Words are an extraordinary thing.
How easy it is to change our train of thought with a simple word replacement.
For example: 'I am scared of him...' as opposed to 'I am scared for him...'
I know good grammar has never been well-practiced among my counterparts, but for those who understand the difference, those two clauses have very different tones.
Who, in the example, is the proverbial bigger person? Many factors affect that conclusion, yes, but what does fear mean to the individual?
What does it mean to be afraid of oneself?
By what means do we size ourselves up to others?
How big a role does empathy play in how we feel about others?
This is what it means to be human - stuck between the instincts of our animalistic natures and our godlike state of mind; the teenagers of existence, again, still finding our place among others and within this realm we cannot escape.
Sunday, 25 December 2011
Somewhere I Belong
I was fascinated at how lucid I could be in times of great distress and pain. Perhaps my subconscious was sure I was wanting the same thing.
I cannot yet imagine what it feels like to lose a child, but I assume the finality of death is better dealt with than not knowing how they're faring. I still believe we were put on Earth as a social experiment of great magnitude. We are all our own beings, fashioned from others, but yet an invisible bond holds us to each other in a way that we cannot quantify.
The same is not observed for other worldly creatures, which helps substantiate my notion of us not belonging here naturally.
This is the great war we fight - with the world, with each other, with ourselves: Is there anywhere we truly belong? It's why we wander, it's why we're at an unrest.
We're all looking for signs.
For something that could tell us we're finally home.
I cannot yet imagine what it feels like to lose a child, but I assume the finality of death is better dealt with than not knowing how they're faring. I still believe we were put on Earth as a social experiment of great magnitude. We are all our own beings, fashioned from others, but yet an invisible bond holds us to each other in a way that we cannot quantify.
The same is not observed for other worldly creatures, which helps substantiate my notion of us not belonging here naturally.
This is the great war we fight - with the world, with each other, with ourselves: Is there anywhere we truly belong? It's why we wander, it's why we're at an unrest.
We're all looking for signs.
For something that could tell us we're finally home.
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
Purgatory
Someone handed me a flyer today. This was all I noticed:
Do you know that you will outlive the sun? Do you know that when the earth and the stars have all passed away, you will barely have begun your endless day? Once you are born, you will never cease to live. You will be alive eternally. Eternity has no end. This is a solemn and fearful truth. Where are you planning to spend it?
Right now, I'm in purgatory.
I'd rather go to hell than be in purgatory.
Do you know that you will outlive the sun? Do you know that when the earth and the stars have all passed away, you will barely have begun your endless day? Once you are born, you will never cease to live. You will be alive eternally. Eternity has no end. This is a solemn and fearful truth. Where are you planning to spend it?
Right now, I'm in purgatory.
I'd rather go to hell than be in purgatory.
Tuesday, 4 October 2011
Time
An average human life (so tempting it is to point out at every opportunity) is less than a thousand months long. One third of those months are spent asleep, so a conscious human existence averages about six hundred months merely. A lifetime is thus a truly fleeting thing, lodged between a sleep and a forgetting; and there scarcely seems time to draw breath in it, before its last breath is drawn.
The first mystery of time, then, is how little of it anyone has. The second is how unimaginably vast time seems on either side of the mere moments humans manage to occupy. If the universe's history were compressed into an hour, the time that humankind has existed would barely fit into the last fractions of a split second of that hour. If humanity succeeds in extinguishing itself through ecological disaster or nuclear war, the spark of intelligent life that flared in this corner of the cosmos would be scarcely noticeable between the massive weights of time that stretched before and after it.
Is it possible to explain time? St Augustine put his finger on the nub of the difficulty when he said, 'If you tell me to meet you at such-and-such a time, I have no problem; but if you ask me what time is, I cannot answer.' As a bishop St Augustine should not, of course, have worried about time, which in theology is a minor matter, for the reason that the deity is eternal, and 'eternal' means 'outside time'; and since the deity and his eternal realm constitute ultimate reality, it follows that time is unreal. And one should not worry about what does not exist.
Unfortunately, the ill-defined nature of deity and eternity makes this a rather unpersuasive thought. Time is all too real, as its swift and ever-increasing pace testifies - to our dismay and eventual undoing.
