My mind the Sophist

“Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

The wisest teachers of Philosophy, Life and Rhetoric in Ancient Mesopotamia were often described as “Sophists“. The word itself is derived from the Greek “Sophos” which quite literally translates to “the wise man“. Greek Poets soon became known as “Sophistes” because they were generally considered to be masters of teaching life through language. The term evolved to mean anyone who taught others their craft, through language. Wise men who could depart their skill using simple rhetoric.
Somewhere deep along the road of History, the term “Sophist” has evolved from that of a “wise man” to that of (according to philosophypages.com); “A plausible argument that is actually fallacious, especially when someone dishonestly presents it as if it were legitimate reasoning“. In other words, a lie. A clever manipulation.

And so, my question to myself today is; The human mind, is it sophist in the modern sense of the word, by nature?. I’d argue that it is. I am fully aware that our minds are made up entirely of experiences, memories, chemical reactions and as stated in a previous blog entry, almost Pavlovian in how we deal with associations, desires, loves and especially what we perceive to be happiness, among other emotional responses. That is simply my stance on the complexity of the workings of the human mind. And yet, I feel an odd sense of deception. A masterfully intelligible deception by the human mind. The feeling of love, is so incredibly deep rooted, I often question how such a powerful emotion is simply the result of a chemical reaction induced by experience and memory. It doesn’t seem possible. It would seem quite innate, other Worldly, even divinely inspired, if I were a believer. But even that explanation, to me, seems too simple, too convenient, and supremely illogical when taken to the extreme that some people will commit acts of atrocity in the name of love (or what they consider to be love). I’m fully aware that the concept of love (or what we, relatively, have came to believe is love), is intrinsically man made.

I do not myself know what I consider to be happiness. It is a confusing term, that I often conflict with contentedness. Friends will tell me they’re at the happiest when they’re around family and friends. Now, in general I’m content when I’m around family and friends, I’m much less stressed, and my intense need to stare at myself inwardly like I’m holding up a mirror and gazing at my thoughts quietly subsides to the back of my mind, when I’m around family (not so much, with friends). But, I associate the feeling of happiness with an intense pleasure that I continually wish to recapture, an ideal state of being, the most significant chase, the realisation of vain desires that we’re unable to surpress. Perhaps we were only truly happy, as children, when “worry” was a word we could not comprehend, and life was inexplicably brilliant. We’d sit and think “eat, play football with friends, chase girls, watch TV… I could get used to this life“, but soon it fades and you’re forced to search for new meaning to the rather obscure and ambiguous notion of happiness. You’re told that you will be truly happy if you buy as much shit as you can afford; a car bigger than your neighbours, or a new outfit with Armani scribed into the back, or a Playstation 3, or a holiday on a beach somewhere for a week before falling back into the abstract rat race. But none of that is true happiness, in fact, it has the utterly opposite affect on me. I’m horribly stubborn like that. And so perhaps that is my problem, and the great barrier I have to overcome. My own Berlin Wall separating contentment from happiness. My stubbornness, unable to come to terms with the knowledge that I am far from perfect, that I have deep flaws, that I cannot know everything, than I am nothing special, that I cannot be everything; my own Berlin Wall.

Perhaps we as humans are so connected to each other spiritually, that we need each other in order to achieve a sense of happiness. Family, friends, lovers, artists, musicians and so on. French writer, Marcel Proust once remarked “Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom” and whilst this is a beautiful use of language, it makes me wonder if my problem is that I’ve never met anyone who makes me feel magnificently happy. Perhaps my problem is that I’m suspicious of people in general, their motives, and so struggle to allow someone to make me feel happy. Which, in itself, causes unhappiness? But then, (you’ll soon start to realise why I want to wake up screaming in anguish most mornings) I have to ask, what is unhappiness? Because whilst I’m certainly not happy, I’m also certainly not unhappy, I simply, am.

