Ahh, feels good to be doing philosophy again. Sticking my intellectual dick into the mental glory hole, per se. And what better way to effect my cerebral money shot than by contemplating the fission of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, two of the baddest mothers to ever oppose Nazis by writing strongly worded editorials?

A little history first. Sartre was born into the kind of middle class family the French refer to as bourgeoisie, because if you don't sound like you're talking with a dick in your mouth, you aren't aren't speaking French. Speaking of which, Sartre's father died soon after he was born, and his mother remarried a man who treated the young genius like something he'd stepped in, instilling in him a virulent, pathological hatred for everything remotely associated with the bourgeoisie Incidentally, Sartre would die without realizing that contempt for the bourgeoisie is, in itself, pretty goddamn bourgeois. This, in addition to Sartre's laughably inept political views, points to the fact that being one of the greatest philosophers of all time in no way makes you a decent human being. By contrast: Albert Camus. (pronounced cow-moo)

Albert Camus was born into wretchedly poor conditions in the then French colony of Algiers, Algeria. Like Sartre, Camus' father passed away while he was young. Unlike Sartre, Camus' mother failed to find a sugar daddy and was forced to toil alone in the Belcourt slums to support him and his brother. Fortunately Camus was smart enough to merit a scholarship and escape the authentic poverty Sartre so coveted. When he was seventeen he contracted Tuberculosis and hovered at the edge of death for weeks, finally emerging with a profound appreciation for the tenuous fragility of sentient life. He also had the ability to tell people's future by touching them, though he just used it to hit on chicks.

Meanwhile Sartre would begin his own affair with Simone de Beauvoir, a freaky dame and damn good philosopher in her own right. Monogamy was too bourgeois for Sartre's taste, at least while his professorship granted him easy access to impressionable coeds, and he would maintain a polyamorous relationship with Beauvoir despite the fact that they were the only ones who could tolerate one another's company for any extended period of time. After Sartre finished school he entered the military, where he split his time between releasing weather balloons and plowing through Heidegger impenetrable prose. This one/two punch inexplicably failed to halt the German blitzkrieg, and he was captured during the Nazi invasion. He spent a year inside an enemy internment camp before finally convincing them that he wasn't a threat (why it took a year, we'll never know) and returned to Paris where he wrote for a a resistance newspaper.

Camus tried joining several leftist political organizations but found that they were more concerned with bickering among themselves than lifting people out of poverty, and got kicked out when the didn't tow the party line. When his marriage to a morphine addict dissolved he married Francine Faure, a pianist and mathematician who never went beyond the occasional meth binge. He worked in the theater and press, eventually moving to France to start writing for resistance publications himself.

There must be something about life during wartime, since Sartre would compose Nausea and Being and Nothingness during this period, while Camus would write The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus in the same period. As one of the last beleaguered defenders of literature's rotting corpse I'm more than a little aware of the uselessness of the written word in today's society, but I like to think this extraordinary output indicates that a strong literary and intellectual tradition can lead to good things coming out of bad circumstances. This is opposed to, say, the populace living under the present Iraqi occupation, which is principally occupied with finding homosexuals whose anuses they can superglue shut in Allah's glorious name. Speaking of assholes, in 1947 Camus left the paper and met Sartre.

Camus purposely avoided the title of existentialist, and in fact never claimed to be a philosopher of any sort, which would prove immeasurably convenient when people pointed out holes in his arguments. Existentialist or no, philosopher or no, Frenchman or no, saying that he was always surprised when people linked him to Sartre is a tad disingenuous. Yes, their philosophies are very distinct, but they are both concerned with how (wo)man can be a moral and content being in an indifferent, godless universe where Arrested Development is canceled while According to Jim endures. Their conflict and eventual split would come from conflicting viewpoints on human nature, or the lack thereof.

Sartre was resolute in his insistence that a man has absolutely no predetermining conditions. He believed human consciousness to be a floating nothingness. It sits on no foundation, and is therefore entirely dependent on itself for it's actions. In his view every single individual is absolutely, irrevocably free as a result of their existence preceding their essence. Therefore every individual is responsible for the society they inhabit and wholly capable of shaping it to whatever their imagination can conceive. As a consequence Sartre believed great violence was justified in the pursuit of revolution, since if mankind could entirely shape the world it occupied by choice, it could eventually chose to occupy a one that was, if not perfect, so vastly superior to the one preceding it as to justify virtually anything done in it's name. Thus when reports arrived of Stalin and Mao turning their countries into concentration camps with national anthems, Sartre defended their actions as the messy prelude to a communist paradise.

Camus was a tad more skeptical. He believed the intrinsic dignity of sentient existence to be so fundamental to the human experience that the only way life could be made bearable was to force yourself to value it despite it's pointlessness and pain, a kind of evangelical affirmation that found its purpose in rebellion against the universe's indifference. To kill another person, he maintained, was to in effect negate your own existence, since your lack of respect for life invalidated your own right to exist and was a essential surrender to absurdity. Both Sartre and Camus employed the categorical imperitive, but their views of the human race they applied it to differed greatly. While Sartre saw humanity as absolutely self-determining and self-governing, Camus saw a deep vein of absurdity running through human behavior, and believed human beings often behaved for no reason at all, only justifying their actions ex post facto. This is exemplified in The Stranger, where Meursault shots a man because he's been walking in the sun too long and happens to posses a gun. During his trial society demands that justification be produced for his crime, and Meursault is labeled a deviant, a sociopath, an embittered loner, when he's really just subject to a primal innocence that society can't fathom.

Camus believed there was a human nature that circumstances drew out of individuals, a human nature could not be reengineered as the communists intended. He believed that men were by and large more good than evil, but couldn't explain why they tended to produce more evil than good. Sartre and his cronies condemned Camus' doctrine of bloodless rebellion as bourgeois morality, and the two greatest minds of a generation were forever divided.