Is there any point in trying to define time?
Perhaps not. It is one of those things that escapes direct attention, although it accompanies every deed and thought. It has a mysterious elasticity, passing at different speeds for different people, even for those engaged in the very same activity. For example: suppose we are at the cinema together; you are enjoying the film but I am not. Time will pass more swiftly for you than for me. Similar hours will be as nothing to a sleeper, yet will limp on leaden feet for one who watches over him.
This protean capacity of time is a significant matter for anyone who would live well. Consider: a weekend away from home in some beautiful, exciting or fascinating new place will feel like a lifetime while one is there, yet like a split second once one is home again. Both temporal judgements will capture something of the truth, which is that time is not something absolute and objective, ticking away in regular quanta, but is made of experience. Think of loitering at home for a week, doing nothing, and compare it with jumping on an aeroplane and visiting several exotic locations in the same space of days. More life gets packed into the latter than the former - more perceptions, more thoughts, more memories, a greater range of feelings; and it is these, not repetition and stasis, that measure life.
Some people use their energy to live many lifetimes in one lifetime. Others, through timidity or lack of imagination, use up a whole lifetime living less than one lifetime. These latter in effect eat their soup with a fork; they walk about with eyes shut, fingers in their ears, cotton wool in their noses. Not for them the vivid, pungent sensations of living along their pulses, experiencing everything at it's best.
That, for Walter Pater, is what a successful life is: 'A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life,' he wrote; 'how many we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
The injunction to live life to the full might better, as this insight suggests, be phrased: Live all the lifetimes you can.
The first mystery of time, then, is how little of it anyone has. The second is how unimaginably vast time seems on either side of the mere moments humans manage to occupy. If the universe's history were compressed into an hour, the time that humankind has existed would barely fit into the last fractions of a split second of that hour. If humanity succeeds in extinguishing itself through ecological disaster or nuclear war, the spark of intelligent life that flared in this corner of the cosmos would be scarcely noticeable between the massive weights of time that stretched before and after it.
Is it possible to explain time? St Augustine put his finger on the nub of the difficulty when he said, 'If you tell me to meet you at such-and-such a time, I have no problem; but if you ask me what time is, I cannot answer.' As a bishop St Augustine should not, of course, have worried about time, which in theology is a minor matter, for the reason that the deity is eternal, and 'eternal' means 'outside time'; and since the deity and his eternal realm constitute ultimate reality, it follows that time is unreal. And one should not worry about what does not exist.
Unfortunately, the ill-defined nature of deity and eternity makes this a rather unpersuasive thought. Time is all too real, as its swift and ever-increasing pace testifies - to our dismay and eventual undoing.
Is there any point in trying to define time?
Perhaps not. It is one of those things that escapes direct attention, although it accompanies every deed and thought. It has a mysterious elasticity, passing at different speeds for different people, even for those engaged in the very same activity. For example: suppose we are at the cinema together; you are enjoying the film but I am not. Time will pass more swiftly for you than for me. Similar hours will be as nothing to a sleeper, yet will limp on leaden feet for one who watches over him.
This protean capacity of time is a significant matter for anyone who would live well. Consider: a weekend away from home in some beautiful, exciting or fascinating new place will feel like a lifetime while one is there, yet like a split second once one is home again. Both temporal judgements will capture something of the truth, which is that time is not something absolute and objective, ticking away in regular quanta, but is made of experience. Think of loitering at home for a week, doing nothing, and compare it with jumping on an aeroplane and visiting several exotic locations in the same space of days. More life gets packed into the latter than the former - more perceptions, more thoughts, more memories, a greater range of feelings; and it is these, not repetition and stasis, that measure life.
Some people use their energy to live many lifetimes in one lifetime. Others, through timidity or lack of imagination, use up a whole lifetime living less than one lifetime. These latter in effect eat their soup with a fork; they walk about with eyes shut, fingers in their ears, cotton wool in their noses. Not for them the vivid, pungent sensations of living along their pulses, experiencing everything at it's best.
That, for Walter Pater, is what a successful life is: 'A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life,' he wrote; 'how many we see in them all that is to be seen by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.'
