| [The first comment to this post by
"gelgameth," as well as my comment to the comment,
are included for the sake of pertinence. --ed.] Meditations during an iced-in day. This paragraph and the one after it, though they appear at the top, were not written first. In the course of writing this essay and posing questions to myself, I found solutions for them. Said solutions appear in the piece as they came to me. All this was inspired by an hour-long speech by Bill Moyers, which you can hear here. It's as eloquent as it is inspiring. Considering that it inspired this essay, it's pretty darn eloquent. In the end, I suppose, I don't know what I want besides change for the better for humankind. I sometimes hear a truth, or see it somewhere, or blunder into it in my own head, and think it would be conducive to my view of "better." So I either repeat it outright or interpret it and then repeat it in order to give it the power to grow to dominance. I desire most of all the dominance of truth in human endeavors and the use of it for "change for the better for humankind." Being driven, truly desiring something, means to have in your head an irreconcilable contradiction. You think and say and act in one direction or another just to find out which part of the contradiction was correct after all, meanwhile hoping that the one you pursued was the correct one. I'm going to talk about mine. What pesters my being so often and leads me to ramble about this or that truth has to do with being itself: "life" versus "death," and what they are in the first place. I've gotten as far as this: The concept of life is absolute expansion and variety. The concept of death is absolute contraction and singularity. However, those are two extremes unreachable in a physical universe like ours. To use astronomical metaphors, even stars can burn out and even black holes emit radiation; Absolute Zero is as unreproducable as the Big Bang. Less extreme examples of life and death are what we can observe. Life as a subject becomes warmth, movement, light. Death as a subject becomes coldness, stillness, darkness. If what we can observe is on a lesser scale than the unreachable extreme, and if we can control less than what we can observe, then all we can control is on a lesser scale than what we can observe. Life as a subject becomes multitudes, closeness, recycling. Death as a subject becomes oneness, distance, permanence. Suddenly, something so incomprehensible as an absolute has been shrunk so tiny that people can represent it. Individual acts can be dissected, their motives scrutinized and revealed as leaning towards benefiting either something resembling life or something resembling death -- either towards others outside oneself or towards only oneself. Groups of people are no exception. Every one of their motives lies somewhere on the sliding scale of benefiting others or benefiting themselves, therefore any action they take can be described in terms of favoring either "life" or "death" in the tiny scale. (Here's where I start putting past tense in place of what was once present tense.) Intellectually, I enjoyed actions resembling "life," i.e. things that benefit the majority, reflect the majority and change over time. I enjoyed as much because I felt it was better to do things for many than for few. (I still do, in fact, but in a different way I'll explain in a moment.) Here's where the contradiction came in. I acted and still act selfishly. Right now I'm sitting here, typing my thoughts on a reasonably powerful desktop computer, in a suburban house full of food and water and warmth, without paying for any of it, while I could be out helping someone else. I ingest finite resources and expel nothing but words and waste, which are often the same thing, to the real benefit of no one -- and I enjoy it. All that is provided by a system which absorbs and destroys for selfish benefit, a "death"-sided device if there ever was one. Is it all right to knowingly partake of a comfortable machine whose fuel is suffering and the irreplacable? That was my first contradiction. I decided that it was indeed all right if I used what I gained in the machine in order to transform it into something that ate only the renewable and gave its comforts to the whole world. That was my goal, an impossible ideal but one which, if I acted towards it, would be my atonement for my good fortune and let me sleep at night. My second contradiction was harder to reconcile. I said before that I desired the dominance of truth so that change would happen for the benefit of humankind. I wanted to see truth dominate everything we do and lead to a more "life"-sided civilization at the expense of the untrue and the "death"-sided. And yet such an exclusionary mindset, not to mention dominance itself, is fundamentally "death"-sided. Using something "death"-sided in order to destroy something "death"-sided -- using dominance to destroy dominance -- is rather like using tyranny to free people from tyranny or using the One Ring to destroy Sauron. That's just what I wanted to do, I realized. If I wasn't to be a hypocrite I had to find an explanation, so I looked to that last comparison and thought, "They didn't use the Ring, they destroyed it." There was my solution: don't use dominance for my goal, simply destroy dominance. But how in the world could I do that without some form of equal dominance? It was my desire for dominance that I had to destroy first. Ahh-so. I realized like I never did before that I couldn't save the world. It was too big, too varying, too alive and different from my own experience. I could no more hope to better the whole human family than I could collapse a star with my mind. What I had to do was limit my scope. Instead of dramatically improving the lives of a world full of people I'd never meet, I had to find and know a few people and do what I could to make their lives happier with my presence. Luckily I already knew many for my "few." Making life a little more enjoyable for my own sliver of the human family... that would be my atonement for not being able to save the world. It occurs to me that I'm doing enough atoning for things I haven't done and things I've had better than others to pass myself off as Jewish in this whole time zone of the United States. Focusing on and making