Freud's The Future of an Illusion makes more sense if you see it as more of a prelude to his book Civilization and its Discontents than an independent treatise psychoanalyzing the human need for divinity and meaning. It was published in 1928, which was six years after the formal establishment of the officially secular/atheist USSR and when National Socialism in Germany was franticly cutting and pasting various religions together to ideologically justify the third Reich's agenda. As Freud applies psychoanalysis to religious belief like a scalpel to a cadaver it's easy to see his methods as cold, calculating, even cruel, but when we view The Future of an Illusion as a piece of Civilization and its Discontents, given what would happen to European civilization in the near future, we can see it as one part of a larger effort to restore sanity to civilization. Or at least, Freud's own particular version of sanity. Freud approaches humanity's beliefs the best way he knows how: as a neurosis. This is by no means the only psychological interpretation of the human need for divinity and meaning, indeed, their contrasting viewpoints on this topic would contribute to the split between Freud and Jung, but The Future of an Illusion serves my purposes insofar as it's one of the few psychological treatises I've actually read. Partially. I'll finish it as soon as that librarian admits she's a dick. Freud fulfills Voltaire's bon mot-cum-prophecy by interpreting the belief in supernatural deities as a delusion/illusion grown from the natural human need for kindness and certainty in a cruel and uncertain world. Freud rattles off much the same grievances as Hamlet the Whiny Bitch (The play's alternate title, along with The Spooktacular Dutch Kill-a-thon Featuring the Harlem Globetrotters. Shakespeare was a man ahead of his time.) including life's uncertainty, its absurdity, the arbitrary application of justice, and so on. He sees the human invention of a divine mediator as a natural extension of our relationships with our parents. We start out as absolutely helpless creatures, dependent for our survival on beings that appear to us to be all knowing and all powerful. When we grow up we're distanced from the people who protect and unconditionally love us, but we don't loose the anxiety they protected us from, so we retreat into being eternal children of God. “We are still defenseless, perhaps, but we are no longer helplessly paralyzed; we can at least react. Perhaps, indeed, we are not even defenseless. We can apply the same methods against these violent supermen outside that we employ in our own society; we can try to adjure them, to appease them, to bribe them, and, by so influencing them, we may rob them of a part of their power.” He goes on to make the point that connecting yourself with a religion is a way of connecting yourself to the history of the human race. By affirming one's Christianity one connects oneself to the whole of Western history stretching back to Rome, giving one not just a sense of one's place in the universe but in culture and society. That's part of the reason why new religions tend not to have much appeal, though the stuff about polygamy and Xenu doesn't help. Unfortunately Freud is much better at eviscerating sacred beliefs than rebuilding society. He argues that man can go without religion and teleology, but is vague on how to actually accomplish this, be it individually or collectively, though we can't fault his prescience. “That the effect of religious consolations may be liked to that of a narcotic is well illustrated by what is happening in America. [prohibition] There they are trying—obviously under the influence of petticoat government [bitches be trippin' & votin']—to deprive people of all stimulants, intoxicants, and other pleasure-producing substances, and instead, by way of compensation, are surfeiting them with piety. This is another experiment as to whose outcome we need not feel curious.” Oh, snap! No you didn't! You just got served, women's temperance movement! Daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn! Humanity likes God and meaning because otherwise it feels small and insignificant, but what's wrong with being small and insignificant? That sounds absurd at first, like asking why gravity or why green, but unlike laws of nature we are capable of deconstructing our motivations. We want to matter, we want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and we also like to be personally exalted. Why? Because otherwise it'll be like we never existed at all. What's wrong with that? I want to exist, exist as much as possible in the brief time I'm given. Why does that matter when I'm still going to die? Even if I accomplish something great it won't make me any less dead. The world was doing just fine before I got here, if anything I'm a parasite, so why in God's name am I so obsessed with proving and perpetuating my existence? Abstractions like love and grace are unsatisfying. We can't just chalk it up to an evolutionary imperative, can we? I don't know. I don't fucking know. I know Buddha would say I'm obsessing over the arrow but damn it, I want to know, and I don't want to spend my life toiling to placate my insatiable ego. Do we just live our lives because we fear the alternative, as Hamlet and Jean-Paul every-existing-thing-is-born-without-reason-prolongs-itself-out -of-weakness-and-dies-by-chance Sartre would have us believe? Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are the entrée? It doesn't seem right. The more one attempts to quantify and rationalize life, the greater a sense one gets that life itself and it's myriad sideshows are being factored out of the equation. If someone were able to manufacture a proof that God exists and life has a purpose, would it really stop the pain from loved ones dying? If instead there was an irrefutable proof that God didn't exist and life was meaningless, would sex really be less fun? Would puppies stop being cute? Would lucky charms no longer be magically delicious? Again: we can't control reality, but we can control how we react to it. There are worse things than having to go without teleology, although most of them are confined to the third world at the moment. Let's conclude this three part epic with a piece of writing from that football loving, car crash having, tuberculosis suffering, hailing from Belcourt, weighing in at 142 lbs, the Algerian ambassador of the absurd: Albert Camus! [roars of contemptuous French applause] The myth of Sisyphus concerns the man the gods condemned to a task with the following job description: 1.Roll rock up hill. 2.Watch rock roll down other side. 3. Repeat. Though there's no record of how the gods kept him at this task, its safe to assume comprehensive medical coverage was involved. In Sisyphus Camus saw the whole of humanity, from the loftiest king to the lowliest horserapist, we are all condemned to an absurd life of arbitrary toil. In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus asks the only question he feels philosophers need concern themselves with: Is life worth living? There's no reason for it; not with this crop of summer movies, anyway. “ 'Why' arises and everything begins in that weariness is tinged with amazement. It awakens consciousness and provokes what follows, mere anxiety is at the source of everything.” And mere anarchy is loosed upon our personal world. Reason/scientific inquiry can help us understand the world but it cannot give us a reason to exist. (more poetically expressed as Raison d'être in frency-talk) “This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.” Life may be absurd, but at least it's proper absurdity. Accept no substitute! Camus outlines three responses to absurdity, none of which he endorses with his Existentialist Seal O' Approval: Despair, suicide, and hope. He dismisses them all, saying that each response is just a variety of giving up. The only authentic response, he proclaims, is to sally forth into fully aware and intentional life, not in spite of its absurdity but because of it. “The very fact that you do not let yourself die means that you have chosen to carry on, and in so doing, you recognize that life has a value, albeit relative.” Camus recommends Revolt. Nothing less than raging against the dying of the light will satisfy him, what he calls a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. There is something contradictory in this, as Camus disdains religious faith but asks his readers to make the same ontological leap in relishing the mobius strip of hopelessness that is Sisyphean existence. But if nothing else, is this not the very thing that raises the human struggle from comedy to tragedy that I mentioned at the start of this byzantine clusterfuck? Will we not allow ourselves the nobility that turns a pratfall into a shooting star?

FINALLY DONE. SOMETHNG LIGHTER NEXT TIME. I'LL SAVE THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GENOCIDE FOR CHRISTMAS.

Ahh, feels good to be doing philosophy again. Sticking my intellectual dick into the mental glory hole, per se. And what better way to effect my cerebral money shot than by contemplating the fission of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, two of the baddest mothers to ever oppose Nazis by writing strongly worded editorials?

A little history first. Sartre was born into the kind of middle class family the French refer to as bourgeoisie, because if you don't sound like you're talking with a dick in your mouth, you aren't aren't speaking French. Speaking of which, Sartre's father died soon after he was born, and his mother remarried a man who treated the young genius like something he'd stepped in, instilling in him a virulent, pathological hatred for everything remotely associated with the bourgeoisie Incidentally, Sartre would die without realizing that contempt for the bourgeoisie is, in itself, pretty goddamn bourgeois. This, in addition to Sartre's laughably inept political views, points to the fact that being one of the greatest philosophers of all time in no way makes you a decent human being. By contrast: Albert Camus. (pronounced cow-moo)

Albert Camus was born into wretchedly poor conditions in the then French colony of Algiers, Algeria. Like Sartre, Camus' father passed away while he was young. Unlike Sartre, Camus' mother failed to find a sugar daddy and was forced to toil alone in the Belcourt slums to support him and his brother. Fortunately Camus was smart enough to merit a scholarship and escape the authentic poverty Sartre so coveted. When he was seventeen he contracted Tuberculosis and hovered at the edge of death for weeks, finally emerging with a profound appreciation for the tenuous fragility of sentient life. He also had the ability to tell people's future by touching them, though he just used it to hit on chicks.

Meanwhile Sartre would begin his own affair with Simone de Beauvoir, a freaky dame and damn good philosopher in her own right. Monogamy was too bourgeois for Sartre's taste, at least while his professorship granted him easy access to impressionable coeds, and he would maintain a polyamorous relationship with Beauvoir despite the fact that they were the only ones who could tolerate one another's company for any extended period of time. After Sartre finished school he entered the military, where he split his time between releasing weather balloons and plowing through Heidegger impenetrable prose. This one/two punch inexplicably failed to halt the German blitzkrieg, and he was captured during the Nazi invasion. He spent a year inside an enemy internment camp before finally convincing them that he wasn't a threat (why it took a year, we'll never know) and returned to Paris where he wrote for a a resistance newspaper.

