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Jesus Christ. Messiah. Lisan Al Gaib. Dude.

Jesus Christ. Messiah. Lisan Al Gaib. Dude.

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The Last Temptation Of Christ

Raise your hand if you’ve seen Dune 2. Keep your hand up if you’ve read the New Testament. Keep your hand up if you’ve been obsessed with the writings of Leo Tolstoy. If your hand is still up, then you might be Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. If they were still alive today. Tolstoy took a stance of radical love later in his life that influenced all forms of non violent protest that we are familiar with now. Where did this stance come from? The source of eternal life, the Son of Man, Jesus Christ. Yet he approached the life and teachings of Jesus in an experimental way, by removing the miracles, the divinity and the mysticism from the gospels.

I read A Confession in which Tolstoy admits his total lack of the will to keep living, and the book is framed as a way to make a logical argument against his own suicide because if he can find no reason to live then why should he. The thrust of the novella is beautifully summed up in the parable he details:

There is an old Eastern fable about a traveler who is taken unawares on the steppes by a ferocious wild animal. In order to escape the beast the traveler hides in an empty well, but at the bottom of the well he sees a dragon with its jaws open, ready to devour him. The poor fellow does not dare to climb out because he is afraid of being eaten by the rapacious beast, neither does he dare drop to the bottom of the well for fear of being eaten by the dragon. So he seizes hold of a branch of a bush that is growing in the crevices of the well and clings on to it. His arms grow weak and he knows that he will soon have to resign himself to the death that awaits him on either side. Yet he still clings on, and while he is holding on to the branch he looks around and sees that two mice, one black and one white, are steadily working their way round the bush he is hanging from, gnawing away at it. Sooner or later they will eat through it and the branch will snap, and he will fall into the jaws of the dragon. The traveler sees this and knows that he will inevitably perish. But while he is still hanging there he sees some drops of honey on the leaves of the bush, stretches out his tongue and licks them. In the same way I am clinging to the tree of life, knowing full well that the dragon of death inevitably awaits me, ready to tear me to pieces, and I cannot understand how I have fallen into this torment. And I try licking the honey that once consoled me, but it no longer gives me pleasure. The white mouse and the black mouse – day and night – are gnawing at the branch from which I am hanging. I can see the dragon clearly and the honey no longer tastes sweet. I can see only one thing; the inescapable dragon and the mice, and I cannot tear my eyes away from them.

Leo Tolstoy – A Confession

Facing the inevitability of his own death, the decreasing pleasure he gets from living every day life, and the inability to forget about the futility in which he now exists he comes to the conclusion that not serving any further purpose he may as well die but admits that he is too cowardly to do it. He tries to find a way to overcome the suffering when he remembers that he gets a glimmer of existential joy whenever he considers how he felt when he had faith in God. It was a matter of course, perhaps even the trend for intellectuals in Tolstoy’s time to be atheist, or to at least accept that religion was not a rational endeavor. Yet he makes the claim that he was at his most happiest when he believed and that this faith in itself could be the key to finding his will to live. He tries to return to the Russian orthodox church in earnest only to find himself disheartened and confused by the dogmatic and empty ritualistic acts that plague the sermons. Tolstoy decides that he must cut away the cruft that has accrued over the centuries since the crucifixion and get back to the very soul of Christianity which are the teachings of Jesus Christ. This is where the novella ends, with a promise that after years of research he will come back with his findings. He delivers this in a following book, The Gospel In Brief, which is itself a smaller piece of a larger work in which he reinterprets the four gospels of the New Testament, stripped of all superstition. Admittedly I did not see his existential crisis ending with a renewal in religious faith. I understand where Tolstoy is coming from though because his conceptualized idea of faith is akin to the Christian idea of the spirit. Then as Jesus teaches his disciples, eternal life can only be found through the spirit not through the flesh. In the parlance of the fable, all the honey in the world will not save you from being eaten by the dragon because the mistake is serving the flesh to save the flesh, in essence making yourself more delicious for the dragon to enjoy. One should serve the spirit to save the spirit which would allow Tolstoy to lift himself right out of that well and enter in the kingdom of Heaven, eternal life or as I like to think, existential purpose and fulfillment.