Perhaps happiness exists not on a continuous flowing river, but on fleeting moments, one after the other, tiny side streams of pleasure, whilst the normal lugubrious, useless World flows by on that continuous river. A smile on a train station platform from a woman you quite like the look of, or a soft kiss on the cheek, or the moment you read in a book something that you instantly relate to and no longer feel alone, or an act of great kindness. Perhaps those moments, those positively shocking moments, are the building blocks of pure happiness.

Contemplation of life, does not make me happy, and yet, I cannot bring myself to ignore the need to contemplate, because if I were to ignore it, I’d feel ashamed of the ignorance I’d be portraying. It’s a trap. There is no happiness in contemplation, and there is no happiness in ignorance (I suspect that if deep contemplation has never graced your thought patterns, then ignorance may provide a much more pleasant existence). I have mentioned previously, that I only ever feel utterly calm; when I have escaped to the serenity of solitude when I’m sat on rocks, overlooking a vast tranquil, lifeless ocean in the early morning. The mellifluous sounds soothe me, and sky that seems to be conflicting with itself over what colour it should be; reds, blues, yellows mixing together. It calms me. I suppose it does make me happy, but soon the tide pulls out and is replaced by the millions upon millions of questioning and contemplating grains of sand. The morning lights flickering in a brand new posh hotel will provoke my mind into thinking “All that space, and they put a hotel for rich people up, what about homes for people who need it most?” And so the torment begins again. Whilst I call it torment (and here’s where my sophist mind plays it’s deceitful tricks on me), I’d feel disgustingly ignorant if I were to unquestioningly acquiesce to life (or what society tells me is “life“). So perhaps my ever weak questioning mind is the height of happiness for me? Or perhaps it’s all just one big mind trick. If there is a God, and he made me this way, I want an explanation and my money back. What actually is happiness? Is it an absolute emotion meticulously ingrained into each and every one of us, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s butterfly that shouldn’t be chased? Or is it that a man once felt an overwhelming sense of subjective joy and invented a concept to fit the experience? Have I ever experienced it?

The Alcohol predicament

In 1901, Ivan Pavlov began his historical research into Classical Conditioning. In short, the experiments involved a form of neutral unrelated stimulus together with a separate stimulus (such as food). Pavlov discovered that whilst a dog would innately salivate at the sight of food; after a while the dog would salivate at the sight of lab technician whom provided the food. In short, Pavlov discovered that the mind can be conditioned.

Similarly, James Watson proved the case for classical conditioning in humans, using his famed “Little Albert Experiment” in which a child was presented on a table with a rat. The child showed no sense of fear toward the animal. After a while, the lab assistant would make a loud sound the moment the rat was presented, which distressed the child to the point of tears. Within a short span of time, the child became distressed and began to cry simply at the sight of a rat.

I am coming to the rather unnerving conclusion that my mind is masterfully deceitful in so much as it airs a Pavlovian-type response without much effort whatsoever. For example, as a child my parents would drink a lot of alcohol. Not necessarily to the point where they were struggling to walk a straight line, but just enough to allow them to lose all sense of rationale. They would argue constantly. There would be mental abuse from both of them, there would be throwing of objects. The arguments were childish, the bickering was ridiculous, they would keep threatening to split up, and for a young child it has quite a worrying affect. And it was all because of the alcohol.

When I was 16, a group of kids who live close to me, and were my age were often very very drunk, they would fight, they would provoke innocent people, they would steal, they would just be absolutely disgusting. They threatened me a few times, and being the non-confrontational person that I am, I simply shrugged it off. But, on a weekend, I’d dread going out at night in case I bumped into them, I knew that they would beat the living shit out of me. Luckily, I avoided them, but they remain the only few people I’ve ever truly hated, and still hate. All because when they drink, they become scum.