Camus tried joining several leftist political organizations but found that they were more concerned with bickering among themselves than lifting people out of poverty, and got kicked out when the didn't tow the party line. When his marriage to a morphine addict dissolved he married Francine Faure, a pianist and mathematician who never went beyond the occasional meth binge. He worked in the theater and press, eventually moving to France to start writing for resistance publications himself.

There must be something about life during wartime, since Sartre would compose Nausea and Being and Nothingness during this period, while Camus would write The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus in the same period. As one of the last beleaguered defenders of literature's rotting corpse I'm more than a little aware of the uselessness of the written word in today's society, but I like to think this extraordinary output indicates that a strong literary and intellectual tradition can lead to good things coming out of bad circumstances. This is opposed to, say, the populace living under the present Iraqi occupation, which is principally occupied with finding homosexuals whose anuses they can superglue shut in Allah's glorious name. Speaking of assholes, in 1947 Camus left the paper and met Sartre.

Camus purposely avoided the title of existentialist, and in fact never claimed to be a philosopher of any sort, which would prove immeasurably convenient when people pointed out holes in his arguments. Existentialist or no, philosopher or no, Frenchman or no, saying that he was always surprised when people linked him to Sartre is a tad disingenuous. Yes, their philosophies are very distinct, but they are both concerned with how (wo)man can be a moral and content being in an indifferent, godless universe where Arrested Development is canceled while According to Jim endures. Their conflict and eventual split would come from conflicting viewpoints on human nature, or the lack thereof.

Sartre was resolute in his insistence that a man has absolutely no predetermining conditions. He believed human consciousness to be a floating nothingness. It sits on no foundation, and is therefore entirely dependent on itself for it's actions. In his view every single individual is absolutely, irrevocably free as a result of their existence preceding their essence. Therefore every individual is responsible for the society they inhabit and wholly capable of shaping it to whatever their imagination can conceive. As a consequence Sartre believed great violence was justified in the pursuit of revolution, since if mankind could entirely shape the world it occupied by choice, it could eventually chose to occupy a one that was, if not perfect, so vastly superior to the one preceding it as to justify virtually anything done in it's name. Thus when reports arrived of Stalin and Mao turning their countries into concentration camps with national anthems, Sartre defended their actions as the messy prelude to a communist paradise.

Camus was a tad more skeptical. He believed the intrinsic dignity of sentient existence to be so fundamental to the human experience that the only way life could be made bearable was to force yourself to value it despite it's pointlessness and pain, a kind of evangelical affirmation that found its purpose in rebellion against the universe's indifference. To kill another person, he maintained, was to in effect negate your own existence, since your lack of respect for life invalidated your own right to exist and was a essential surrender to absurdity. Both Sartre and Camus employed the categorical imperitive, but their views of the human race they applied it to differed greatly. While Sartre saw humanity as absolutely self-determining and self-governing, Camus saw a deep vein of absurdity running through human behavior, and believed human beings often behaved for no reason at all, only justifying their actions ex post facto. This is exemplified in The Stranger, where Meursault shots a man because he's been walking in the sun too long and happens to posses a gun. During his trial society demands that justification be produced for his crime, and Meursault is labeled a deviant, a sociopath, an embittered loner, when he's really just subject to a primal innocence that society can't fathom.

Camus believed there was a human nature that circumstances drew out of individuals, a human nature could not be reengineered as the communists intended. He believed that men were by and large more good than evil, but couldn't explain why they tended to produce more evil than good. Sartre and his cronies condemned Camus' doctrine of bloodless rebellion as bourgeois morality, and the two greatest minds of a generation were forever divided.

If you're reading this, adored breacher of my solipsism, it's likely that you, like myself, have an irrational hunger for unpleasant truth, and in the philosophical realm there is no truth more unpleasant than the fact that life's joys are not commensurate with it's sufferings. Immanuel Kant understood this, saying that if the only criteria for life were whether its joys outnumbered its pains no human existence would be worth experiencing. This is often given as the justification for infanticide except in the state of Texas, where “Touched my stuff” is also a valid defense. The English language can lay claim to the best expression of this condition, albeit through the mouthpiece of a whiny Dane: “and by a sleep to say we end the heartache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,[penis] the pangs of despised love, the law's delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of th' unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?[penis] Who would fardels[penises] bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns, puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.” He may have peppered his speech with genital non sequiturs, but the man had a damn fine grip on the human condition. None of us would suffer poverty and depression, heartache and heartburn, third world debt and first world guilt, if we knew for a fact there was something better beyond the veil, though the prospect of having to mingle with all those damn relatives who finally kicked might be cause for hesitation. For better but mostly for worse, we're stuck here, so how do we cope? For the Greeks there was the concept of ataraxia, which meant different things to different schools, but roughly translated the concept means freedom from pain or the minimization thereof. But we humans can be pretty noble creatures when it doesn't interrupt our twittering regimen, and we don't like to think of our existences as being principally defined as the avoidance of pain and boredom. (a kind of pain) That's not how it feels, anyway. No matter how vague and formless our querulous longings so often seem, they rarely strike us as pointless. Our feelings often seem to come out of nowhere and be as evanescent and incoherent as fever dreams, but we as a species refuse to accept their ineffability, dedicating schools of thought and libraries of knowledge to determining just where our feelings come from and pouring those selfsame feelings out again and again until they fill canvases, books, museums, soundscapes, skylines, and yes, even goddamn web pages. All of this feels like it means something, and nothing is more immediate and real than feeling. We need God and we need this to mean something because being alone on this churning sea of love and hate and fear and hope and desire and distraction and desolation and abundance and loneliness loneliness fucking loneliness inside us is just not a goddamn option. But. We are not just beings of hurricane force desire, we are not blind naked infants crawling in whatever direction offers succor, consumer culture notwithstanding. We are beings of reason and intellect and truth and if there really is no prime mover and ultimate point, I for one would like to know, if only to justify my rampant alcoholism. (Don't judge me!) In one of my earlier posts I talked about a myth where people were once complete in and of themselves, then the gods crashed their party and split them into opposite sexes, dooming them to need each other and be incomplete. I connected this myth to the splitting of the self that occurs during puberty, but it could represent any number of milestones in individual and collective human development, including the evolution of the corpus callosum, which is the creamy middle of white matter in the gray matter nougat of our brains and serves as the highway by which the left and right sides exchange most of their data. Some theorists speculate (being theorists, they can't help themselves) that the corpus callosum is a relatively new evolutionary trait, and before it evolved the two halves of the human brain were as ineffective at communicating with one another as seperate humans are now. Before the corpus callosum each human was really more like two people in one body and what was really internal input could be perceived as external input, i.e. a god planting ideas in your head. This theory wouldn't just account for humanity's early and persistent obsession with evangelical deities but why we tend to feel so alone, like a part of us is missing. Still, unlike evolution, it's just a theory. Let's see what Freud has to say, since he's been nice enough to explicitly write “In what does the peculiar value of religious ideas lie?” even if, as an incest loving cokehead, he's being a tad bullish with the word 'peculiar.' In The Future of an Illusion he writes “Man's self-regard, seriously menaced, calls for consolation; life and the universe must be robbed of their terrors; moreover his curiosity, moved, it is true, by the strongest practical interest, demands an answer.” Ah, but Herr Doktor, ours is not a practical interest! We demand to see how far down the existential rabbit hole leads, even if it goes through the universe itself and we simply end up staring at our own asses!