Now that I’ve put that out there I want to state that I myself am not religious, and I don’t believe in any literal sense the scripture writ in the gospels. Jesus never sat down and wrote his thoughts into words, the gospels were written around 60 years after his death. Not only that but the canonical gospels are only a subset of the many that were written which the budding Christian church decided were the most suited to be canon. Even the canonical gospels don’t always line up with each other either. So we must tackle these religious sources for what they are, unverifiable accounts of the life and teachings of a man which may be more literary creation than historical figure. This is of course supreme blasphemy according to the church. The funny thing about heresy is that it only matters to you if you abide by the institution that declares it such. The greatest Christian institution: the Roman Catholic church is a military hierarchical framework originating via the Nicene Creed. It was created as such to protect Christianity as a religion and to standardize the creation of theology, the greatest misstep I think in the history of Christianity as a philosophy. Because in doing this, they wiped out the most anarchic of Jesus lessons: the rejection of dogma in favor of belief. His words are simple, yet the institutions that sprang up in his wake continually complicate them in favor of maintaining the idea of religious divinity and disseminating this power into a purported chain of command that starts with the pope. Yet Jesus was a teacher of the poor, disavowed the rich and powerful and held that men are more important than all religious ceremonies. The catholic church then, and any offshoot from its inception, is itself a heretical organization.

Therefore I can get to the real business of Jesus, which is interpreting his philosophy in a way that applies to humanity not divinity. As I read The Gospel In Brief I could not help but make continuous connections to other great teachers of life. So much so that I thought Lao Tzu and The Buddha must have been pen pals with Jesus while he was in the forest coming up with his ideas. I kid, but Eastern influences must have been present in the time of historical Jesus, there’s very little evidence to suggest there was any direct contact but the similarities in some of the lessons is striking. Firstly there is Jesus’ role as an ascetic. The Jewish fasted before the time of Jesus but the biggest difference is they fasted to commemorate events or to perform a sacrifice as dictated in the Old Testament. Jesus not only willingly gave up food, but went so far as to say food is not necessary:

He who fulfills the will of the father shall always be satisfied and knows neither hunger nor thirst

He upends the paradigm choosing instead to not look at fasting as a sacrificial act but as a display of the will of the spirit, a supreme act of self control. The Buddha also recommended his followers to fast as a way to detach from the need of food and sustenance which would arouse suffering. He practiced extreme fasting for a time before giving it up in favor of the middle way yet he did so with the realization that one does not need as much material food as they think and that one’s power over the mind is one of the greatest tools against suffering. So on one hand we have the food of the spirit (service to the Father, the origin of life) surpassing the need for food of the flesh. On the other hand we have the removal of the attachment to food by our willpower. The two concepts seem inevitably entangled to me. Moreover Jesus taught generally that needs of the flesh chain us to dying by the flesh. His concept of eternal life, as being removed from any sort of fleshly desires could be read as another version of the eightfold path of buddhism which aims to remove all attachments to any concept or materialism that stop us from achieving enlightenment and exiting the cycle of death and rebirth, aka eternal life.

Next we have Jesus’ radically nonviolent stance. As he famously states:

If anyone strikes out your tooth on one side, turn him to the other side. If you are made to do one piece of work, do two. If men wish to take your property, give it to them. If they do not return your money, do not ask for it.

Jesus reinforces his belief that resisting evil is itself a mechanism of evil, hence the only means to do away with evil is to not only to willingly suffer, but to give more than the actor against you would take. This form of “generous” victimhood is a means to highlight that the things that victimize us do so at our own volition. Here we have a smattering of the stoic concept of “Amor Fati”, love thy fate. Jesus encourages his followers to love their fate by multiplying its effects. The buddhist concept of right thought, right conduct, and right effort all apply to this situation, because Buddha also taught the ancient concept of Ahimsa, nonviolence towards all living things. Jesus’ method of multiplying those violent or evil acts against us can be seen as the inversion of the buddhist belief that life is suffering. If you throw yourself on the sword instead of resisting against the sword then no action can be taken against your will and therefore you cannot suffer by the spirit. This also has moral implications because by increasing the acts performed in your detriment, you are increasing the evil done in the short term however there can be no moral victory against a non-violent resistor and in our modern times in particular, in which all actions are surveilled and criticized, the moral victory is the everlasting one.

Lastly Jesus preaches that the kingdom of heaven, contrary to popular culture, is timeless, cannot be seen, and is not physically present anywhere. He says that it exists on earth and can be entered at any time provided you access the origin of all life, the spirit.

Understand that, if man is conceived from heaven, then in him there must be that which is of heaven

Rather the kingdom of heaven is part of us because we are created from it. We lose touch with it and Jesus’ lessons act as the shepherd that reconnects us to our divine origins. This concept is striking in its similarity to the words of Lao Tzu in the Tao Te Ching. The tao, for the uninitiated is the eternal and limitless substance from which life springs, and life returns:

The Tao is infinite, eternal.
Why is it eternal?
It was never born;
thus it can never die.
Why is it infinite?
It has no desires for itself;
thus it is present for all beings.

Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching

The tao represents the unlimited potential from which humanity is made. In the Tao Te Ching Lao Tzu describes how being more like the tao improves our lives because the closer we are to the origin of life then the closer we become to realizing the perfect life, or perhaps as Jesus would say, the everlasting life. Jesus refers to “the father” as this origin of the spirit. The father is one with the kingdom of heaven and traditionally he has been identified as the Abrahamic God that created the earth, and gave Noah his purpose etc. But what if it wasn’t the same God? What if Jesus never meant that the father was an actual person or deity but a force, origin, or an immutable aspect of human nature like the tao? He certainly alludes to the fact that his father cannot be known, nor can the origins of his own birth be verified because the light that illuminates knowledge cannot itself be illuminated. Similarly Lao Tzu describes the tao:

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching

Here he states that although we can try to describe the tao, give it a shape and a name, we are incapable of ever actually understanding it or knowing it. By naming it we create a lesser version of it in our minds, similar to Plato’s theory of forms, we can only reach approximate knowledge via an imperfect understanding of the infinite tao from which all life springs. Jesus seems to think similarly of his Father:

You have understood that understanding proceeds from the Father into the world and returns from the world to the Father.

Lao Tzu and Jesus reasoned that trying to define something intrinsically unimaginable robs it of its power and purpose. Rather they all preached that keeping this unfathomable barrier in mind while accepting that it is a part of us is instrumental to being at peace with ourselves. The Buddha and Jesus also both believed that maintaining strict beliefs and expectations were fundamentally damaging to our internal lives. Siddhartha famously encountered the four sights which (eventually) awakened him to the four noble truths of suffering. Jesus understood similarly in his meditation out in the wilderness. He states in the gospels that that the temple of God lives in the hearts of men who love each other, taking care to illustrate that no physical sacrifice, place of worship, or ritual can bring you closer to eternal life and speaking harshly to the orthodox who upheld these values for their own sake due to their attachment to scripture. According to the buddhists, once you remove all attachments you will achieve the state of enlightenment which will allow you to exit the cycle of rebirth. Enlightenment, eternal life, entering the kingdom of heaven, returning to the Tao: these all sound like the same concept to me.

So it seems there must have been some dialogue between east and west at the inception of Christianity. But whether these are all teachers that borrowed from each other or whether they all possessed the clarity of mind to arrive to similar conclusions doesn’t matter. Religions have sprung up in the place of teaching to try and control the power that comes with sanctity. Yet holding the words of our teachers as unimpeachably sacred is damaging to the whole endeavor of human progress. Jesus knew this which is why he taught that belief supersedes actions. Correct belief gets at an objective center of morality, but correct actions leaves room for the false teachers to bear ill fruit in the realm of subjectivity. This is the true power of Jesus’ words, because even if you do not believe in the christian church or have ever heard of Jesus, are part of a Satanic cult, or are born on a different planet if you do as he commanded and always, and to the end, love each other then you are a disciple of Christ without ever realizing it. It is this concept which propelled Tolstoy from suicidal ideation to passionate living. The connection to these truths which have been realized over and over throughout history saved him in spite of the obfuscation caused by the religious theology that paradoxically try to protect them.

33 in 2023

33 in 2023

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Usually I try to write these yearly reflection posts for my birthday. The better, and more accurately to coincide with my yearly dispositions. Yet I have felt that not much has changed since last year, which is reflected in the fact that it feels like the year has passed me by dizzyingly fast. Has it only been a year since I was holed up in the restroom of the Alamo experiencing a separation of mind, body and spirit? It feels like yesterday, or rather like one long unbroken and deterministic chain of events that hasn’t really stopped. Something has definitely changed though, my creative output on all fronts has slowed down. I write less, film less, produce less “content” for lack of a better word. Though to be clear none of this is ever meant to be marketable (because you would need a market) and in fact anything you ever read that is meant to be profitable should be looked at with suspicion. Not because of any ill intent on behalf of the author but they are now serving something outside of their authentic self, and despite claims to the contrary this master will creep into their process. Sorry, this could really be a post about the Hollywood studio system vs less profit driven world cinema but I wont digress.