When I was 14, walking my friend back to his house, through a graveyard, a group of around 15 guys stopped us. They were so incredibly drunk and stoned that they threatened me for absolutely no reason. “I’ll fucking cave your skull in” was one of the threats. One of the guys punched my friend right in the face and followed it up with one to the back of the head. As I stepped up to pull him out, one of the other guys (who was just intensely muscular) pulled me back and threatened to kill me. He then shouted to the other lads “We’ve got another here, watch me kick the shit out of him“. At this point, two older gentleman walked past and we were able to get away. My instant thought was “what have we done to deserve this?” Of course, the answer is that we’d done nothing to deserve it, we were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. For a 14 year old, it’s horribly scary. It consumes you. You feel unable to leave the house through absolute terror. These people suddenly have an intense control over your life, and you learn to deal with it, whilst all the time resenting the fact that you have to deal with it.

I distanced myself from a lot of “friends” by the time I was 17. I’m still trying to distance myself from certain people. I have become overly careful about who I trust, and who I associate with. Despite any front I may invariably put on, I’m disastrously insecure. And much of that insecurity can be traced back to bad experiences through alcohol. I do not want to end up like those kinds of people.

Since those days, I’ve developed a deep Pavlovian inspired hatred toward alcohol. I hate how people become after a few drinks. I hate how violent a night out can be, or how cruel people are to me when they’ve had a drink. I hate how abusive they become. I hate how then when they fuck up, the next day, they blame it on the alcohol. Why drink, if you can’t actually handle it? I hate how everyone around me, is more interested in talking about how much they drank on a Saturday night, than anything else in life. I find it boring, repetitive, and slightly pretentious. Why am I the boring one, when the extent of a conversation with a drunk after a Saturday night, is which gutter they threw up in? I couldn’t give less of a shit if I tried.

I am fully aware that the majority of people are perfectly able to enjoy a night out whilst knowing their limits with alcohol, and that’s fine. I certainly don’t have a problem with those people. And whilst I myself feel a sense of classical conditioning in so much as I’ve learnt to associate alcohol, with violence and a loss of humanity, I fear those who go out purely to get “hammered” have been conditioned to believe that a Saturday night must involve alcohol. I have also been horribly conditioned (I cannot change how I feel, I wish I could) to view all people out drunk on a friday night, as little clones of each other. No different.

I become horribly uncomfortable around drunk people. It is perhaps a fountain of paranoid misery raining down in my mind, that tells me that those around me who are drunk, are going to end up being abusive and threatening to me. I can’t actually handle it. It remains a predicament though, because on the one hand it is a little juvenile of me to blame a substance rather than the personality of the person abusing the substance, but on the other hand the substance is the catalyst for the immensely unpleasant change in personality that occurs. I suppose I’ll split the resentment between the personality, and the substance. Either way, I’m fully aware of how weak minded I am for allowing myself to fall victim to such simple conditioning.
Problem solved. Pavlov would be proud.

They’re in control

Everyday, I feel forced to bow down to the feet of businessmen, because they control our lives. They control what we read. They control how much free time we have. They control how we look (too much stubble? Shave it off!!! How dare you be yourself). They control how we can talk, what it means to be “professional“. They control how we dress (tuck your fucking shirt in!!!), they control language to suit their own ends (Manipulative propaganda, becomes “sales literature“) they control our lives. They know how much power they collectively have, and they love it. It will never change. We all have to change, and adapt our useless lives in order to revolve around them like meaningless, void planets around the star in an Armani suit. We’re slowly becoming acquiescing minions to these pathetic stars, that burn up and spit out the ashes of anything on their way to the king of all stars; the centre of their meaningless Universe, which just so happens to be a Pound sign.

I see people in business suits, and they look all the same, all pretentious middle class non-individuals who have some odd sense of self importance, but utter the same office cliches, nothing original, or different. Nothing intelligent or Worldy. Nothing creative or ingenious. All of them, look, dress, act, talk, walk the same. The same lifeless expression on their boring faces as they stride with their bluetooth headsets, purposefully toward more more more. Like robots. And those people control my life in every way. If I had the choice, they would be bottom of the list of people who have any say over how we run our lives. Behind artists, and poets, and tramps, and the insane, and the clinically brain dead, and rats.