The injunction to live life to the full might better, as this insight suggests, be phrased: Live all the lifetimes you can.
Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Peanut Butter Bliss
I only know that your face, the sound of your voice, will never diminish for me.
I refuse to give you up.
There are people like that, after all - individuals who resist the current, who hold out against that betrayal. Who refuse to take their small bouquet of mis-remembered moments and leave.
You'll run into them at the supermarket, or while waiting in line at the cinema, and they'll say, "I had an acquaintance many years ago," or "I once knew someone who I cared for very much who also loved oranges," and suddenly, standing there waiting to pay the cashier, or clutching your movie ticket, you can see them leaning into the current's pull, hear the rocks of the riverbed clattering like bones.
Sometimes we do the right thing - the only thing - and be hated for it. Inevitably.
Even justly. (Perspective?)
I refuse to give you up.
There are people like that, after all - individuals who resist the current, who hold out against that betrayal. Who refuse to take their small bouquet of mis-remembered moments and leave.
You'll run into them at the supermarket, or while waiting in line at the cinema, and they'll say, "I had an acquaintance many years ago," or "I once knew someone who I cared for very much who also loved oranges," and suddenly, standing there waiting to pay the cashier, or clutching your movie ticket, you can see them leaning into the current's pull, hear the rocks of the riverbed clattering like bones.
Sometimes we do the right thing - the only thing - and be hated for it. Inevitably.
Even justly. (Perspective?)
Where Are We, Jes?
When I read, I form pictures in my mind. That is, after all, the point of the written word, yes? To create a film in the mind's eye using your characters, your setting, your pace - with their script. Using one's delicious imagination, you become a movie director.
But what about those times when the picture you had all that time turns out to be (even slightly) incorrect? Unfortunately, I have had this experience myself, not too long ago.
It is utterly disappointing (to me).
I feel as if I've betrayed the author - but is it not the author that has betrayed me, by not painting a picture I could translate?
It's all in the detail.
I fear I may be slipping away. Getting lost to things that are of no importance. I will try to read (everything) with clearer understanding.
Adieu.
(excerpt from my book.)
Jesamania.
But what about those times when the picture you had all that time turns out to be (even slightly) incorrect? Unfortunately, I have had this experience myself, not too long ago.
It is utterly disappointing (to me).
I feel as if I've betrayed the author - but is it not the author that has betrayed me, by not painting a picture I could translate?
It's all in the detail.
I fear I may be slipping away. Getting lost to things that are of no importance. I will try to read (everything) with clearer understanding.
Adieu.
(excerpt from my book.)
Jesamania.
Monday, 15 August 2011
Destabilise
I have been dreading writing this post. Not for lack of things to say, but because I know I will be lying, inevitably, about some things.
Even if I deny it, every other post of mine has been for the readers, and not written for me. This time, fuck you guys (in the nicest possible way), because it's about time I start speaking to myself about some things.
Let's start with family.
Big ugly topic, eh. You have no idea.
It's an unfortunate thing to say that the people I call friends have not had the opportunity to know me throughout all my transitions. Not many people know the story of my life. Do I prefer it that way? Mostly, yeah. The last thing I want is to elicit sympathy because of circumstances I'd been in. There are things that I've been through that I wouldn't wish on anyone, but I am grateful for having experienced it.
I used to be a happy child. Obviously, things changed.
When I was 12, my mother, who was no longer married, began this relationship with a co-worker. Right from the outset, I was against it. I had this childish notion that it was wrong for a mother to bring strangers into what was an established home space. And so I let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I hated what she was doing. No doubt it upset her. I became a troublesome child at that point. I would let him know that he was not welcome in our house, and it probably tore my mother in two. Eventually, she decided to break things off with him, but it seemed almost impossible. He was very taken with my mother, you see, and refused to let her leave. He told her that if he couldn't have her, no one else could.
On the 29th of September 2005, he took her life along with his.
That man stole a mother away from 3 children, a sister from her siblings, an aunt, a cousin, a friend. He changed so many lives by taking away one.
