The superior man lets many things pass without being duped." This is the condition of the innocent child in swaddling clothes inside the terror. It holds on to no thing. It's in between cumming and going. It only has me-mores to re-me with. The me-mores are the "swaddling clothes" and require a living body to twist and weave them into a one-thread shroud that's a metaphor inside a metaphor.
Or maybe not. How the hell would I know? I do like the last paragraph though. I never have understood why such pride is taken in weaving a one-thread garment, but it's held in high regard in several cultures. What it actually means could be subjective and whatever the individual shape-shifter insists upon. Sometime I appear to be convinced I am is evolved itself from one of ten billion zillion pearl-like creatures that roam the universe and perpetually make ourselves into things outta whatever we find about us at any one ti-me or the other.
I don't think the pearls roam the universe as if vagabonds out looking for a good time. I think they're all running helter skelter from a terror they can only cope with from the inside out, and when they're on the inside they forget the terror is waiting for them to re-me.