And I’m expected to sell my soul, my sense of self, my identity to these people, for a crap wage and a shake of my hand every New Years? Am I not a person too? Am I just a windmill, churning money into the pockets of those who have already got enough?

On their way to work, they rush around, as if being five minutes late is the absolute end of the World. It’s like standing on a Motorway, watching the speeding traffic, the machines dodging in and out of the path of others, all the time travelling far too fast that the rest of the World is simply a blur shooting past on all sides. They are like children. They have a destructive mentality. Everyone is expendable to them. Everyone is a piece of money making machinery and nothing else. And they control us. Thieves in suits. But it’s okay. Because they’re a celebration of the “free market”. Suddenly great minds are not important, great artists do not matter, because they are just not ruthless enough; without a businessman mentality, what is the point in being?

The maximization of profits is beneficial to the whole of soci…blah blah blah utter bollocks. The allocation of resources to their most usefu…blah blah blah more excuses for being despicable overly egotistical idiots. It’s all in the name of “freedom”. The terrible injustices, the destruction of human spirituality, treating your workforce as if they’re shit on the bottom of your shoe is “just business”. The advancement of humanity is not the end goal for these people, humanity itself is simply the means to achieving indescribable wealth. We’re having to cut costs to..blah blah blah….. of all the times I’ve heard this, I haven’t heard of one Chief Executive willing to slash his own wages, or selling his boat, or his brand new Bentley before making people redundant. When my dad was made redundant about a decade ago, the Chief Executive, after making him redundant, wanted to thank my dad for his work over the years…. by taking him for a drink, in his brand new BMW. Government is the prob….blah blah blah excuses for a fucking awful failing system that rewards the greedy by claiming it benefits society as a whole. When is that going to work? Can you please let me know?

They insist that competition is the basis of human nature. We’re all competitive apparently. And i’d argue that society creates the competitiveness within us, not the other way around. We’re told from a young age that we’re all out for ourselves, that we shouldn’t rely on each other. What happens to those of us who don’t have that mentality? We’re left out. Told we’re lazy, or useless, or made to feel pathetic and not worthy. Surely, with millions upon millions of years of human evolution; having sent a man to the moon, cured diseases, the wondrous works of art humanity has created, surely we can arrange society in a way that doesn’t allow the deaths of millions through simple -to-cure problems like lack of water. But then, that might affect the multi million pound bonuses of the top business men, and we wouldn’t want that. But go on, defend it. And if you try to defend it, I make no apologies for calling you scum.

LESS REGULATION they shout. Yeah that’s what we need…. a bunch of lying thieves free to destroy as many more lives as they possible can, along with the ones they’ve already destroyed whilst demanding tax payer help. “Trust me, take this sub prime loan, everything will be great!” . These people aren’t moral by nature. They’re amoral, and that’s why we regulate, because some of us still recognise that people are much more important than profit. They have no ethical principles. They just have a list of what they’re allowed to get away with. “Freedom” to buy as much property as you wish, despite the fact that it drives up house prices, destroys local communities, and increases the homeless rate. Dishonesty, manipulation, deceit, theft, is all masked under the word (and language has a lot to answer for) “competition”.

They then call us hypocritical, for paying as little as possible for products we’ve all been brainwashed into believing we NEED; which means products we buy are inevitably made in some foreign land by exploited people, to keep costs low, and keep competitive. What are we supposed to do? How do we stop ourselves becoming part of that cycle? We’ve been forced to become unquestioning consumers because there isn’t another way. What can we do? What can I do? Have no clothes? No bed? Live rough? What then? We’re called lazy. Business is slowly gaining a monopoly on morality, and for a system that prides itself on “choice“, it’s quite hypocritical in itself, wouldn’t you say?. It’s their way, or you’re a fucking hypocrite leading a largely fatuous existence. It cannot defend it’s disgusting principles, and so they resort to attacking the rest of us. Attack, is the worst form of defence.