Why has my output stopped? I think I’m victim of a pattern I fall into where I consume consume consume in an attempt to parse through and come up with some subjective view of an objective reality. To put forth an example, if I want to write about a movie I love it’s easy to watch the movie, then read everything written about it, then read about all the sources of the prior reading, then explore tangentially related topics all in a vain and desperate attempt to hold an opinion that is unimpeachable. Obviously I’m not the subject matter expert on anything because once I see the maw of knowledge open itself to me I recoil back and think “you know what I think I know enough”. Yet I don’t feel satisfied enough to ever really publicly say anything so I think “let me just sit on this for a while longer”. There’s a clip I’ve seen of Ethan Hawke stating how Leo Tolstoy thought his brother was the real genius, but he lacked the ego to put pen to paper so Leo was the one who was showered with accolades. Here we have a terrible shadow though for if those with egos are the ones who write then wisdom, or even competence, is not really a determining factor in success, and with success comes the further dissemination of ideas. Maybe this is best reflected in our political landscape where we have a bunch of Socratically deficient dummies that don’t understand that they know nothing. This is an oversimplification though because even the smarter politicians get consumed by the political game everyone plays to assure majority support but regardless being able to show your face in public and say “yeah I got the answers I can do that” is always a lie, regardless whether the person saying it disagrees or not. To break down that into its arguments though…I think the mere statement “I know” is false. The implications are thus:
If I have verified something as a fact then I know it.
I have verified it as a fact.
Therefore I know it.

The jungle cat lying in wait to eviscerate this argument is “I have verified”. When is the last time you verified something? a quick google search? A text? Asked Alexa or Siri? Academics all know to check sources when reading through others’ works. Yet how deep do we search through this tree of knowledge? Sources have sources, those sources have sources, even when it coms to raw data and numbers it is interpreted by someone or something. This is a pedantic view but my point is all our knowledge is built on others’ “knowledge”. So then when we say I know it is not the previous argument we are really saying it’s this:
If someone/something I trust has verified a fact then I know it’s true.
This fact has been verified by someone/something I trust.
I know it’s true.

Of course the second ticking time bomb here is the definition of verification. Scientifically we have errors of measurement but what of non-empirical matters? If I find a friend who looks down on there luck I may say something “I know you’re sad, but things will turn around”. Do I know they are sad? I am interpreting their emotion using body language. Or to remove doubt I ask them what’s wrong and they may answer “I am sad because my ice cream fell”. Ah there we a firsthand verified source. I know they are sad because I trust them to know they are sad. Later I may go and tell mutual friends that I know our friend is sad without any second thoughts. But does my friend know they are sad? Is sadness something we learn or is it something within us that carries a blueprint of what it means to be sad. Of course the final question is what is sadness? And do I really know that my friend’s definition of sadness is the same as my own? When I say “I know you are sad” what I’m really saying is “I think you are exhibiting signs that I identify as sad” or in the second scenario where I tell our mutual friend: “Our friend is feeling emotions he has defined as sad and I think it closely resembles my interpretation of sadness”. Our language is mutable enough that in both cases we understand what is being said and since “being sad” has no true objective definition we all have to accomodate various interpretations of sad into one term. I can never really know if my friend is sad just as they can never really know if they are sad because being sad is an external concept which we have continuously tried to define in the course of our lives. There are more accurate words you can use to be sure. My friend could say “I am unhappy” which relies upon both of us understanding what it means to be happy first. Or he could say “I feel upset that my ice cream fell because I wanted to eat it.” which is more precise language. Yet we had already no doubt assumed that was the case when they remarked that their ice cream fell. Even now do we know they are upset because of that or is there some deeper significance to the ice cream. So the margin of error lies in the abstraction of our language and thus in the abstraction of knowledge.

It is how we have advanced as a species to rely on secondhand information that we accept as true empirically or non-empirically. Yet it is the same reason that in the age of technology we have come to our reckoning. We have unlimited sources and virtually unlimited discourse. We can pick and choose trusted sources that say whatever we need them to say. It’s a relativist nightmare which we cannot wake up from, an unceasing churning of truth. Which is all to say that if nobody can know anything, then maybe it’s okay if I produce more dumb stuff next year. I know you’ll agree.