One of the Carls, I'm not sure if it was Sagan or Jung, once said that the search for meaning is the only thing that adds the grace of tragedy to the otherwise absurd human comedy. By quoting them/him I hope to add some air of legitimacy to this random internet rambling. Meaning, like religious belief, is an extremely personal matter, and none of us can claim to have persuaded someone via reason that God does exist or that life is meaningful, no matter what our résumé would have others believe. We start out believing or not believing what our parents and community tell us, then most of us stop thinking entirely and become productive members of society, but some of us are masochistic enough to keep questioning existence until our loved ones smother us so they can watch The Real World: Cancun in peace. What makes people believers and unbelievers? We're inclined to push Experience to the front of the line, but that spot should really be reserved for Choice. We can only chose our experiences to a limited extent (My lifelong dream is to take one of those motivational speakers who wails Success Is A Choice, dump them in the concertina wire hell of a DRC concentration camp and say “Work your magic!” I switched guidance councilors a lot.) but we can chose how events influence us. The exact same terrible thing can happen to two people and lead them to opposite choices, making one reaffirm their belief in the supernatural while another to decides that God is either an unrepentant sociopath or was never really there. The same goes for whether life has a purpose or not. “What after all are our experiences? Much more what we lay into them than what lies in them! Or must one really say: nothing lies in them but themselves? Experiences are fictions?” As is his wont Nietzsche is taking it a little far in the previous quote, but as usual, there's truth in them thar exclamation points. We've come to associate fiction with fraud, but it's an undeniable aspect of the human experience, shaping why we get up in the morning to why dem people on the talky box make us vote against our own interests. Our life is a narrative and how we live it is greatly informed by how we see our part in the story. Neither of us will learn much if I rattle off my own personal belief about God and the meaning of life (despite the fact that they're the RIGHT ones and if you disagree with me you are WRONG WRONG WRONG and probably a GAY NAZI COMMUNIST) though they're certainly fair game if I can't think of anything else by my next self-imposed deadline. A more productive avenue of inquiry/ranting is why we feel the need for a deity and a meaning to life, which brings us back to my half-remembered opening quote, and since I seem to be in a quoting mood let's not break momentum and throw “If God did not exist, it would need to be invented.” into the pot, a line usually attributed to Voltaire, though invented-God knows if he really ever said it. Why does humanity need meaning and God? Well, how does he function without it? Dostoyevsky asked this question again and again in his fiction, and despite the fact that if you pick up one of his books and open it to a random page it will seem like nothing but weeping Russians literally throwing ruble notes at one another, he goes farther into the Big Questions than any man before him and few after. Crime and Punishment starts with Raskolnikov determining (not in so many words) that there is no God and moral judgments are baseless. This leads to the natural conclusion of him murdering two women with an ax, one who pretty much deserves it, another who most certainly does not. College students who feel rankled when assignments interfere with their binging schedule like to point out that Crime & Punishment contains ten pages of crimes and punishments and seven hundred pages of St. Petersburgians arguing with one another, which is true. The fact that those Russians are arguing with one another about crime, punishment, justice, God, fear, suffering, hope, love and despair is understandably lost on them, since further reading could jeopardize their ability to complain. What follows is a sometimes tedious, often rapturous depiction of a man's soul being forced through the eye of a needle as he moves like a ghost through the Godless universe, encountering fellow victims of the fall whose smoldering pain provides the only illumination in a dark world. There is not a lot of crime in Crime & Punishment because, from Dostoyevsky's perspective (as he raced to complete the novel in a desperate bid to satisfy his publisher and pay off gambling debts) the crime is both incidental and universal. Raskolnikov's hell is not the hell of punishment for murder but the hell of isolation, the hell of distance: distance from God, distance from other people, distance from compassion, distance from hope, distance from society, distance from himself. The murder itself is just his bloody baptism into this underworld. Modern religion has emphasized the solitude of Jesus on the cross. Go to any art museum and you'll likely see Ol' J-Bones just hanging there looking ripped, and if there's anybody else depicted it'll probably be people below, looking up at him and getting their lamentation on, the profitable message being that HE'S SUFFERING and it's YOUR FAULT. Less often depicted is the two criminals who are crucified with him (Luke 23:32-43) who don't just round out the triumvirate to make for a more uniform silhouette but are an important allegory, as they're both the archetypical everyman. One of the men crucified with him turns away from Christ, but the other sees the chance to strike up a conversation. (Hey! How's it going? You're crucified? Well, at least we've got that in common. How many nails you got over there? Three? I got four, they must've run out. Rome always undersupplies the Mediterranean colonies, no wonder the soldiers are taking our crap. You're the son of God? I'm the son of a shoe salesman. I guess they're kinda the same, I mean, shoemakers can be very exacting. Hey, don't stab him, I was just talking to him! Oh, you are a dick.) The idea is that we, by virtue of being alive and sinners, are fellow cross monkeys. We're up there suffering too, but can mitigate it by being the man who accepts instead of the man who denies. Raskolnikov starts out by being the latter, but the agony makes him slowly claw his way in the opposite direction. Feeling obliged to fully hammer his point into our skull, Dostoyevsky has Raskolnikov experience a dream in the gulag (spoiler!) where the author envisions a world without the unifying force of religion as a kind of Hobbesian war of one against all, basically Mad Max with serfs and farm implements instead of Australians and cars. If I was an English teacher I'd pause in fondling the coeds and take this moment to say “Now, what can we take from this?” as if I was running a souvenir stand selling Crime & Punishment commemorative mugs and refrigerator magnets. Of course it's up to you what you take from this and I'm in no position to force you to write a thousand word essay explaining that, thank maybe-God. Some would say that Raskolnikov proves humanity needs God because it needs moral direction. Others would say Raskolnikov's actions are the natural outgrowth of an absurd world where cruel, covetous old ladies prosper while innocent children die horribly from consumption, that Raskolnikov's ultimate redemption consists of turning to his fellow crucified but not to God, an affirmation of humanity's need for fellow humans like in Camus' The Plague. We need God and we need meaning, because life just sucks too much without it. If we think about it, our lives are defined by suffering to a frightening extent. Is that all we are? Are our entire lives just pieced together coping mechanisms and reflex actions, our every choice no more meaningful than jerking our hand back from a hot stove?

Maybe.