I can pretend that I respect businessmen, I can pretend that I see them as decent human beings, but I’d be lying. I do not like them. I look down at them. They disgust me. I don’t know them personally, and so I insult my own intelligence to judge each one individually, but it’s a feeling I cannot break. The business World infuriates me. The mere mention of the word “Business” acts like a spark that lights the fire inside me. I can’t be in the same room as these people, listening to their pretentious bullshit, without feeling resentment toward them. My mind becomes a swarm of vicious bees carrying the putrid pollen of every last injustice in the World, and I cannot accept that this is the height of human “freedom”. I don’t want to hear what the benefits are, I don’t want to hear why this system is so wonderful, because it quite clearly isn’t. Excuses from economics students, who quite ridiculously refuse to accept any such demeanour on the part of the business World are simply blinded by ignorance. Business controls the World. Business controls politics. Business controls our lives.

And yet, there is nothing I can do about it, because these deceitful little scum bags, control my life.

The Mirror of Sylvia Path

It was inevitable, with my current state of mind, that I’d be drawn to the poems of Sylvia Plath. It isn’t just Plath I’ve been reading. I’ve spent the past couple of days reading the works of Existentialist Philosophers such as Nietzsche and Sartre. They appeal to me, because they start from the precept, that the Universe we inhabit, and thus, we ourselves, lack order; that we attempt to make order out of chaos, and it completely destroys our sense of self. Which, is how I currently feel.

However, Plath strikes more of a cord with me, my sense of sympathy and my love for those who are different, because she appears to have been so mentally disturbed and unable to escape such deep insecurities that it reasonated in such a timeless and beautiful creative talent.

The opening stanza to the poem “Mirror” immediately provokes a reaction of “wow” within me. I remember studying it at College, but not really taking too much notice, because I couldn’t actually relate slightly to it. I struggle to understand that which I cannot relate to. The moment I start feeling a little different, and really looking inward, I immediately search for something to relate to. Some claim to relate to rock music, some claim to relate to hip hop, others claim to relate to particular artworks or politicians. This poem, does just that for me.

MIRROR:
“I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful—
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.”

The idea that strikes me about this poem, is that on the surface, it is merely Plath describing what we all identify with a mirror. Beneath the surface, I’d argue that the mirror, is her mind. And therefore, the narrator, is her mind, almost separate from Plath herself. The mind is letting us know, that she is stuck entirely with it, and cannot change reality. I find the most powerful image of this stanza, is “The eye of a little god”. The mirror here has been given a power above all else. It is all knowing and all seeing. It is the perfect representation of the self. And as the second Stanza suggests, the perfect representation of the self isn’t always something we can deal with.
The second stanza continues:

“Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.”

The idea of a lake, and of a woman (Plath, herself) searching for herself when looking inwardly (at the reflection on the lake) is striking. A lake’s reflection is quite fluid, and easily manipulated by the ripples that devour it. Could this suggest that Plath is attempting to manipulate what she once considered to be “The eye of a little God”, to something she prefers, a version of reality she can deal with, despite that fact that it isn’t actually reality?
I was then haunted by the idea that Plath, unable to manipulate her perception of reality, has chosen to ignore the honest reality reflected back at her, and instead turned to “those liars“. She’s searching for a different explanation to whom “she really is“. She feels trapped by the reality, by the honesty of the mirror/lake and by what it shows. She clearly hates the constant inward demons that haunt her, as suggested by:
“I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.“
She is searching for happiness and reassurance, even if it means turning to dishonesty, instead of an honest view of herself she just doesn’t like. And although the happiness that is perhaps found dishonesty toward her own reality is certainly there, it is always overrun by the horrible feeling of what is actually real, the reflection she cannot overcome. The mocking feeling of unmanipulated truth, that wont leave her alone. Mocking, yet honest.

