Musings on Incomprehensibility.
I've been so long in posting. I have been either busy, or lazy. Odd how these come at you at the wrong times, when you want to be lazy life happens, and when your being blissfully busy, all you want to do is take a time out and contemplate your navel. The ironies built into life never cease to amaze.
The text below are merely notes, I post them out of laziness and guilt. Feel free to comment, to help me whip there formlessness into some semblance of shape:
Alt Title: Observations (on a busy day) [from notebook]
We Each live imprisoned within ourselves, bodies. Escape is impossible, we are enslaved by body sensation, experience, a wall of distance separating us from the external, other bodies, PEOPLE. We can never UNDERSTAND (or in the jargon; TRANSCEND) beyond the walls of self-hood. We are doomed to be ourselves. To only experience the world fettered by our own finite context.
This is a far more profound and immediate form of "angst" than proposed by the existentialists. Their angst is only an abstraction, and to be avoided by merely being ignorant of any so-called meaninglessness, and mortal finitude. Refutations: Here and Now is IMMEDIATE. We exist within a finite moment wholly day-to-day. To step out of this and view it in context to our ultimate mortality is a step into abstraction, hence less real. It is a meta-thought or context. As to meaninglessness: this is the opposite, life is too full of meaning. Meanings shift, collide, melt away. Day to Day existence is infinitly layered with meaning. In the Here and Now meaning is dictated by need. Only in stepping back is meaning neccesitated in any greater sense.
- These meanings are real. The temporary, shifting ones. They function and effect, and thus are real.
- The bigger he picture (as function of abstraction) the more complex meaning becomes.
- There is no THE (as in ultimate) meaning. This is mythology.
- In part we do this to create a social construct of our unknowable (subjective) self into social reality. This is imago, and an exercise of Nietzschean power
- We make ourselves in our own image. We make others in a bastardzation of our own experience and their imposition of imago upon us.
- We often come to beleive our own projection, forgetting US as thing-in-itself. We, in a sense, project ourselves upon ourselves. We create ourselves, thus our context, and thus the world (as meaning, as personal reality).
We like the surreal - the avant-garde - because it is art like existence. Open, interpretive, ever-changing. Almost any meaning is possible, but there IS no meaning for the plethora of meaning. Good art, like life, leaves the mind grasping, gasping, hungry, and incomplete. It foils rational solutions threatening uswith the great howling void of unreason with lures of fulfillment, understanding, and enlightenment.
- There is no illumination, just endless, beautiful, mirk.
- Art is only time humans are honest enough to embrace the fundamental ambiguity of life.
On some level we all yearn to escape the flesh, the mind, obligation, imposition. To be free within the world, actually TOUCHING existence. Freedom and transcendence, this has been our secret dream, always.
Our species is cursed. We are born, thrust into the incomprehensible alienness of existence, perpetually lost and confused. And it is all down-hill from there. Thus we lose ourselves in games, we bury ourselves in the warmth of second hand mythologies, and the darkness of the here-and now. From time to time we see light and half-heartedly rattle the bars of our cage, then quietly rebury our heads in the sands.
How to escape? Like the Zen Buddhist. Wrap your mind in the incomprehensibility, and wander blindly until you feel the warmth of the sun on your face. Get lost.
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