NEXT TIME: FREUD, SISYPHUS, AND SEX SEX SEX

Fellow thought junkies, think of all those who have come before us: the eclectic, esoteric, oneiric line of human miscellany that propagated and perished just so we could be here, just so we could exist, just so we could sit in traffic for two hours each day then come home and eat Baconnaise™ while we watch 25 Hottest Hollywood Cougar Tales on E!. I'm always surprised when people are surprised by pyramid schemes since they're unarguably the most natural thing in the world, a reflection of the grand pyramid scheme where one person dies so another person can be born, then that person dies in addition to the first person so yet another person can be born, and so on and so on and by the time we reach you and me a truly unfathomable body count has been amassed just so we could arrive here in the metaphorically poignant riot of blood and screaming that is vaginal birth, though as we round 7 billion without slowing the present is set to have more humans alive at once than have ever died, a nifty bit of scale tipping that will no doubt be worth it when environmental catastrophe winnows us like hummel figurines tossed in a wood chipper. The bible™ screeches at us that God™ punished ladykind with a terrifically agonizing birthing process as ex post facto punishment for Eve's snacking habits and obnoxious tendency to not be a man, but blue state sciencey types apostatize that it is the human brain that doth so wrong the vagina, forcing the unprecedented widening of the human pelvis to allow the passage of a human being that must be born so early in order for its oversized brain to squeeze through that it's functionally helpless for years. Any other species would have had the good sense to leave such top heavy offspring in the dust as they continued following their quarry across the continents like stoners following The String Cheese Incident's grease powered tour bus, but we mammalian primates knew a good thing when it fell out of our womenfolk, and consequently we would eventually be able to devise satellite television. The fossil record suggests that we, as a species, are disinclined to leaving others behind even if those others prove a liability, at least provided they are part of our family or tribe. This has allowed us to follow an evolutionary course more like Natural Selection Lite™ than the hard, cold Natural Selection Classic™ that other organisms must quaff. I am very thankful for that. I would not survive in the state of nature—that is the one and only thing I ever learned in Gym class. What would the world look like if self conscious creatures hadn't evolved from sociable apes? What if, say, a species of rabbit had gained sentience? It would change Easter forever, for one thing. For another thing, it would be impossible. Rabbits reproduce via the Catholic method, having between six and eighteen offspring that they then neglect, secure in the knowledge that their sheer numbers mean one or two must survive. There's no room in that equation for high intelligence, no grace period for the premature birth required by the frontal lobe that's so instrumental to the appreciation of bacon-derivative garnishes and the horny mature women. It boggles the mind to think of all the pain every woman endured to prolong the species, every time a father went hungry to feed the doe-eyed misfit that would prove yet another link in the chain that briefly terminates at vous et moi. And that's just the survivors, think of all the humans who through no fault of their own didn't succeed in completing the horizontal rumba, those kids whose big brains complicated the birthing process so much they killed their moms and themselves, those who succumbed to the obscene infant and child mortality rate that still culls half the world. Where's their day? Where's their parade? Where's their memorial? Where's the Tomb of the Unknown Gene Pool? These days even a genetic underachiever like myself can make their infinitesimal mark on the internet, but reproduction has long been the only path to indicate that you ever existed. Genghis Khan raped so many women that 8 percent of the men living in the former Mongol empire are related to him, about sixteen million people. Now, as in all of history, we stand at an evolutionary impasse, but never before has the contrast been so violent or the distinction so radical. When a village in Somalia gets its arms chopped off it is in part the result of clashing eras of evolutionary dictates: one that favored being able to swing a machete for ten hours a day meeting one that favors the wholesale exploitation of land and resources at any cost in accordance with globalized neoliberal economics. Our species has always had the peculiar relationship of having one foot in and one foot out of evolution, but now that the human race has grown so powerful that we can change the world we inhabit we're by proxy guiding the way humans adapt to it, creating our own evolutionary process. We have our vain, sociopathic hooligans over here, our plump preening consume-o-trons who like to pretend they're vain sociopathic hooligans over there, our beaten down invisible proles over yonder, and here on the web we have our jaded, narcissistic, confrontational solipsists. As Liam Lynch pointed out, the internet is a preview of how rude people will be in the future. But all is not darkness, and fie on me for implying it is so. Who could have envisioned the marvelous, terrible system we're using right now would grow out the US military's need to link defense computers? Who could have known that Alexander the Great's empire would dissolve in a heartbeat, but the Hellenistic civilization it spread would endure to this day? The law of unintended consequences may yet prove to be humanity's salvation from the industrialized nightmare he's sealed himself in. For who could have imagined that Eli Whitney would invent the slam dunk, thus forcing the American Basketball Association to invade Normandy so they could throw the One Ring into Mary Magdalene's Holy Grail Vagina?

Or something.

Suffering.

Got real quiet in here, didn't it? Our reaction to the very topic is a phenomenon. There's a word or phrase for it in most cultures; the Kiriwina of New Guinea use Biga Peula (literally 'hard words') to refer to ideas and concepts that are universally known yet cannot be openly acknowledged if society is to continue to function. Of course there are exceptions. As children we're indulged, we're coddled, we're allowed to weep and lament over every differed gratification. We get through it by being plied with ideas like justice and hope and karma and righteousness and virtue that we're assured we'll understand when we're older, at which point it will, of course, be fait accompli. I've often thought that just as children are given EVERYBODY POOPS when they enter the potty training phase of their life, adolescents should be given EVERYBODY KNOWS LIFE IS A SICK JOKE WITH NO PUNCHLINE when they reach the bad poetry writing phase of their life. (Pain rhymes with Rain! Oh, I'm good.) Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance sayeth Sartre, but what is that idea besides something to impress the philosophy bitches with? Part of it comes from Sarte's profound belief in human freedom and existence's preceding essence. He believed consciousness to be pure emptiness since the entire world was outside it, and therefore beyond mechanistic determinism and free. Yet we cannot simply be nothing (without a lifetime of Zen meditation, anyhow) so our lives are defined by the continual pursuit of input to grace our consciousness with some kind of definition. The very reason I'm writing these words is to give form and definition to the swirling, featureless mass of my mind. By doing so I confirm that I exist, and am able, however briefly, to banish the looming specter of my impending (so often it seems like it's already here) nonexistence. Even my impish desire for attention from you, treasured reader, is an expression of my need to have my consciousness supplemented by that of another. Alas, this selfishness is inherent to the process. You define me at the expense of your own self definition, which is why the media of one-way transmission is inherently selfish. By your reading this you're justifying my very existence, which becomes a double whammy when I try to shape your thoughts to match my own. Sarte's view of relationships is fundamentally confrontational, even parasitic, and this is what he means when the says hell is other people. We need to relate to each other, there simply is no other way to formulate a vision of ourselves. Try going without human contact for a day, a week, a month, a year, and you will begin to have a very real sense of your Self slipping away, though the same effect can be garnered from an hour of daytime television, or a few minutes spent reading the comments on a message board. Is this what suffering is then? A failure to corral our own consciousness? Yet really, suffering wouldn't be suffering if we knew the whys and wherefores of it, and simple discontentment increases exponentially due to our failure to understand it. This meaninglessness, this absence of Teleology (Telos being Greek for Purpose) is what Kierkegaard called, in his characteristically purple prose “Sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.” but let's just call it Dread with a das kapital D. (philosophy joke, I'm sorry, there's certainly no need to inject more suffering into the world) We are unhappy but we don't know why. Every atom of our being cries out for there to be a reason why we suffer the way we do, but none is apparent. The power of suffering, the sheer reality of it, can inspire awe. There's a room in the D.C. Holocaust museum that you pass through three consecutive floors of as you navigate through the building, a room that's filled with pictures of the gassed and shot and burned and starved etcetera. When you reach the bottom floor and look up into the abyss of pictures stretching skyward like a necropolis tower of Babel, the feeling you experience is not sadness or horror but the kind of dumbfoundedness that usually comes from viewing a natural wonder like Nigeria Falls or Ayer's rock. Sometimes it seems like the only relationship we can have to suffering, our own or others, is to acknowledge that it's beyond our comprehension. But it's not that simple, and a deep part of me rails against anything being dismissed like that. Suffering is too fundamental a part of us to be discounted, both individually and culturally. Pain, and our need to justify it, has played a huge, arguably definitive role in shaping our society. Our most exalted symbols are those of suffering, sacrifice, martyrdom, instances where the self was annihilated for the purpose of the greater good. This is an end run around the karmic torture wheel of the Self/Other paradox, where one side is entirely annihilated and thus manages to both relieve themselves of the burden of Selfhood and wholly define themselves. It's also how suicide bombers are born.

That seems like an appropriate note for a post about suffering to go out on.