I suppose I should explain why I feel I relate to this poem. The mirror Plath speaks of, is the hard honest cold face of reality. It’s a reality I do not understand. I do not like. And whilst most people unquestioningly get on with it, I find myself feeling forced to embrace it, rather than doing so of my own free will. Conflictingly, a part of my mind; I suppose you could call it the “candles or the moon” as Plath does, insists that life does not have to be the miserable way it appears on the surface, that there is more to people and more to me than the lugubrious solemn bubble we’re all born into and educated to accept. But all the time, the mirror amplifies it’s presence, it grows in size, refusing to reflect back at me, anything that I consider to be the essence of me, but instead reflects back what I’m “supposed” to be, insisting that life is forever going to be one big basket of disappointments and worries. The Mirror, is always there. The conflict never ends.

It’s a magnificent poem, harrowing and tragic, up for much interpretation. Of the poems of Plath I have read, this one speaks volumes about her mindset. That isn’t to say that “Lady Lazarus” and “Edge“, and even “Words” which starts quite disturbingly with the disturbing line “Axes after whose stroke the wood rings” to convey the feeling that words have on her, aren’t as stirring, but “Mirrors” spoke to me on a much deeper level. I actually sat reading it again and again, and every time, something new jumps out at you. This, is why I consider Sylvia Plath, a genius.

Purpose isn’t

“Where am I? Who am I? How came I here? What is this thing called the world? What does this world mean? Who is it that has lured me into the world? Why was I not consulted, why not made acquainted with its manners and customs instead of throwing me into the ranks, as if I had been bought by a kidnapper, a dealer in souls? How did I obtain an interest in this big enterprise they call reality? Why should I have an interest in it? Is it not a voluntary concern? And if I am to be compelled to take part in it, where is the director? I should like to make a remark to him. Is there no director? Whither shall I turn with my complaint?”
- Soren Kierkegaard

I do apologise for banging on in this tone, but I really do need to try to articulate myself as fully as possible, just to try to understand myself. Writing on here, is like untying what seems initially like an endless plethora of knotted thoughts.

I really do want to start concentrating on my political opinions again, but it’s a monumentously difficult task, when I feel like I’m descending into madness. Okay perhaps it isn’t that serious, but I cannot think on my usual level, I feel trapped in some kind of whirlwind of thoughts and feelings that just cannot be articulated in any particular way, or any particular outlet, as my previous blog entry proved. Chances are, I wont be able to concentrate on actual Political issues for a week or two. I hate when I go into this odd mode. It’s a little demoralising.

My mind becomes a mix of thoughts, surrounding the eternally unanswerable existential question; what the fuck is the point of me?. I’m coming to the horrible realisation, that perhaps there is no point to me. Perhaps “purpose” is a man made concept that outside of our quite ignorant version of reality, is actually a big empty nothingness; meaningless. Perhaps I have no purpose. Perhaps every hour of every day I spend either working or learning, is ultimately pointless. Perhaps all I’m doing is existing. Perhaps the laws of cause and affect apply only to the past and the present, there is no future goal. Perhaps, there is no future. Professor of Law at Harvard, Roger Fisher, once remarked “There is a fundamental human need for guiding ideals that give meaning to our actions”. Perhaps there is no absolute, black and white meaning to our actions. And so, by that logic, perhaps purpose is, as previously suggested, merely another man made concept designed to worry each one of us. Even if I’m horribly wrong, that’s how my mind currently operates, and I don’t know how to change it. Perhaps absurdism is in essence, making an important point that man’s search for harmony and reason, is at odds with the very nature of a chaotic, disorganised and ultimately meaningless universe that he inhabits. Perhaps the smell of the Office at 9am every morning, is as potent and soulful as life for some of us is ever likely to get. Perhaps the only worthy purpose, is the preservation of the species, improving the quality of life and maximising the chance of happiness for everyone. Because as once stated by Buddhist Philosophy Gyatso in “The Art of Happiness” – the purpose of life, is the chase for happiness. The chase itself though, is fucking difficult, especially for me. It’s confusing. It is the only aspect of life, that can bring me close to tears, because I’m forever locked into this relentless battle in my mind, that I cannot escape. However, and quite the juxtaposition, the realisation and acceptance that your existence is relatively nonsensical is almost a great weight off of your shoulders. I want more from life, and yet, perhaps there isn’t more.

