Death to the Ego

What then of the veneration of those who overcome the ego? What then of the myths of the hero who prevails over the self?

Indeed, where does that leave the notion of self-sacrifice?

Self-sacrifice in the pursuit of Oneness is misguided, for it is still your experience of self-sacrifice and your experience of Oneness. Rather, prevailing over the ego is still to be venerated and the myths should continue to be told. For ego is not the same as a self: ego is the story about the body that houses the self.

Those stories can always be changed. At times such a narrative may need to be annihilated. This is the proper death of the ego.

The Melancholy of the Disinterested

There are those few who cannot seem to attain flow, however. They have not yet found that experience that can draw them out of self-awareness and into a state of pure fixation on some part of the world. For them the world becomes grey and life is melancholic, for they cannot escape the anemic experience of being self fixated on self.

They may take up this or that activity, but it never arouses the passions enough to shrink the fixation on self. The world remains grey.

This is one form of what we now call depression. The solution is elusive: one either continues searching for the thing that arouses the passions, or one resigns themselves to the melancholic life of self-fixation.

I, for one, would never denounce a person for being in such a state.

The Impulse Towards Oneness

When the introspective self finds itself melancholic it may turn toward the world to find fresh air. A passing interaction may be soothing, but far too much self-awareness will keep the experience shallow. So the passing interaction becomes deeper and deeper as self-awareness shrinks. In this is a greater intensity of experience, and one may begin wanting less and less self-awareness.

At some degree this becomes the impulse towards Oneness. The desire to be so fully connected to something else that one ceases to be separate entirely. This impulse can then be enshrined as an ideal or as a "proper state of being." Those who enshrine such an impulse may come to see the self as a hindrance to the proper state of Oneness.

This, however, is nothing more than nonsense. For it is still your experience. It is still the World as I found it even if the fixation shifts from the I to the World.

Remove the enshrinement and you have the aspiration to what we now call "flow." There is no killing the self to attain flow, flow is an experience unto the self as well.

The Essential Melancholy of Self Fixated on Self

You are a self. This fact is not melancholic inherently. What is melancholic is when a self fixates on the self.

How is it that the self is known? Through experience of the world.

However a self may also seek after the self. Famously Hume tried this and found that it could not be done - leading him to deny that there is a self at all. This is not a necessary motion, for the self is found in the perception of things outside the self. However, when the self tries to fixate on the self it leads only to melancholy, for there is nothing there to perceive.

When there is nothing there to perceive, there is only thin air, boredom, and starvation. This leads to melancholy.

You Are Essentially a Self

The nature of the self is unknown. What a self is is unknown. What cannot be denied, however, is that you are essentially a self. This is known not through introspection (an attempt at a self finding the self) but through interaction with the world. For that interaction is your interaction. That experience is your experience. It all comes to a central point, and this character of phenomena is the essence of the self that we can discover.

The Future of the Microstory

In a show or a movie, what is more primary? The plot or the imagery? The answer is, of course, a case-by-case answer: your average mystery relies heavily on plot as it tries to appeal to the viewer's curiosity, intellect, and the satisfaction of revelation (which necessitates build-up and pay-off), but some films are more about presenting stylized imagery with a basic plot that exists only to organize the imagery.

Exhibit A

In many cases, those bare bones plot movies are more beloved and iconic not in spite of their lack of narrative depth but because of it. How many times has Tim Burton ever blown your mind with his storyline? But you remember his visuals and his style. If you have ever known a girl between the ages of 13 and 16 who fancied herself "dark," then you have seen her express all her notions of love and romance by celebrating Jack and Sally. Recall Avatar, which had its plot lifted directly from Dances With Wolves, but left some people depressed, suicidal, and feeling that they were living in a colorless world because Pandora was so beautiful. 

In other cases, even movies have have intricate plots oftentimes have their plots ignored for the sake of their iconic pictures. In Fight Club we learn that an emotionally constipated man with insomnia and an abandonment complex created an anti-consumerist, violent, destructive alter-ego for himself who was everything he couldn't be - and then in the course of the story he realizes that he was a deeply sick and unhealthy person who really just needed to let himself learn to love another person. In other words, according to the plot Tyler Durden is an extreme example of what happens when men who resent being abandoned by their fathers turn their rage on themselves and their world instead of growing up. How is this expressed in our imagery and icons?

We express it by making him a sage, of course

All this is to say that we can extract plot from films and still have something satisfying and meaningful. In fact, we oftentimes discard whatever plot was attached to our favorite imagery and situations for the sake of making them more versatile. What is the implication of this?

Media is now consumed on demand. We have more control than ever on what media we consume and the timeframe in which we do it. Further, we have more capability than ever before to generate our own media, particularly through YouTube. In the domain of comedy it has always been understood that plot was subordinate to situation: funny always triumphed over coherence. We have seen this reflected in the explosion of sketches, of varying quality, that litter the internet. 

How long will it be before it is accepted that the same principal can apply beyond humor?

It is difficult to produce a full and complete narrative, especially for an amateur, but it is completely possible to pour one's heart and soul into a single situation. Why is it that we suppose that this is only appropriate if the situation is meant to be funny? Would it be possible to create a microstory where the payoff is the satisfaction of vengeance? Or the brokenness of a unrequited romance? Or righteous indignation at some offense?