You wake up. You wake up on a bed, a cot, a bus station bench, or someone else, but the important part is you wake up. Your dreams dissipate like stars at dawn, the patterns blurring into incoherence until even the points themselves dissolve in the waking world's glare. You've been exiled from your own private existence, absorbed wholly into our world like a drop of water trapped in a sponge. You're one of us now: the liminal, the demarcated, the chartered, no more flying on ice cream unicorns with your gym teacher's face for you, here it's all bills and television and petroleum-based plastics, so you might as well open your eyes. Come on, someone was nice enough to make a planet for you, the least you can do is look at it and pretend to be interested. There we are. You are now officially conscious, but what does that mean, besides the fact that if someone tries to have sex with you it's no longer a felony?That's largely dependent on what you're conscious of, isn't it? Consciousness is like a blank canvas, a rough stone, unmolded clay, it isn't really anything until it receives some kind of external input, gets that initial reaction to provoke an equal or opposite reaction, so what's the first thing that sullies the empty perfection your reborn mind? If you're male, that answer is probably a raging hard-on. You're saluted by that fleshy tube every morning thanks to the invisible hand of evolution, reaching out through time and space to molest you as you slumber. Presumably there was a time when we were not cursed by morning wood, but like the proverbial Adam we fell from that state of grace when, during humanity's precocious hunter/gatherer development stage, the guys who woke up with a morning glory tended to reproduce rapaciously while their more reasonably bechubbed peers did not, and the result has been poking our sleeping companions out of bed each morning ever since. The effect this has on the male consciousness is profound “since feeling is first” as e.e. cummings put it. Entering every day with a lightning rod of ultrasensitive nerves jutting out of your Sacral Chakra thrusts you headfirst into the world of base sensation. (That sentence may have led you to notice just how phallic language can be.) First there is feeling, specifically, your feeling. This can lead us XY creatures to be very selfish (-Men? Selfish? Go on! -No, it's true!) since the very first thing we experience upon returning to the world is a profound atavistic NEED, so the very first thoughts adding definition to the blank slates of our minds (-Men? With minds? -Go on! No, it's true!) is there is a problem that someone should be attending to. That urge bounces right off the radar dish of our junk and redirects itself at whatever target happens to be nearby. Therefore, thorough no fault of his own, our hypothetical male has rendered himself the center of the universe and reduced everything around him as a means to facilitating his satisfaction. But it's not all bad. That very same base desire can serve as a launching pad for more noble aspirations, and the straw of sexual frustration can be spun into the gold of scientific and cultural progress, the male forcing himself to recognize problems and dedicate himself to solving them, alone if need be. (-Men? Masturbate? Go o-WE GET IT ALREADY) Yet we may not allow this simple exercise of articulating motivations to dissolve into Bad Faith. Our choices and ourselves are still absolutely free despite our influences, and we will not allow ourselves to mistake a simple motivating push for total control. Malekind is guilty of many of the best and worst acts in the human saga, but however Freud my want it, the penis bears no more blame than the spleen or appendix. Your penis is like the Force, gentlemen: “You mean it controls your actions?” “Partially, but it also obeys your commands.” Now if you don't mind I'd like to get the hell off this topic (-That's what she sa-SHADDUP) and back to how consciousness builds the world around it. You've woken up inside your body. Your body is an instrument that allows your consciousness to interact with reality. This raises the question of whether your consciousness is a product of your body or your body is a product of your consciousness and the short answer is that both are true and their mutual exclusivity is an illusion (as is everything else, in a certain sense) but back to the matter at hand: your body fills your mind with input like data filling a CPU. Your mind also has memory like a computer (we made them in our image, after all) and unless you're waking up from a night of binge drinking memories will start filling your mind and they will generate a story you've found yourself dropped back into. It won't necessarily be an enthralling story, but it will form a picture of the reality you inhabit and how you, as an individual, have interacted with it up to this point. Consequently you, AKA “the I” AKA “Self-Awareness” is the last thing your mind formulates on its return to functioning in the world, a leap computers cannot and probably will not ever make. You can do what computers can't. Besides burping the alphabet, this means you chose what data you take in (selective perception) and what data you input back into the world. (action mitigated by choice) We often forget this and live a reactionary life, a convenient and meaningless process of stimulus and reflex. Avoiding this is harder than it sounds. Even if we make an effort to be attentive and contemplative, we easily fall into patterns of particular kinds of attention and particular kinds of contemplation, and just become a different kind of machine instead an honest to God human fucking being. I'm sure if you cared to look you could find automaton pitfalls I fall into over the course of this very post. Having a real worldview is very hard, but what's infinitely harder is not just taking that worldview and using it as a tool to declare yourself superior to every other person you see. It's the difference between people like you and me who just want to do the best we can, and the Christs, the Buddhas the Ghandis the Kings the Debs, and it's a test I fail pretty much every time I drive my car. Every day we wake up and we fail. We try to be kind and courageous and patient and altruistic, but it's the most we can do to keep ourselves from beating the old lady in front of us in the checkout line to death with the magazine rack as she tries to swipe her social security card through the credit card reader for the third time. But we try. We're broken genetic amalgamations that clumsily interact with a universe that was made for no one in particular. Every night we give up and take ourselves apart. Every day we put ourselves back together and try again. Taken that way, the stuff that happens in between hardly seems to matter.