The Death Of Jairo Lopez

The Death Of Jairo Lopez

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Or Puss In Boots: The Last death

Jairo Lopez is a man, men are mortal, Jairo is mortal. When I write that name I am referring to myself but it’s not me, it’s the version of me that slots into your mind when you hear that name. If you’ve never heard it before then an impression is already beginning to form. That impression can become complex and informed by real experiences but it will always be just an elaborately built network of associations you make of me. There are perhaps hundreds of Jairos living in the minds of all my friends and family each of them a little different, imperfect copies of me that come into conflict with each other as perspectives change. These shadow clones are not mortal, they are eternal in the way that ideas can exist forever. I carry in me the ideas of all the friends and family I’ve lost over the years, holding them arrested and transfixed in time as I knew them. They perform in scenes of my memories, ambiguous actors in dubious plays with the same start and the same finish but always different in between. I may pass on these productions to others who may not know the original versions, a hasty rendition of a badly transcribed opera. They may retell it to others still, each time it jumps from person to person the actors in the plays become less true to their creators until only ripples of emotions and colors are left. The imaginary people and memories are distilled to the very essence of sensory perception, crushed into the miasma from which our very thoughts spring and in which the selfhood sits.

In this way we are not mortal, we cannot truly die. As our physical bodies return to the Earth so do our spirits live on in the collective human conscious via those we have touched. If we all exist as a conjunction of mind, body and spirit then upon our death each of these realms are released, disentangled from being. The body persists through the soil, the spirit lives in the hearts of others, but what becomes then of the mind? It ceases to exist…it’s the true death and no one can experience it but me for my mind is uniquely and unequivocally mine. Or rather, my mind is me, it gives me the ability to be a self in opposition to the other and it is unknowable to you.

My body seems to want to keep reminding me of that impending death. This time it was a gall stone, one I was carrying unknowingly but which demanded its presence known to me via an incredible pain in my upper right abdomen. In a flashback to the events from my birthday three months previous, once again I was stuck in a public bathroom writhing in pain. This time there was an overwhelming sense of pain, which triggered the symptoms from before: nausea, lightheadedness, difficulty of breath. Public bathrooms are such wonderful things, truly you never know what you could be walking into at one. I don’t know why I felt more comfortable suffering in the silence of a stall while my friends waited outside, presumably starting to wonder if something had gone wrong as the minutes ticked by. Indeed they walked in at some point to ask if I was okay. But how do I explain the iceberg of feeling and symptoms I had experienced in the span of the last hour or so? The deluge emotions and thoughts passing by my brain as I bargained with primordial forces to absolve of me of the little demon pushing his way through my insides. How could I explain the reconfiguring of my limbs and stomach to ease pain if even slightly, standing up and sitting down again when I thought I would lose consciousness and fall to the floor? So I told them I had a stomach ache but was okay.

I couldn’t monologue at them all that I felt as I was still going through it. Even in the present I was projecting myself in the future talking about the very events I was going through. This is a technique (or coping mechanism?) I picked up from some of the long distance cycling I do. Disassociate from the present you and think about how future you will look back on the events you are going through. Perhaps this comes from a strong desire for the present to be the past, if only time could pass faster through a sheer act of will. Most notably when I projected my thoughts forward some version of me, now relaxed and past the event, was discussing perhaps with you dear reader about what happened that night in the bathroom stall, ipso facto I wasn’t dead. I didn’t believe I would die and yet are we all not one terrible accident away from death? But there’s a difference between being killed and dying.

Eventually the intensity of the pain passed through like a storm. As it faded I thought about how objectively I should have dashed to the emergency room because I knew this was not a normal pain regardless of the rationalizing thoughts I began to have. Again my mind tries to play tricks on me, after the pain is gone already it begins to erase the internal promises I had made to myself and to soften the freshly minted memories into a nostalgic film instead of a blueprint of my doom. I resolved to at the very least see my doctor the next day. Which in our current healthcare system is a bigger undertaking than I knew. I couldn’t see my doctor but I saw a doctor and phenomenologically speaking that’s the same so screw it. I felt fine but the next day I was told to go to the ER because I had signs of liver damage. My own liver betrayed me, so this is how it would be I thought, there is no mind over matter, only mind in spite of matter.

The hospital kept me for 4 days. I had to watch my tightly scheduled and varied days fall part into one haze of cable TV and liquid meals. Each time I had to cancel a meet up I felt a pang of loss for a moment I would never be able to live. It’s a small price to pay to make sure I could stay alive but that’s 4 days diverted like a railroad from good times city to bad times central. I’m not the first to make this comparison but it felt like a prison, sure I was free to leave at any point, but I didn’t want to keel over after my first slice of pizza back home. So I sat there as my world shrank down from the greater metropolitan area of Los Angeles into a single room in Harbor City. As my agency dwindled, my problems and obsessions also narrowed in scope. If you have not realized how used to living life in the abstract we are then stay at a hospital for a couple days. I read this example in Irrational Man by Barrett: when you think of 2+2 do you stop and take the time to prove the 2,913 subtheorems that allow us to come to the answer 4? No, someone else has done that for us so we are free to go trotting about telling people 2+2=4 like medieval math gods. Being in the hospital was like removing these abstractions from my everyday life. The best parts of the days where the meals, and I would make sure to keep the phone next to my bed so I could order exactly what I wanted from the cafeteria. And OH! that bloody phone, a cruel joke played upon me by Fortuna. Unbeknownst to me the phone I had did not ring, so for the first two days I was not able to make a choice, all they gave me was the most milquetoast meal available. Being robbed of these choices was of course where the feeling of imprisonment came from. My days involved meticulously planning when I would stand up from bed and use the restroom so I didn’t have to drag my IV and medical pole behind me. I would strategically read my book at regular intervals so I didn’t get bored of the TV or the book too quickly. At night when sleep would come I welcomed it as I knew it was the single fastest way to pass the time. Just weeks ago I was exploring the cradle of my family in El Salvador, poring over ancient Mayan ruins, and zip lining across volcanic jungles and now I was here warring with a telephone and planning when to stand up and pace my room. Outside this prison I never have to stop and think about these things, in fact each moment I can spend reading my book or catching a tv show is a breath of fresh air in a fast paced life. That is the power of abstraction.

My doctors informed I developed an infection in my blood probably caused by the passing of the gallstone. In an existential jape I was symptomless, apparently they caught it early enough that I suffered no ill effects. Are you still sick if you don’t feel sick? Even with the knowledge that I had the infection I didn’t feel any better about being in the hospital. Perhaps if I had just a tiny fever, enough to whet that drive for self pity I could have withstood the experience a lot more easily. I started a round of antibiotics which I ended up having to take home in the form of a long term intravenous line in my arm, with a snaking plastic thread laid deep in my veins. I had an access panel, like a Cronenbergian version of the tin man needing direct access to his inner fluids. You know what they say, you can take the man out of the hospital but you can’t take the hospital out of the man. It was all very inconveniencing but the sobering thought I kept having was that 100 years ago I’d be laid out on my back literally dying of a fever from an infection I could have never prevented caused by simple stone from a near obsolete organ blocking my bile ducts. Again the abstraction of modern life rears its ugly head, without antibiotics I would be withering away without a hope or a prayer in sight of getting better. It would be a violent, disgusting end no doubt as the bacteria in my blood slowly started to destroy all my organs one by one. Yet in our blessedly modern society, I was complaining that I never had a symptom at all. I thought about how many times I would be dead by 1800s society standards. That one time I had cellulitis in my leg, that second time it happened a year later, that one time after the car accident, this new gallstone incident.
Four times over I’d be dead, perhaps we should all keep an internal count lest we believe that thought terminating cliche: YOLO.

During my reading in the hospital I came across a passage from The Death Of Ivan Ilyich. The passage clearly resonated with me in the way that only a perfectly aligned moment in time can, so I ordered it and read it within the week. Ivan lives the perfect, complete life at least by the standards he has been taught. One day he bumps into the side of a table while decorating a room. An innocuous bump that somehow ends up gradually killing him. Needless to say my reading of this involved Ivan passing a particularly troublesome gallstone. He experiences physical pain at first but over time he starts to be tormented by his mental anguish until they become entangled and inseparable, the death of his body becomes the death of him. The pain in his side represents his inevitable death but it also serves as a beacon of illumination that cuts through the falsities of his life. He tries to go about business as usual, performing all the rituals that brought him joy and comfort before but the constant nagging pain does not let him slip back into complacency and he realizes that these things never actually brought him happiness at all they were only useful in allowing him to never confront his death and so to never confront his life.

As he begins to accept that he will die, the complete bullshit of every day existence angers him and he sees the masks all his friends and family wear. He feels as if he’s sitting next to this unknowable, eternal void that everyone around him refuses to see and which compared against the pettiness of their rituals do not matter. Playing Bridge with his friends was his favorite activity and as he realized he will die he stops caring for it. This is contrasted with the the fact that at his funeral his closest friend decides he wants to go catch a game of Bridge since the service ended early enough. Your friend’s death is not your own. What does it take to shake everyone out of the abstraction of ritualistic life? Coming close to your own death changes you, and although we know of it, when we meet it perhaps then is when we actually begin our lives. When you stare into that eternal, unthinkable void what will stare back? Ivan wondered if he had lived a good life, and he cannot admit that he did not because if he did it would require him to die a death of the spirit and reorient his entire existence.