It was a difficult time for me. I'd never been so lost, so eager to follow anyone who could make me forget. We endured months of court cases in attempt to find somewhere stable for my brother and I to stay. Can you imagine what that's like? Imagine telling a child that they're a burden. We were made to stay with our biological father, and his family. I couldn't bear to welcome new people into this new life, so I spent a lot of time on my own. 'Family' became a new concept to learn. And I'm still learning. Somewhere in my heart, I know that as dysfunctional as my family history might be, its only made me stronger. I'm a better person for learning how to appreciate all the small things. That's what it's about, right? The particles of being.
Speaking of beings, I want to be able to tell you what draws me to people I deem important.
I have a lot to give, emotionally, physically, intellectually. All I want to be happy is a companion. Someone with whom I can share my deepest thoughts, and not have them be subject to judgement. It probably sounds conceited of me to say so, but I feel that I am not appreciated for what I am, what I have to give. I am a lot of things to many people, but I am not who I want to be to them. Does that make any sense? I'm not able to be myself, because no one would understand me as I am. Ok, that isn't entirely true. But there are times when I can only remember who I am, by remembering you.
These people who are important enough to remain, are those who treat me as an equal. They teach me, as I teach them. We're following these derelict trains of thought together, because we want so much to understand, so we can be understood. There are entire lifetimes in every thought, and it saddens me that I cannot share some of them with you.
But I will try. Sometime.
Perhaps.
Jesamania.
Even if I deny it, every other post of mine has been for the readers, and not written for me. This time, fuck you guys (in the nicest possible way), because it's about time I start speaking to myself about some things.
Let's start with family.
Big ugly topic, eh. You have no idea.
It's an unfortunate thing to say that the people I call friends have not had the opportunity to know me throughout all my transitions. Not many people know the story of my life. Do I prefer it that way? Mostly, yeah. The last thing I want is to elicit sympathy because of circumstances I'd been in. There are things that I've been through that I wouldn't wish on anyone, but I am grateful for having experienced it.
I used to be a happy child. Obviously, things changed.
When I was 12, my mother, who was no longer married, began this relationship with a co-worker. Right from the outset, I was against it. I had this childish notion that it was wrong for a mother to bring strangers into what was an established home space. And so I let her know, in no uncertain terms, that I hated what she was doing. No doubt it upset her. I became a troublesome child at that point. I would let him know that he was not welcome in our house, and it probably tore my mother in two. Eventually, she decided to break things off with him, but it seemed almost impossible. He was very taken with my mother, you see, and refused to let her leave. He told her that if he couldn't have her, no one else could.
On the 29th of September 2005, he took her life along with his.
That man stole a mother away from 3 children, a sister from her siblings, an aunt, a cousin, a friend. He changed so many lives by taking away one.
It was a difficult time for me. I'd never been so lost, so eager to follow anyone who could make me forget. We endured months of court cases in attempt to find somewhere stable for my brother and I to stay. Can you imagine what that's like? Imagine telling a child that they're a burden. We were made to stay with our biological father, and his family. I couldn't bear to welcome new people into this new life, so I spent a lot of time on my own. 'Family' became a new concept to learn. And I'm still learning. Somewhere in my heart, I know that as dysfunctional as my family history might be, its only made me stronger. I'm a better person for learning how to appreciate all the small things. That's what it's about, right? The particles of being.
Speaking of beings, I want to be able to tell you what draws me to people I deem important.
I have a lot to give, emotionally, physically, intellectually. All I want to be happy is a companion. Someone with whom I can share my deepest thoughts, and not have them be subject to judgement. It probably sounds conceited of me to say so, but I feel that I am not appreciated for what I am, what I have to give. I am a lot of things to many people, but I am not who I want to be to them. Does that make any sense? I'm not able to be myself, because no one would understand me as I am. Ok, that isn't entirely true. But there are times when I can only remember who I am, by remembering you.
These people who are important enough to remain, are those who treat me as an equal. They teach me, as I teach them. We're following these derelict trains of thought together, because we want so much to understand, so we can be understood. There are entire lifetimes in every thought, and it saddens me that I cannot share some of them with you.
But I will try. Sometime.
Perhaps.
Jesamania.
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