Various pay-offs require more elaborate set-ups, however it seems to be me that it is perfectly within the realm of possibility to expand the domain of microstories to payoffs other than humor. It also seems to me that it is economically inevitable that, due to the over saturation of people trying to be funny on the internet, people will begin experimenting more and more with microstories that offer alternative emotional payoffs. Eventually a few formulas will be found that work.

Or at least one can hope.

Why is a Wise Guy Not a Wise Guy?

Requested by RGF

To properly answer this question it must be stated aloud. “Why is a wise guy not a wise guy?”

Or perhaps the proper way of writing the question would be “Why's a whys guy not a wise guy?” In which case the answer is that a wise guy does not bother with so man “whys,” because he sees that “why” is only useful up to a certain point. Why allows one to make sense of how forces and agents operate within a system, but also comes to a terminus where continuing to ask “why” will only yield impotent “because” answers. Eventually one is bound to come to a point where the answer is “it just is” or “I just do,” and the “whys” guy who insists on asking why beyond the point of usefulness cannot be a “wise” guy who applies knowledge and understanding to his actions.

On the other hand, maybe this is all wrong and it is not a question at all, but a statement: “Wise: a whys guy not a Ys guy.” In this instance we have two types of men, the “whys” guy and the “Ys” guy. Y being typical shorthand for a “yes” response, especially in questionnaires, we can picture the “Ys” guy being the chap who does as he's told and doesn't bother with asking too many questions. He acts based on the vision of another and is not concerned with understanding too much of his own area of activity. The other man is the questioner – the “whys” guy – who will not act unless he has been given an explanation of the meaning and context of his actions. The statement declares the “whys” guy to be also “wise,” to the exclusion of the “Ys” guy.

Or perhaps it is the reverse! Perhaps this statement says that the “Ys” guy is “wise” while the “whys” guy is not! For what, after all, is wisdom except an aid in determining what actions one should take? And what is the critical foundation of society except a willingness to trust others and accept a certain level of blindness in order to function at greater levels than any single individual imagination would be capable of picturing? In this case, the “whys” guy slows society's progress, the “Ys” guy understands the value of endorsing a social structure – and is therefore “wise.”

And what else might these words be saying? “Why is a wise guy not a wise guy?” That is, asking why the wise are not wise? A bit a shoddy logic that illuminates the deeper truth that a wise guy is only wise in a certain context – that is, certain behavioral inclinations and certain maxims may make a man wise in one situation, and a fool in others. Put a wise debater in a managerial position and see the fool come out; ask the analyst to be an artist and you'll soon beg the fool to go back to his dungeon of spreadsheets!

And thus we see that the same bit of wordplay can be used to say this but it can also say that and that in this context we're discussing wisdom in the abstract and in that context we're discussing social structure, and no doubt there are more this and thats that might be appealed to as context. No doubt all this confusion could be avoided by multiplying words to create clear logical pictures of what we are trying to communicate, and therein lies the real wisdom of the statement: A bit of wordplay will stay with us far longer than logical clarity, for the wordplay resembles the obscurity that characterizes our lives as they are rather than our lives as our logical pictures say they can be.

But even that explanation pales in comparison to the goofy joy of playing with words!

Hope is not Out There

How does it end? Whatever situation you are in - or even the entirety of life itself - how does it end? Does it end in victory for you? Rest? Satisfaction? Does the whole thing end utterly fucked up? Miserable? In defeat?

You can watch life's trends and try to predict the ending. You can tell when the situation is turning against you and you can tell when the situation is turning in your favor. But Fortune is fickle, and just because one day is full of warm fuzzies holds no bearing on whether the wheel might turn the next day and leave you with nausea and exhaustion.

However, for practical reasons, in life hope largely comes from within. In so far as we can study life's trends and study the way an action leads to a consequence, hope is a matter of phenomena and method (something like a science). However, insofar as we cannot see very far in front of our face, and insofar as life is full of mystery and twisting turns, hope is more a matter of creating a certain picture of the world and clinging to it through strength of will. Anxiety is little different, except that it points in another direction and it is far easier to cling to. Regardless we do not, on the whole, come to hope or anxiety because of data that the world provides to us, rather it is through the pictures that we use to make sense of that data.

This is to say, that if we see our lives growing greater and greater, that comes from our own vitality; if we see our lives ending in brokenness, that comes from our own acceptance. The world, however, will not allow us to see more than a few feet in front of our face. Our near circumstances are not something we can study. Our anticipations are context that we use to make sense of our present moment.

Oh my Blog,

It's been awhile, hasn't it?

It's been a long while.

Phenomena as a Fixed Point

Our language is ever at risk of becoming something knotty, chaotic, and superfluous. We define concepts - but suppose we define too many or not enough? How should we know what "too many" and "not enough" even are? We might make critical those concepts that we most need to do away with. We might create entire studies, entire subjects, that we devote our lives to that simply do not matter.

Language is human.

We must return to phenomena as a fixed point to keep from losing our minds. This is not to say that we must keep language simple or that language must slavishly proceed from what we observe, but it is to say that there is something outside of language that language relates to.

Perhaps we like our language to be simple, we must wonder what we want it to be simple in relation to? And the answer is phenomena. Or suppose we want our language to be specific. Specific according to what? According to how much we can see. Phenomena keeps us from getting trapped by the words that proceed from our own mouths.