How strange to be alive. I'm not being sarcastic or facetious or employing any of the other doodads from the Literary Bag O' Tricks™ I keep next to my computer right beside the lotion, the tissues and the leather-bound Time/Life copy of the complete works of Kierkegaard with the pages stuck together. It's a simple offhand comment on the condition of existence. I don't mean that it's particularly strange now, when space travel is virtually the exclusive parlance of telecommunication companies and children are scarring themselves for life as soon as they're old enough to type 'prolapse' into Google image search. Existence itself is strange. It's strange that there's anything at all, though to put the 'Why is there something instead of nothing?' question into perspective, we may as well ask 'Why should there be nothing instead of something?” All things being equal and given that we have no idea what the Universe's rules were before the big bang (as opposed to the pathetic inkling we have now) existence seems just as likely as non-existence. I'll admit that it's a lofty, haphazard guess on my part, but something about the idea of the whole of existence resulting from a phantasmagorical coin toss strikes me as true, if only the metaphorical sense that an angry god throwing lightning bolts seems more true than air molecules having their electrons and positive ions forced to flow in opposite directions. I know the simple act of existing shouldn't seem strange. It's not like there's another, more sensible reality I'm familiar with. If I came to Martin Heidegger with my problem, managing to catch him in between Nazi rallies, I'm sure he'd say something completely incomprehensible, not just because I don't speak German, but because his writing is notoriously byzantine and opaque, i.e. shitty. Instead we will consult the Heidegger who exists in my mind, a being that's infinitely superior owing to the fact that it's generally liberal but politically agnostic, always speaks clearly, and bears a striking resemblance to Bettie Paige. MindHeidegger tells me, in between gentle slaps with the riding crop, that the reason existence feels strange to me is because I feel strange, and with good reason. 'You will always define yourself in terms of the world you occupy. This is an inevitable byproduct of being a sentient, truth-seeking creature. In a very real sense, if you are depressed, the world truly is a depressing place. It's also true that if you are happy, the world is a happy place. Both the world and ourselves can only exist insofar as we interact with one another. This riding crop exists because it is smacking your ass, and your ass exists because it is stopping the riding crop's movement. By the same token the world seems strange to you because you are strange in relation to the world.' That sucks for me. I say, or would, if the ball gag permitted verbal activity. 'Not just for you,' MindHeidegger says, 'but for everybody. Every human being is born into a world where time is already moving, and it's like entering a play in the middle of the second act. I call it Thrownness.' MindHeidegger shrugs. 'It sounds better in German.' 'Geworfenheit.' I say, which just happens to be the safeword, and MindHeidegger unties me. We humans literally just do not belong. We don't fit. Every lifeform on the planet survives by adapting itself to the world it inhabits, except for us. We've adapted the world to suit us, filling it with technological miracles to better accommodate our peculiar minds and bodies. The fact that this has, by and large, made us more alienated than before shows just how profound our condition is; just how instrumental it is in in making us what we are. There's a line in The Idiot where a man composing his suicide manifesto writes (I'm quoting from memory) 'That fly flitting about my room is happier than I will ever be, because that fly knows exactly why it exists.' This is the burden of consciousness, where every moment is a twisted menagerie of vague shattered longing girded by twisted impotent rage loosely juxtaposed against bewildered cringing fear shot through with blind staggering arousal clumsily lurching through a cold razor fog of other people's judgment. This is what Buddha meant when he said life is suffering, though that translation is misleading. An English version more in tune with the sentiment of his teachings is Life Is Flawed. Life is flawed because existence is flawed, but existence is flawed because WE are flawed. Disconnected from us, existence is fine. Nature is cruelly efficient and efficiently cruel, while our beloved planet couldn't care less whether it actually hosts life or not. Why are we flawed? That, adored reader, is the 64,000 dollar question. Is it mere evolutionary happenstance that our brains evolved just enough to recognize our predicament but not enough to rectify it? What is the evolutionary purpose of ennui, shame, or a broken heart? Are we fallen from the grace of a sadistic, uncompromising metaphysical force? Not bloody likely. The stern, disapproving father figure of the Old Testament YHWH seems exactly like the kind of thing we'd make up to torment ourselves. We truly do ourselves a great injustice when we insist that our miseries are dispensed from on high. We are so much better at abusing ourselves than any supernatural deity could feign to be. But that is the Problem of Suffering, a quagmire that has baffled philosophers since the beginning of time and I will need at least a page to definitively solve it forever, not including dirty jokes. Let's get back to the feeling of displacement inherent to existence. You may have been saying to yourself during my ranting and raving 'But ericthornton324, I feel quite at home in this world. Sure, the global sex trade turns a million sons and daughters a year into broken, wasted husks of debased humanity, globalized neoliberal economic policies are ruining the planet just as readily, the plight of men in sub-Saharan Africa is surpassed only by the plight of women in sub-Saharan Africa, the richest, most prosperous country on the planet is also the most fucking miserable, and Peeing Robots 2: Revenge of Michael Bay On Everything Good is breaking box office records the world over, but I still can't help but feel right at home in his crazy ol' world.' Well, bully for you is all I can say. Live long and prosper. Maybe you're the next evolutionary leap, a creature better adapted to live in a world that rings with cries of suffering like a celestial tuning fork. I have no right to condemn you for being happy, take it where you can get it, for fuck's sake. As for me, I'm happiest when I'm dissecting my misery, which brings us back to the sheer absurdity of human nature, a brick wall we can look forward to banging our head against for a nice, long time. That's a good thing, for you see, the brick wall exists because it is responding to the force of our skulls with resistance, and our brains exist because they're rattling around our skulls in response to the brick wall's resistance to our bashing...

What are you? Well, to start with, you're basically me. Like me you're the ashes of a dead star that happened to condense here in a spiral arm of the milky way galaxy, a quaint little neighborhood that was nice until the hipsters showed up. Like me, you're the result of an esoteric process of mammalian reproduction where the union of a particular sperm with a particular egg is so unlikely that your being here, as opposed to someone else who undoubtedly would lack your dashing good looks and artful penmanship, is downright absurd. Like me, you take in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. Like me, you eat and shit and work and sleep and dream and hope and hate and fear and fuck and experience a vague dissatisfaction at the nexus of your being that even in your happiest moments is still there, lodged inside you like a chip of ice that refuses to melt or a blot of shadow the brightest light can't dispel. You're so like me and I'm so like you that the differences are really negligible, as negligible as the difference between ourselves and our 99.7% identical genetic cousins, the apes. Granted, there are some disparities. When you and I wear people clothes it is mundane, as opposed to hilarious. Ditto for when we smoke and wash kittens in sinks, though its safe to say that public masturbation will always be a spectacle by either species' standard. The point is that, in purely physical terms, you and I can be entirely quantified. We have opposable thumbs, we have oversized forebrains, we have ten trillion cells and ten times as much bacteria; in short, we have bodies. But that's not who you are. Look closer and it vanishes. I am my body. What is my body? My body is a physical entity that houses my mind and allows me to interact with the world and other bodies, ideally in sweaty, sticky ways. But what is your mind? Is your mind a part of your body? If it is how can you say that your mind controls your body, wouldn't it mean that your body really controls your mind? Your story's full of holes! ...and our interrogator whips off his mask and we see it's none other than noted philosopher, mathematician, and dirty Frenchman Renee Descartes! There must be a mind body separation, he proclaims, like two clocks wound and set in perfect harmony, Cartesian dualism is your only hope for any identity beyond that of a meat machine! No! You cry, springing to your feet. (You were sitting.) The nature of causality is such that causes and effects must have a necessary connection and be of a similar type! You can't just plug in some abstract disconnection! Watch him shrink in terror at your blistering reasoning. Now kick him in the head to finish making your point. Very good. But even as you stamp his silly hat into the ground you realize it is a hollow victory, that not only do you not know what you are, you're no longer even certain what the 'you' you're trying to define is. All we know for the moment is that your body and yourself are not entirely one and the same. For one thing your body renews itself every seven years, reconstituting itself with completely unique materials so the you that exists now has no material connection to the you that existed seven years ago. For another thing you're just protons, neutrons, electrons and photons, no different in quantum mechanical composition from the letters you're reading right now. The physical differences come from different waveform patterns manifesting in your electron shells and how said shells exchange photons with other atoms. In that sense you're not so much an object as a pattern. Saying that you are your body is like saying a song is a guitar. Your body is just the instrument that permits your existence. It is a means, not an end. So I'm a pattern, you say. I'm information encoded on electron waveforms that plays out as they react with one another. That's very nice but it DOES NOTHING TO TELL ME WHAT I AM. Even if there are certain macroscopic similarities I am not a blip on a screen or a note in a symphony or a brick in a building because I think. I feel. I am independent as well as interdependent. You are right of course, though I wish you could make your points without spitting so much. From the moment we're born we know that even if we are to the earth's body what bacteria is to our own bodies, we are unique, we are special, we are something apart. We know this instinctively, it is a conviction at the very core of our conscious being, right next to our fear of clowns. “I am what every other human being on this planet is not.” Our very existence starts with the act of being pushed away from another human being. As time goes on we bounce off other individuals, each time learning more about who and what we are, each time failing to bridge the yawning disconnect inside us that keeps us looking. In time the very experience of our lives becomes a mirror, with every person, place, and thing both clarified and occluded by our seeing ourselves in them. The story of God appearing to Moses as a self-sustaining flame echos the conviction that burns inside all of us and would later be employed to great effect by Popeye the sailor-man: “I am what I am.” What are you? I am not you. I am that which is me. I am an alchemical marriage, a snake eating it's own tail, an eye in the mirror that's looking at itself looking at itself. I AM I. If that sounds absurd to you, you're right. Words aren't designed to transmit these kind of deeply internal ideas, that's why Buddhists and Hindus maintain that true enlightenment can't be articulated but only experienced on an instinctual, existential level. Still, if I haven't made it painfully clear already, I love words. They can point you in any direction, even if they can't take you there. As we reach the end of this silly exercise please keep that in mind. I can't define you. By trying to all I've attempted to do is elucidate a particular viewpoint and thereby define a little more of myself. And in that selfish aim I've succeeded, because I now realize that my love of words is a tiny part of who I am. This is the nice thing about thinking, you see. If you do it long enough things start to actually matter. (Of course if you keep doing it, they stop mattering again. That's why I keep these posts short. Also I'm lazy.)