Which at last brings me to Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (spoilers ahead I guess?). How could I know that when I dragged my little brothers to the theatre on Christmas morning I would be treated to such a deceptively Tolstoyan film about a cartoon cat. Puss In Boots is on his last life, a respectable 9 compared to my measly 5, when he meets death. He’s died in the same way that I have died, deaths that have been abstracted away not by modern medicine in his case but by fairy tale logic. At last he comes face to face with true death, literally in the form of a wolf. Unlike Ivan Ilyich he recedes into a false life where he is in a purgatory of rituals and adopts a mask in the form of a beard. This mundane existence is a death-in-life which compared to his previous lives is a shadow of his existence. Yet before he met death, he lived a life-in-death, never stopping to have real purpose or meaning because without knowing he would or could die he lived only in service to his legend, the idea of a Puss In Boots not his authentic self. He finally shakes himself out of his depression and latches on to the notion that he can regain his former existence by getting more “lives”. We know that he can’t ever do that though because after knowing death, he is irrevocably changed as becomes apparent in how he interacts with the characters going forward. He meets his former self at first metaphorically in the echos how he affected his former partner Kitty Softpaws and then later on more literally as all his previous incarnations are present to convince him to abandon his newfound morals. The change in him is clear as he does not recognize his present self in his former actions and he realizes he can never un-know this. The only thing he can do is stop fearing death and dedicate himself to a purposeful meaningful existence. Like Ivan Ilyich, he dies a spiritual last death so that he can begin life anew. Of course I see myself in the cat, trying to ease the burden of existence by continuing to perform in the theatre of Jairo’s life. While I don’t exactly feel like I have lived rudderlessly it’s a reminder that there’s nothing wrong with taking stock of life, taking a quick peek at the void to measure up against what you’ve been doing lately. The truth will always come out in that moment when you ask yourself, have I lived a good life?

Dialectical Monism

Dialectical Monism

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I’ve talked on here about the concept of bad faith and the need for one to be authentic to ourselves. Half that battle is knowing who we are and what we want because those things are moving targets. The dissonance between those two realms of the inner and outer is what leads to unhappiness and un-fulfillment. Yet none of us are automatons with singular wants and needs, we are tapestries of desires and we twist and fold in on ourselves in a myriad of ways. Yet to simplify this paradox we abstract these internal battles into two opposing forces. All decisions can be broken down into a series of two choices: yes or no. This is at the heart of how we think, so it is no wonder that when creating computers we have embedded them with this sacred knowledge of yes or no, 1 or 0. Two opposing forces that build into a unified self.

Sometimes I feel my two selves at war, and the battlefield is my mind and body. Yet aren’t we always in constant battle with ourselves? There is the push and pull of time in every situation. If our decisions are the fundamental exercise of our existence and we cannot remain in a state of non-existence then time is both the cause of our existence and the measure against which we exist. The existential relief that comes from having chosen lasts only as long as the next choice remains looming in the distance. Putting off that next decision is at the heart of the human condition. It is the agony of consequence that keeps us in a state of complacency, an inactive participant in our daily lives. Yet if our biological imperative is to survive, then to live is to wage battle with ourselves over and over until we perish.

Under the tongue root

a fight most dread,

and another raging

behind in the head

These are the lyrics of Duel Of The Fates (before they got loosely translated into sanskrit), it’s a snippet from Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees). The lines refer to the fight amongst a tree yet it applies to us as well. The roles we embody with our words may be in opposition to the self in our minds. The act of decision can sometimes feel like a violent rejection of one role or fate over the other. The song plays during a battle as the two greatest opposing forces in the Star Wars Universe battle to lay claim to Anakin’s future. Light vs Dark, Yin vs Yang, and yet ultimately unification through balance.

Last weekend I tried to do a bike ride that I objectively failed at. Having planned it very poorly I ran out of water on a hot day and turned back having done only about half of what I set out to do. The heat was exhausting and every second I was on the bike was a decision point to continue riding or to stop. The mounting pain, onset of heat exhaustion and mechanical troubles that I was facing were forcing me to keep deciding to continue as opposed to the state I wish to be in which is passive activity, the role of cycling. Yet is willpower more like a status check that may or may not fail you depending on the severity of the decision or like a reserve that whittles away little by little as you are forced to take action over and over? To be an athlete you must be able to tolerate pain, that is the nature of strength and growth. The athlete in me told me to keep pushing forward, yet the pragmatist repeatedly questioned why I was pushing to the brink of suffering. So who is my true self? In that moment the pain, doubt, and realization built to a crescendo and I knew then I was cycling in bad faith. Eventually I chose to stop and turn around. This is a microcosm of the decision points we face in life yet it illustrates the profound effects the simplest ones can have. To wit, having invested in my identity as a cyclist I feel like I have failed myself yet undoubtedly I made the right choice that day lest I ended up on the side of the road with heat stroke. Who we are is a conjunction of the forces that shape us and it’s important that our identity and our confidence must come from different sources.