This isn’t to say I’m depressed, or emotionally woren out. I do love life. I love the subtleties. I love people. I love the natural World, which I’ve started to appreciate a hell of a lot more recently. I love the feeling of extreme tranquillity. And I love how calm I am. I wonder though, what my value is to anyone. If anyone actually gives a shit. And I just absolutely hate that there’s a set path we’re all expected to take. There is almost a framework that we must all cling to, and build on. We must all be educated a certain way; jump into a career that we’ve been pressured into choosing for quite some time as soon as possible; earn lots of money; have a holiday once a year; feel utterly demoralised by a job you hate; ignore or embrace as little as possible any externalities that actually make us who we are; retire; die. I do not like that framework, and yet that’s the only way to live. It’s forced upon us. We are told how the World works, forced to understand beauty and serenity, and yet, no one understands it. Not me, not a scientist, not a businessman. The World, humanity, is a great mystery.

“With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can’t start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead. It’s like quicksand… hopeless from the start.”
- Sylvia Plath

The only way I can describe my need to question everything around me (which by the way, irritates me endlessly) is to compare it. I had this conversation with a friend the other day. I do not see anything in black and white. There are no absolutes with me. There are multiple shades of grey. Everything is obscure. As pointed out in another blog I wrote not too long ago, language itself confuses me, and demoralises me, and strips away beauty for me. It is like viewing the entire World through a frosted window. Nothing is obvious. It is a skewed reality. But then, my argument is, that my frosted window reality, may be just as ridiculously meaningless as what others consider to be their clear windowed version of reality. Someone said to me not too long ago “do you always have to question everything, can you not just accept things as they are?“. I was quite taken aback by it. I immediately thought “My way must be wrong“. It added to the confusion. When people challenge my vision of life, I tend to worry that I’m horribly wrong.

I constantly need attention when I start to feel like this. And I start to feel like this every few months I constantly need to be listened to. I constantly need to be reassured. But a paradox of wanting to express my deeply mixed feelings, in a fountain of words, at the same time, forcing myself to keep quiet through the unnerving fear that I’m disastrously boring everyone around me, is quite the challenge to overcome. An incessantly tormenting empty feeling, like I have nothing to cling on to, or put my full attention into. It’s almost hopeless, like standing in the middle of a twister, where everything around you is chaotic; and yet you’re in blissful ignorance and the calmness of the centre, but you cannot get out. You’re stuck. You can either jump into the madness and hope you keep up, or you can exist on this quite serene yet ultimately isolated and lonely plain. Either way, you’re stuck.

French Author and Philosopher, Albert Camus once said “There is not love of life without despair about life”. It’s a voice I find myself deeply fond of, because it speaks on my current level. Not a suicidal, angry, depressive level. Simply a questioning, reasoning level, like a child trying to figure the World out.

Ever let the Fancy roam

“The World fascinates me”
- Andy Warhol

I haven’t wrote anything for quite some time for a very specific reason. I’m struggling to understand what I actually want from my life, or who I actually am and it’s plaguing my mindset at the moment. I write this, to attempt to unravel strands of confusion that just appear impossible to dissolve by my own thoughts. The deviously manipulative prerequisites for what society tells me, is essential for a happy, fulfilled life, and how I’m just not buying into it. The confusion this causes me, is fucking annoying.

