Skit (to come)

I wrote a little skit today with a friend, but he kept the notebook with him, so I shall have to post it at a later date! It reminded me how much I like to make curious characters at an instant. Perhaps some of my problem is trying to write is that I think too much about it, because I don't do so badly when I simply write.

An Odd Question...

What is the self?

The Oxford English Dictionary says "a permanent subject of successive and varying states of consciousness". 

That seems accurate enough, albeit somewhat clinical. 

I am me, Jackie, and in my day-to-day living I pass through varying states of consciousness. Happy, sad, ecstatic, mournful.... the possibilities are endless. Sometimes things are as simple as 'I feel hungry... what is the best way to get something both tasty and healthy?' In fact, this is my "state of consciousness" often enough that it sometimes bothers me how pressing an issue it is to my mind. Hmmm.

But that barely begins to tell you about who I am as a person. I guess the question did not ask 'what is your self?' but just 'what is the self in general?' But that isn't very interesting to me. Perhaps that is why I have always been split between reading philosophy and literature - I like to think about large, seemingly profound ideas, but what attracts me most are strong personalities and unique characters. 

Romantic Love is Dead

Or, more accurately: romantic love never existed and only now has our culture exhausted its means of retaining the illusion that it ever did.

How did I come to this conclusion?

I was reading Shakespeare earlier in the day and was thinking to myself "Why is it impossible that this sort of poetry with these sort of themes would be written today?"

Think about it: the biggest movie in America right now is "He's Just Not That Into You". What people want most, deep inside, is some great personal accomplishment. A beautiful romance is no longer enough to satisfy someone. There are no more comedies or romantic comedies. None among the many people my age that I know are at all optimistic about the idea of love or marriage or any variation upon the theme. And these are all idealistic, intellectual, soulish, Berkeley students in the humanities and social sciences. Imagine all the other crooks out there who just want to become big business owners. That kind of thinking negates the possibility of ideal love even before the seeds of it begin to grow because of the powerful feelings that accompany sexual attraction, which is what most people mistakingly refer to as 'love'. 

Perhaps culture will shift and begin to more distinctly acknowledge the love of family over the love between young couples - Coriolanus will be performed more often than Romeo and Juliet. But such things are difficult, if not impossible, to predict. 

People are frighteningly pragmatic in the ways they seek love. For the most part, things go unsaid concerning romantic attraction. When it is brought up, it is reduced to only the basest terms of convenience - 'sex is healthier than not having sex'. Is this really where we have arrived? 

An Imagined Dialogue

Charles: Let us go to bed - for I am weary and need sleep and your body close to mine is the only thing that gives me good rest. 

Deborah (to herself): So we'll sleep until morning if the night permits,

if Winter does not penetrate the sheets we share

with cold immuring. But that does not mean

that I will love you when the day breaks. 

The sun's light can be raw, sometimes, 

and when it breaks upon my eyes and penetrates

through my skin, it may boil and confuse

the things inside me, confound them to patterns new. 

Should I be blamed for this? Nature and I -

we have a pact of sorts. I flow and ebb according,

sometimes, to her wishes and vaunts of fancy.

I am tractable, pliant; my days are as lifetimes.

The beauty of my body (if beauty indeed there be)

and the love in my heart (if such passions can so be called)

abides here awhile with you - but the night drones

letting rest what was past, cooling the earth

upon which tomorrow lights fires anew.

Living Irreligiously

Seeing a gangster-looking man (or man-boy) today at the Indian convenience store/restauraunt grabbing a soda, I noticed him wearing a huge metal cross, made of adamantium, studded with diamonds, rich with the excesses of the West.

And I thought - what does it mean to him that he wears the symbol taken up by Christianity?

But I must make a small note here - something that has bothered me for a few weeks - about what people exactly mean when they talk about Christianity. The tradition that people claim to be a part of is altogether too huge and too amorphous to be anything really coherent in itself. There was Jesus and then St. Paul... but we mostly forget the Gnostics and the Rabbis of the Talmud. In any case, Christianity is a highly 'pick-and-choose' religion, although most of its adherents have their version chosen for them, determined usually by the city they grow up in. 

And that is what I also find kind of disgusting about religion(s) in general. It is so obviously culturally based, so obviously passed down from parent/community to child, that it begins to look ridiculous when the rhetoric of 'truth' or 'absolute truth' is thrown around. 

Whatever truth may mean (and there is still much to think on concerning what this word means), there is at least one kind of truth that we know very well: that which is applicable on world-wide scale. The law of gravity falls into this category, as does the theory of evolution (or, more specifically, the fact all species now living on earth have evolved from another species that lived in the past). We could add mathematics, certain principles of geology, and many other things. But into this group are never placed things that have been chosen by humans on a cultural basis. 

The gowns worn by college graduates are not a 'truth' in this world-wide sense - they are used for a specific ceremony, at a particular time, to commemorate a certain accomplishment. There would be no contention on the part of Americans or Europeans against a culture that uses different ceremonial wear to commemorate the completion of their highest educational curriculum. 

Why do some religions, which arose out of a specific culture, time, and for certain historical reasons, then make claims about its world-wide applicability? I don't deny that there can be kinds of moral truths embedded in religious texts and teachings, but I obviously have some great contention with the idea that "No one comes through the Father but by me" from the Gospel of John (which was written some 50 or more years after Jesus' death and is generally not taken as a reliable representation of what the historical Jesus actually said) is something that should be applied world-wide. 