There will always be me and the shadow of me, the me I aspire to be. There will be times when they are in opposition and times when they are in agreement, they both may grow or diminish but through constant reflection and interrogation they should always remain in balance.

Benedictus

Benedictus

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At a bar last night some poor woman had the misfortune of asking me what I was currently reading and I proceeded to vomit half-formed ideas on existentialism, freedom, authenticity, and self-discovery at her. Today I realized I desperately needed an outlet lest the flood gates be open upon more unsuspecting bar patrons. Sometimes I loathe the question “what is it about”. Can you truly summarize such a dense work of prose in a sentence or two? (Spielberg would say yes) Yet as humans we are constantly compacting, contextualizing, and abstracting vast amounts of information. Not only that but it is the foundation of the creative process to absorb and produce. So, as my platform, this blog shall serve as the repository for all further fruits of my creative digestive track.

I have about two dozen half written drafts of posts I was inspired to write but subsequently got cold on. In fact I have about a dozen of them that have the preceding sentence written into them, as if such a sentiment holds the key to actually, finally publishing one of these damned things. But so help me God this is the one that will make it through because I’m deciding to keep these short and sweet. My problem previously has been to try and write thematically cohesive, well thought out essays (or stories) but really my mind has never worked that way. So today I am presenting my thoughts just as I currently have had them today.

I mention God because he is on my mind. And I mention he because he is the patriarch of the church as was made clear by the Great Mass I witnessed today. Mozart’s other great unfinished work was performed handsomely by the LA Philharmonic at the illustrious Walt Disney Concert Hall. As usual I was the only one there wearing a Sleep hoodie and a t-shirt and below the median age of 50. I’m trying to make classical concerts metal again but I’m fighting a losing battle I fear. The LA Phil was kind enough to display lyrics of the translated Latin up on the wooden beams behind the orchestra. For something that sounds so divine the lyrics are so boring. Oscillating between “we worship you great father” and “we thank you for your glory”. That’s not to say the music was boring though, quite the opposite, it feels rapturous to sit in that theatre and listen to the rich sound of the orchestra delivering some of Mozart’s most inspired writing. I could not help but wonder how he wrote something that could make me feel as if I believed in a divine being without actually doing so. To me, belief in God was never even a consideration so although I grew up Catholic, I wouldn’t call myself a lapsed catholic, I simply never was one. Which brings me to my other rumination of the day, that I am nothing.

The concept of nothingness as it relates to existentialism is a void to which all meaning can be ascribed to. Simply put (from a simple understanding I’ll admit) it means absolute freedom, infinite possibility because nothing has no attachments, duties, wants or needs. We are born nothing and we die nothing. Which sounds nihilistic but in fact is rife with excitement and opportunity…and anxiety. I sat at a coffee shop today to try and parse through this concept and after the last bit of caffeine ran its course I decided a bar was more suitable for the punk rock philosophers of the 1900s. A single beer can go a long way towards helping you understand the concepts of Being and Not-Being, nothingness, and time. So I was swimming in this philosophical milieu as I watched, experienced, the LA Phil play Mozart’s exaltation towards his heavenly father. If we are nothing, walking voids then naturally we try to fill that by collecting identities, roles, occupations, ideas. It would appear to me that God, the church, and any religion is the ultimate answer to that void, certainly the easiest to adopt since the processes and mechanisms have all been laid out for you by generations preceding. I can’t help but admire the creative work of geniuses that are moved by a singular focus and devotion to religion. Having that clear of a purpose is work in and of itself, but it’s not for me.

Imagine Mozart in 1782 composing a tribute to God, hoping his audience would worship in unison with his music reaching a height that neither would on their own. Enter me in 2022 using the performance as a springboard to ponder the absence of God and my ability to free myself from religious attachments whilst experiencing second hand spirituality. I’ll admit that this sort of intellectual hijacking is always a delicious treat when I am present of mind to notice it.