I want far too much. I cannot stick to one way, for too long. My indefinable (and annoying, to a few people I know) need to question everything around me, like a child. Normality and expectation wears thin, I want difference and change to inject a sense of wonder into my life. I’m not ambitious in the traditional sense, in that I do not have a specific career path in mind, I’m not dedicated to a chase for a materialistic paradise that simply doesn’t exist except in the minds of the have-nots. I want to do things my way, not a set way that we’re expected to live. I am ambitious in my own sense. I want to be everything. I want to be a Photographer, a Journalist, a Philosophy Major, an Author, a Teacher and a Politician. I struggle with authority, I can’t handle it. I cannot use the word “Sir” or any other such ridiculously self important, pretentious title. I see myself, on the same level as the rest of humanity, regardless of the power of wealth. I struggle deeply with the Managerial class. I start to feel like nothing more than a piece of money making machinery and yet I’m always acutely aware that spiritually, the veins of humanity run far deeper than the chase for gold. My mind is simple to everyone else, and yet it confuses me every second, of every day. I can’t work myself out. And yet, to me, my mind is the most important aspect of my being. I do ask myself “what do I want from life?” and the question seems too ambiguous. There is no definite answer to that question. I don’t know what I want. I never have done.

I get the horribly, soul destroying feeling that I bore everyone, all the time. I tend to stay quiet about myself because I get the feeling no one actually gives much of a shit. Which is fair enough, my life is no one else’s problem. But the moment anyone asks me how I’m actually feeling, I could potentially talk for the rest of the day, but it’s boring, and so I just stay quiet. I absolutely hate, with a passion, the idea that I’m boring someone. Now, I’m not saying that I hate my life and need to cry it out, because that’s not true. I love life. I have a great family. Great friends. I just need someone to talk it out with, to make sense of my own confusion.

It seems to me, quite evident, that humanity has allowed life to become filled with worries, angers, grudges, hates, and insecurities which in turn drowns out the mellifluous noise of beauty. We have allowed ourselves to lose sight of exactly what is important, and what makes us smile, because smiles are few and far between, they have become more of a luxury than a necessary part of everyone’s day. The mind becomes closed, and fixed on a specific goal linked to money. A holiday once a year. A new car that says nothing other than “i’m an extension of Jamie’s dick“. Houses become investments rather than a home, to live in, as the World starts worrying about how little their house is now worth….. as if it matters. LIVE IN IT! I feel like whilst the World is becoming more and more obsessed with money, I’m sat on the pavement, left behind. And the odd thing is, I’d rather be on the pavement, left behind. It’s almost like a prisoned feeling, being told “be this way, or you’ll fucking fail“.

“Open wide the mind’s cage-door,
She’ll dart forth, and cloudward soar.“

I constantly read books exploring obscure subjects that really does not enrich my life on a consumerist level. There are no life skills to be found in a book detailing the process and the meaning behind the figures present in God’s robe within the Creation of Adam fresco etched beautifully into the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Whilst ex-school mates are out making their fortunes, starting families, and running a household; I’m sat agreeing with Chomsky; reading Ginsberg; attempting to understand the troubled yet genius mind of Plath; and three quarters of the way through Dante’s Divine Comedy. Essentially, I’m putting my incessant need to learn, above the inescapable truth (or perhaps it’s just my own cynical preconception) that modern life is linked almost exclusively to a lugubrious, untrustworthy, miserable vision of a working week. A working week, that in the minds of each passing generation, is slowly becoming more and more the defining essence of being. You’re a plumber, you’re a technician, you’re a brick layer. It should not be the defining essence. None of us, are our jobs. Our jobs, should not have become as important a feature of our lives, as they have.

It eats away at me, because I know it’s the wrong way to live. A largely gratuitous way to live. I’m not naive, I know that the chances of unimaginable success and wealth lay far beyond my reach. But it isn’t my fault. It’s the way I am. I can’t change that. Nor, do I want to change that. I actually love who I am. Of course I have my insecurities, as everyone does. But ultimately, I like me. I like that I’m cautious about who I chose to associate with. I like that I question every aspect of life. I like that I’m not an abusive violent thug. I like that I know exactly what it is that provokes a sense of extreme serenity within me. I like that I want to learn everything about everything. And there is where the confusion lies. I like how I am, and yet how I am, in the long run, futile.

ARRRGH!