happy a few can be "life"-sided, too, until such time as one's few grows in power to take over the lives of others. That's my mentally meandering moral, I suppose. I've spent something on the order of four and a half hours writing this bugger. Time for food and a shower. gelgameth 2007-01-14 05:28 pm UTC I think I need to emphasize that the distinction is a little more "birth" and "death" than "life" and "death".. life is made up of both halves. Every living thing exists as a cycle of birth and decay. Right now, as I type, countless cells are active within my body. Thousands of them are dying, and being discarded. Others are being born; freshly split from the glands and cells that promote them. What's more, I am currently sick. The act of birth within portions of my body is being perverted by an alien organism; and so my body reacts by giving birth to new cells which in turn act to destroy the corrupted cells. While you have been around longer, and are no doubt wiser, I still feel the need to make this point. I need to challenge your conception of what death is, because while there is truth, I see ways in which it is not. Is "death" the same as "untruth"? Is dominion an element of death? If control and dominion are untruths, and signs of death, that paints a rather bleak view of any god you can imagine. It does not seem to me that the patterns of life and death work in this way. I think it is unfair to death to characterize all that is bad as "death". However, while I disagree with that, I do agree with much of your conclusion. Using the machines of domination and tyrrany to overthrow it seems.. hypocritical. But are we combatting something that is in all parts evil? Is the system made of nothing but death and decay; or is there instead some part of it that we wish to salvage? Rather than trying to destroy it completely, is it not more right to rescue what is good, as we can, while burning away the rest? Perhaps not. Maybe it is all wrong and should all be destroyed. But I do not think that is where we, as children of this generation, are to act. The generations before us tried to save the world as a whole by burning away the old and celebrating the new. And it did not last. It would seem to me that our place is to take a more considered; patient approach to the problems. We are in a position of privelage; but nothing is gained by simply throwing that privelage away. Let's use our privelage to put something good into the world for everyone. ------- 2007-01-14 07:28 pm UTC I see your point in the first line there. I should have been clearer. The things I was talking about were the concepts, the Platonic Forms if you like, of life and death. The idea behind the Forms, by the way, was that there was one perfect and unattainable absolute form of everything in the world -- the absolute chair, the absolute lampshade, the absolute spork -- of which all physical examples are crude and imperfect representations. What I was talking about was the Forms of "life" and "death," the absolutes from which we've cut and polished our ideas of them. Birth, I suppose, goes with "life" as much as dying would go with "death." By reducing those absolutes to relatable terms, I'm diluting their meanings. "Life," for example, went from a super-lightspeed explosion to a nuclear fusion radiance to close multiple warmth. "Death" went from the absence of everything to a black hole to frigid lonely distance. I extrapolated things on the human scale back to their absolute forms and attributed good and bad based on that, with "good" being closer to explosive presence than crushing absence. You, I see, take exception to that, because untruth and the act of dominance might not be "death"-sided. I believe untruth resembles tiny-scale "death" because untruth (carried by lies) is something which is just not there, whereas truth (carried by facts) is something which is there. Think of it this way... Fiction and fantasy can contain truth even though they speak of things which didn't or couldn't actually happen because they illuminate real-world concepts or describe real-world events in code, most often to dodge persecution. However, fiction becomes untrue when presented as absolute truth -- "Harry Potter is a witchcraft handbook and nothing else" or "1984 is a history book and nothing else," for example. Works of fiction become untruth when narrowly restricted and when all subtle meanings are obliterated. Destruction and restriction are smaller examples of super-gravitational crushing, which is a smaller example of there being nothing at all, which is the absolute "death" mentioned above. So, untruth can be said to be "death"-sided, somewhere on the "death" side of the imaginary sliding scale. I guess you could ventilate that argument by holding that "death" is not ultimately a true singularity, which is really as good as absence... or that I've crossed some wires in shrinking it down to human terms of simple restriction... Which brings me to dominance and control, or rather dominance through control. I used those words because they carried sufficient negative feelings; I was trying to describe the act of imposing one's will on others for the benefit of oneself and the deliberate detriment of those others. The words "dominance" and "control" seemed appropriate but "tyranny" and "slavery" might have been better. Dominance, after all, can be as little as 51%. Control can simply be beneficial organization. "Life," through control, can have dominance over "death" but not tyranny over it through slavery because "life" is concerned with expansion and multitudinousness (multitudiny?), the opposite of what concerns "death." Perhaps that explains why "death" exists in the first place, why peaceful protests seek to incorporate and change rather than annihilate their enemies. Perhaps "death" exists in the first place because "life" needed the opposition... But... hmm. Nature abhors a vacuum, doesn't it? If "life" needs "death," then why is it in such a hurry to fill the gaps "death" leaves?... A-ha! That must be part of the process! If there was no "death," there wouldn't be anything for "life" to keep expanding into, no chance for new varieties to arise... then "life" wouldn't be itself. It needs "death," it's opposite, to "know itself," as it were. Interesting... |