Writers, even fake ones on the internet, like metaphors. This isn't just so they can whip out their literary acumen and bask in the resulting oohs and ahhs, but so they can make manifest something that everyone implicitly knows but habitually forgets: that everything is connected. [pauses to vomit blood into specially designed Sentimentality Bucket® (patent pending)] Yet the process goes still deeper, is more fully ingrained in us as a species than we normally realize. It is not just our obscenely oversized brains that make us the standout freaks of Earth's genetic sideshow, but what we do with them. In addition to being capable of consuming a downright heroic amount of pornography, the human mind is the only instrument on the planet able to deduce that it does not exist at the center of the universe. There are many mammals that bear striking similarities to us: The dolphin with its diverse capacity for auditory communication, the chimp with its fondness for throwing rocks at tourists, the northern hairy nosed wombat and its little known capacity for flagrant racism, but humanity is the only species whose ingrained need for a narrative leads us to re-interpret the world so it reflects our need for stories. For example: the turtle does not care that its shell is segmented. Given the average turtle's capacity for turning its head it probably doesn't even know what its shell looks like. The Ibo people of present day Nigeria weren't having that shit. When they looked at the turtle (or tortoise, what have you) and its shell they didn't just see a source of soup that was kind enough to provide its own bowl, they saw a story. Today if we discovered a turtle's shell we'd decipher its purpose via rational scientific inquiry, but it's telling that for 99.9% of humanity's two hundred thousand year existence, that just didn't occur to us. Other creatures accept what they see, seamlessly integrating it into their environment, but the first thing we humans say upon seeing something new is “Where did that come from?” Our first instinct is to generate the story. The turtle's shell had to smooth at some point, so how did it change? I bet it was broken and put back together. How did it get broken? The turtle fell from a great height, as high as the clouds. Why was a turtle as high as the clouds? Well, it went with the birds to feast with the great sky spirits. There are great sky spirits? Duh. So why did it fall? Well, in those days turtle was the douchebag of the animal kingdom. He ate all the food at the sky spirits' feast so the birds didn't help him down. He jumped, broke his shell, and had to glue it back together. Ergo, it is segmented. There. Shell explained, story told. But notice we don't just tell stories about animals, we anthropomorphize them, we give them human characteristics like greed and anger. None of us can tell a story without putting parts ourselves in it because stories are wholly internal constructs, essentially just projections of ourselves. The turtle must feel greed since we feel greed. The birds must feel anger since we feel anger. We call it projection, but that can be misleading since it implies that we actually have an effect on the thing we tell the story about. As our species endures (despite several noble efforts to the contrary) we're slowly, painfully acclimating ourselves to the gentle indifference of the universe. Since the dawn of civilization we've been trying to shape reality to our expectations by employing fabrications like magic, myth, alchemy, all of which are invented story elements grafted on to the narrative of our lives. Its only recently that we've truly realized that the fictions we construct don't change reality, that we've tried to learn the natural world's laws so we can play by them. Modern science didn't start until the enlightenment. Modern medicine is ridiculously new—the germ theory of disease wasn't popularized until Pasteur, and bleeding was still popular well into the twentieth century. People like to point out that every advancement in empirical knowledge moves the human race further from the center of the universe, but I'd like to self-importantly point out that it also distances us from forms of life we like to consider ourselves superior to. Before expanding our knowledge of the world through rational inquiry the principle difference between us and animals as to how we saw our place in the universe was that while we both believed ourselves to be the nexus of existence, animals had the conviction automatically, while we had to construct stories to solidify our position. The course of history has altered dramatically since the scales fell from our collective eyes. All over the world rainmakers and medicine men and snake oil salesmen and water diviners have died out, (or at least been forced to alter their pitch) as the narratives that made them and the projected urges that sustained them are supplanted by the cold reality of detached observation. When people lament that there aren't any frontiers left in the world what they're really mourning is the death of the stories, the larger than life projections that we filled those strange places with: The sea monsters perched on the edge of the world, the deserts filled with wandering ghosts, the mountains occupied by vengeful and hedonistic gods, any blank space we could fill with the parts of ourselves we prefer not to address directly. The world is a better place now (kind of, depending on your demographic) but a less fantastic one. The more control we have over the world the more little control we realize we have. In this way we've come to realize that the world isn't a character in one of our stories, that in fact it's the other way around. We're characters in the word's story, which is a character in the Milky Way galaxy, which itself will become a permanent guest star in the Andromeda galaxy in a mere three billion years. All of which is enough to make an individual feel pretty fucking infinitesimal until you realize that universes, along with garbage, carbon and tween idols, is one of the most plentiful things produced by humanity. Fiction doesn't shape reality the way it used to (confined to justifying our wars) but it doesn't diminish us as a species. Every story is a world. Add them up and we have a gestalt that diminishes the universe. [vomits]

Ahh, the internet. Roiling froth in the whitewater rapids of the human metaconsciousness, fluffily sweet foam on the existential cappuccino, sticky santorum in the global orgy of commerce and entertainment. God, I hate it. And love it. The internet is the unhinged parent that screams at you until you devolve into a quivering puddle, then makes recompense by buying you that shiny new toy, oblivious to the fact that it's now just a living reminder of their wrath. It's the gibbering idiot on the subway you learn to ignore, coming eventually to appreciate the constancy of his presence and ramblings until one day a word or phrase catches and you find yourself listening intently, searching for some underlying purpose in his slurred Jeremiad about Jewish Lizard-Men controlling the DMV, and slowly realizing that he only seemed to make sense because you weren't really paying attention. It's the child that astonishes you with the innocent, ebullient joy it takes in the mere act of living, then takes the same joy in tearing the legs off a spider and watching it pathetically hobble away from an open flame. It's an obvious fallacy to regard the internet as humanity's quintessence, the digitized church where our basest and loftiest desires harmonize into a single, self-congratulatory hosanna. If anything it's taught us that the more varied and complex our modes of expression are, the more quintessentially ourselves we become; which is to say the potential for Lolcats has always existed in humanity, but before the internet it tended to manifest itself differently. One imagines Michelangelo obsessively perfecting the epic grace of God's outstretched hand as it pierces infinity to draw Adam from nothing. The artist pauses in his sacrosanct duty, peers surreptitiously over his shoulder, then scrawls I GIV U LIF on the sky in huge, stark letters before covering them in desperate swaths of ultramarine. Truly nothing in the internet, from the beautiful to the bilious, from the divine to the disgusting, hasn't been with us since the beginning. If the first thing we did as a race after standing upright was invent tools, the obscene gesture undoubtedly came in a close second. It's nice think of the internet as a melting pot, where people, ideas and pornography can come together without predispositions, interfacing as seamlessly as two ghosts passing through one another. It's also bullshit. Whether you're skulking through it sewers or soaring through its stratosphere, the more distance you travel in the internet the more often you'll hit a brick wall called INDIVIDUALITY. Bash your head against it enough time's and it'll start to sink in that people don't come together so much as bounce off each other, a process all the more gorgeous for its inherent violence. Each of us is an atom in the internet's leviathan body. When we bounce against each other we generate heat, when we exile ourselves we freeze, but unlike the atoms that make you and me, we remain independent agents of the web we weave. We come together to make something, but look closer and each of us is distinct as the specks composing a pointillist mural. Yes, we unite to make something, but then we scatter. Which more or less completes the widdershins roundabout of this rant-cum-manifesto and brings us to a very important question we all should ask ourselves more often: Is there any point to this? