Oops, I Forgot To Take My Meekness Pills And Inherit The Earth

No one succumbs to a temptation they find unattractive. What is it, this compulsion to scrawl things on blank pages? Why this boundless out-flowing of words? What drives me to it? Is writing some sort of disease, or - being speech in visual form - is it simply a manifestation of being human?

Language is lyrical. I become offended when people don't make the effort to understand what I say, and why I choose the words I do. Why is no one curious? I don't understand how someone could not be bewitched by language, enthralled by linguistic propagation, the miracle of inventiveness that can spawn such gems as 'cyanosed' or 'perspicacity'. When I wrote essays in school, I was chided for using words that are less commonly known among people. This confused me. People don't savour the gift of a sentence, or delight in how a word defines the object and becomes forever inseparable from the concept. And this, of course, the very essence of humanity, is the universe I set out to conquer.

Sometimes I fear that I reduce language to a quantifiable process. I peel back the skin to examine semantics and split seams to make sense and extract the logical clauses. I conduct autopsies to excise its tumourous ambiguity, classify and grade the natural exuberance, demystify the miracle, bag it up and explain it away. It's a deflowering of sorts, this desire to harness the fundamental power of language - and it's entirely preposterous - it is tantamount to a rejection of language as irrational, illogical, inexplicable, impure. Perhaps it is a response borne out of fear - a fear of the inexpressible, all that cannot be explained. For all my efforts in understanding language, I do see that mystery is closer to love than familiarity.

I am a theatre of processes. I am the prey to an imperfect vision, to the grandiose colossus that is language.
It is a process of demystification that creates the illusion of control.

The Semantics of Murder

"The difference between a crime of evil and a crime of illness is the difference between a sin and a symptom."

I've never understood why people have an affinity for living. Why would you want to survive?
Survival, not death, is the real mystery. The instinct to cling on gasping and serve your time is a concept that is both underrated and under-explored. Even in the face of unending pain and inevitable death, humans beg for the chance to live in the world they've done nothing but complain about after having destroyed it. I've never understood the appeal.

Recently, I've had the pleasure of discussing the semantics of murder with Cavie and Akshar, and they've helped me realise what's so beautiful about murder. A particular method of murder, incidentally.

I am stunned by the intimacy of strangulation.

The act of stifling the life force of a person, somewhat absorbing them into you, gaining strength from their growing weakness and thriving off their futile willingness to survive... It's thoroughly engaging.
It has none of the distance of a gun shot or stab wound; none of the impersonality of a weapon. It is a passive way to kill, and an almost feminine way to die. The act of murder is a calculating decision. It is not acted out for the moment of death, but rather for the process of dying. It is an act of real and complete engagement, for it is intensely personal. This is how you kill when love meets hate, when you become so consumed by your victim that your body must become the weapon. It's an intense desire to crush the fragile windpipe and feel the warmth ebbing out of a body before it becomes inanimate in your arms.

And then, the quiet aftermath ensues.
Introspection. Time for both the killer and the victim to reflect on how they could both have avoided this outcome. Time to consider their flaws. It's a brazen opportunity for pure remorse as the victim experiences a final expiring embrace. Now can you see how little there is that separates love from hate?

You've watched the grand finale. There is a certain romance in dying in front of an audience. You wish for a beauty in death, not unlike Juliet or Cleopatra. But in reality, death is an ugly affair. Stay ugly.

All that's left is the rest of your life. Don't make a fool of yourself by trying to escape. Endure the purgatory of waiting and take the consequences without objection. This is the story of your life. You've spent a lifetime enduring the mundane plot with predictable twists, and you're about to experience the short-lived peak of another. This is why you live. This is why it has never occurred to you to end it all - your life is a vigorous and persistent search in the hopes that your story will end differently, and not merely confirm the absence of something essential and elusive.

When I imagine death, it is rich in its anticipation, but so utterly barren after delivery. It becomes very quickly anti-climatic to me. If I cannot fathom love, then I cannot experience the agony of loss. I do not feel your pain. I am only able to observe the gaping void within me where the stem of my humanity must have withered and died before it could blossom. 

The Cognitive Condition Of My Brain Is Currently Compromised

How could anyone be sure if who they are is what they see in a mirror?

Memory is a wonderful selective. We cling to the peripherals in moments of stress, little slivers of reality that construct a defence against the trauma. But what is not of any certainty is the memory itself. Memories change because how we want to remember them changes. People who feature in our lives never play a consistent part. In this manner, we are all storytellers, because everything we witness becomes fiction in a retelling. We remember people and their actions in context of how we feel about them in a particular moment. Experiments! We are all each other's experiments in an encounter.

Why do we ask questions? If you just listen long enough, you hear everything you need to know. Observation is a rewarding conquest. I've watched people absorb each other's pasts until they could no longer distinguish between beginnings and endings, between truth and falsehood, ownership and possession. It's actually a great dissolution of privacy as they raid each other's lives in order to make sense of their own.

'Whoever has eyes to see and ears to hear will be persuaded that mortals can hide no secrets. He whose lips are silent speaks with his fingertips; betrayal threatens from every pore. That’s why the task of making conscious the most hidden business of the soul can be certainly resolved.'

What do we know about ourselves?

I have made some leeway with distinguishing between three commonly misused words: Emotions, Moods, and Attitudes.

I've concluded that emotions have physiological correlates – it can be seen from gestures, facial expressions. They often lead to an action, and result from a specific event. They beg the attention of an audience. This, readers, is what we practice in front of a mirror, because this is all we can control.

Moods are seemingly more complex. They have no sense of time or direction, and are not necessarily expressed physically. They also seem to have no apparent cause or source. A result of hormones, perhaps?

Attitudes definitely have a more cognitive, conscious component. It's a switch.

Reactions are not as appreciated as they ought to be. So much can be read in a glance. We need to learn to listen with our eyes. What do you despise? By this you are truly known.

“No amount of observations of white swans can allow an inference that all swans are white, but the observation of a single black swan is sufficient to refute that conclusion.” – David Hume

Certainty is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences the certainty must have a feeling of the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional certainty will destroy a man.

I want my past transposed into an extravagant storyboard with the reassurance of plot. Like you, the reader, who demands the story, a reason to turn the page, I want an ending so that there could be a beginning.