What a joke.... I'm not even going to write about this anymore. 

Anyway, about this gangster-man that I saw.....

Oh pah! Who knows why he wears what he wears and believes what he believes? I was here going to say that my life might be more intractable because I don't have anything like a god to keep watch over me, but now I realize that I probably have more well-defined thoughts on ethics and morality than do most people who call themselves Christians. 

Deep thinking is the most important basis upon which to build a life. Cultural inheritances may come and go, but wisdom stays. 

Partie

People get together in college. To chat, to drink, to eat some snacks. 

But that choice of words is very important - to chat, not talk. 

And with so little opportunity to talk in life, why would a gathering of people so quickly become an excuse to chat rather than talk?

Am I perhaps vapid? Not so... I may not be witty, but I certainly am not vapid. Why then do I find it difficult to chat? I hesitate to say that it might be because I have more profound things to think about, because that is always the easy escape. 

I hear the music still going, people still chatting.... what are they even talking about? I am thinking about the last few hours and cannot think of anything anyone said except "What is my favorite superhero?" Well! I said Spider-man because he was always a jokester no matter how serious the situation became. But that was about childhood, and childhood is always memorable, memorial....

I'm actually going to go down right now and see what others have to say and report back to you in a few minutes...

No. I couldn't bring myself to it. I stood up in my chair, decided to change into pajamas and lay in bed instead. 'To die, to sleep, perchance to dream.... Ay, there's the rub..."

New Directions

Here I will actually begin to type up and post my daily journal writings, because I realize that my blog has never been a consistent or true representation of my thoughts. Why not make the blog much more casual, with a theme that doesn't demand only the deepest or most curious things to see the surface of day?

With that simple introduction, I give you my journal entries for today:

(This is the beginnings of a story based on a guy that works at UC Berkeley's "Free Speech Cafe", who is fat, pudgy, irascible, and who seems altogether to hate life. Yet it is not so much a satire of him, as a satire of the world that has created such a docile monster.)

The advent of Juan Güero:

Juan Güero is the disillusioned spirit of our age. He works to no purpose, and what's more, he despises the work itself. Not purpose driven, yet uncaring of the moment, he lives in a perpetual state of transience. His joys are all private: things he does at home which we do not know of, but which do not work to make him less fat. He brushes off all advances made by persons who wish to bring him out of his drudge-like sphere of existence, even when they directly concern him and his office. But what of his office? He does what he does only out of necessity (though some speculate that he does it merely out of spite) and in that hardness of un-purpose he would revile all the world. He is the Last Man, though even if a great responsibility were thrust upon him, he would not take it, for he has no vain ambitions nor delusions of grandeur. even if he were the only man capable or fit for leadership (though I admit this is difficult to imagine), he would shrug off his given crown and go back to filling coffee cups full of their mysterious brine. 

Juan Güero calls his own comrades by a variety of slang words; never by their true names. It only so happens that his last name is one of those same slang words he often uses. It was by accident that we were able to discover this and set up an interview with him, pretending that we worked for the university, and needed to speak with him concerning the cultural patterns of Berkeley workers. Here I present to you his narrative recorded on cassette tape, which I have personally transcribed: 

My name is Juan Güero. I live now in Berkeley, California, but I was born in Colmo, a small city south of San Fransisco. There is a phrase in Spanish: "es el colmo", which means: "it's a shame".  I didn't like it there. My mother whipped me around, and I never saw my father eat anything except beans and beer. He worked as a garbage man; my mother worked at K-Mart. As she always said - it was a colmo to live in Colmo. 

(Sorry, this story is too depressing to transcribe! I'll leave the rest to my notebook, unless I find some compelling reason to write the rest...)

Random notes:

What kind of animals are we? Many answers, responses given, but always with the difference - we are not animals as other animals, because we can even ask the question to begin with of what kind of animals we are. 

The professor says: The syllabus I've drafted, wafts into your heart..

"Reader, I married him." - Jane Eyre

The immortal soul has exhausted itself (self-conscious models that are not aware of their modelhood) Give me some soul food, for my body is weak... The bifurcation of ourselves, probably spurred on by culture, that is... We appropriate culture and incorporate it into ourselves, but rarely is it the case that we appropriate it fully so that there is no conflict between self and culture. Culture is created to mitigate against the inclemency of some 'bad' selves, though inevitably the rules it creates suppresses some good things about other selves...

To proscribe things in moderation - drink only at celebrations, for example, - creates a taboo against drinking alone or at other inappropriate times, which can be harmful. The idea of human as humane, an ethical being, I think, may be different according to culture, but there is one standard that prevails against all difference, though perhaps not always in respect of the community - one who does what is most difficult is almost always admired, or envied, which is perhaps a better kind of reverence than admiration, since every preacher-man and cheat-skate can inspire base admiration. 

"The body changes, but the psyche remains the same..."

To achieve personhood, one must breathe in and out, one must speak purposefully, one must feel sympathy.

Mary is a really beautiful woman, but I don't find her personality attractive at all. Anomalous monism? My heart...

Here I drew a picture of an ostrich:

And next to it wrote:

The Ostrich that ran a thousand and one miles..

He won the race...

but in the effort

lost his mind.