breather. But to the voyeur of this spectator it is a sign of vegetation, the aerobics of comfort. As for one who despises the little things of life, who tires of rote stimulation and seeks vast pleasures—he is forced to live dangerously in a new way: through work, politics, education . . .
The Disciple
The teacher’s ideas crawling through his head, he got the nurse to check it for lice, but he found that being prodded with sticks was little better than getting beaten with one. That was enough to cure him of both learning and annual checkups. Having discarded two types of exams, the mental and the physical, only his therapist was left to give him discomfort. Making weekly appointments to blunt his emotions, he prepared for his inkblot tests by making hand shadow puppets in a free-association sequence. His passions being all he had left, he was forced to regularly guard himself from them.
Love’s Secrecy
To dare not tell; beyond this, the moment our partial nature is even implied, wholeness eludes us. A sad fate, as the truest love is a desperate love. Nonchalance only ever leads to an adjacency of two halves—a pie bisected before panning.
Eighth Heaven
We do not gradually ascend a train of thought from its sea-level beginning to its cloud-conclusion of inspiration, but dash there eagerly, overleaping any drops and creaky steps in-between. Paths of reasoning are outlines for flights of fancy. The stairway to heaven is too slow, too winding with the subtle and ambiguous; we require an elevator that lifts us to our biases without the effort of justification. Eventually a malfunction finds us trapped in the dark, mimicking the very pit we were trying to avoid all along. Only here, there is no privacy.
Ride to the Ophthalmologist
Optimist: It is on the slow ride that the heart beats fastest.
Realist: We would’ve snuggled on the Ferris wheel, it’s true—but only the rollercoaster could have made me scream.
Pessimist: Yes, we most wish to love those who bore us.
Idealist: Then why not live the excitement of your dreams?
Pragmatist: Fine, just don’t fall off the Ferris wheel in your simulated swoon—wear a seat belt!
Metaphysician: What for, when the fall would be such a short descent into heaven!
Brood for Brooding
If I ever have children I want them to be beautiful little fools. This way there will be no byproducts of an overly-developed consciousness to cause me embarrassment—whispers of therapy sessions, madhouse holidays, poetry readings. My children will simply want to have fun looking good, and they will bring me pride from the envy others feel for them. For what reason would a man want to have children, if not to reinforce a lifetime of intentional failure with a few successful accidents? Failure must not be undone, but augmented by its juxtaposition with success . . .
“Given the way your father is, it’s amazing how normal you turned out!”
Translation: “Why do great creative minds so often pour all their imagination into their work and leave none for the fruit of their loins?”—Could it be because they need to achieve some sort of conventional recognition in their own lifetime to give them the freedom to keep failing? One cannot push originality into a realm of elite incomprehension without the emotional support of ignorant and oblivious relatives. The remorselessness of condemnation—from connoisseurs as well as the general populace—needs its parallel in a close circumference of pity for the incompetence in which one has lived. Every offensive personality trait and repulsive feature of physiognomy that can be presented as evidence of being cursed by the gods is, so long as one has sired a few beautiful little fools, one more lump of dust under the carpet.
The Ground
Unlike Kafka, Joyce, or Pessoa, I have no native city to transfigure into literature. Nor, like Thoreau, will I assimilate the wilderness into picturesque descriptions. My only alternative is to channel my experiences of the in-between life, and only provincial writers do that—artists whose souls have shrunk to the size of a town census or sprawled out in pointless suburban languishing.
It has been said Pessoa is the “writer of Lisbon,” but it is a trivial thing to encapsulate metropolitan minds and manners. His was a much greater achievement: he is the flâneur of the sky. No one has ever captured its changeable oblivion as he did, how the strolling of storm clouds reflect his inner being. He looked without any intention of consuming the rain they had to offer—without any concern whether there really was any rain at all. He did not merely describe the sky, his inner being created it.
But where is the poet of the ground? The bottom half of Tiamat—that is something we are more familiar with. We were never intended to soar through the air; the sky is not high enough for our dreams. Our natural environment is the soil that ties us to one place even as we imagine others, the desolate beaches that tease us with their horizons, rocks that jut high into the air and, once scaled, make us want to fly. The poet of the ground would not describe personal dreams, but the trances and delusions of others as contrasted with their pitiful realities; he would not use the earth as a symbol for himself as such, but for the composition and granularity of his people. What is humanity, after all, but a rock at one extreme and sand at the other? The unbreakable exception is eroded by a lapping tide while the rest pour through God’s fingers.
Human Languishing
Of all life forms, only the plant possesses negative liberty in the fullest degree possible. Free from the hunt for nourishment and mates, liberated from work, desire, and friendship, it has all the time in the world to do exactly what it is incapable of—to contemplate. The counterpart of the plant in the animal world is the philosopher. Worse than the voluptuary—who through thoughtless pleasure descends to the animal life—the philosopher does not seem on the surface to be a depraved creature. He is free enough from the menial tasks of life to seek exactly what he can never achieve—vegetation. The first man to shirk off his labor onto the back of another, solving the problem of having to work, was faced with the new problem of what to do. The result was the synaptic tremoring of our vexations, thought thinking itself, the frustration of every action. This in itself involves no depravity of character: one is absorbed into an ideal of beauty or truth, with the form of the object becoming identical to the form of consciousness. But an exclusive focus on the task can only be maintained for so long until awareness divorces itself from the activity and creeps back in, time speeds up, and anxiety returns. Heightened consciousness impedes effortlessness. One can only be happy when not thinking of oneself. The philosopher’s contemplation—which he trumpets as the ultimate instrument of positive liberty, the crown of evolution which overcomes all obstacles—far from fostering tranquility (let alone eudaemonia, or even happiness), drives him into a frenzy of restlessness, discontent, and burnout. Thus does a total, unified freedom mock transcendence and become its own prison. It rockets one to the fullest actualization of his purpose and reveals it to be not only a limitation of life, but the very antithesis of his dream. Only when philosophers can grow into acorns, when their good spirit overcomes humanity to attain floral flourishing, will personality overcome destiny. The “man of character” is realized in one who relies on the weather alone. In the first stage of evolution we climbed; in the second, we slide.
If philosophy in it pure form is unable to address eudaemonia, as Williams concludes, what is it these thinkers are capturing when they advise us on values? Might such a willed negligence towards the lower affairs necessitate, not a “good spirit,” but a display of cacodaemonia?
Anderesis
Be a monster of
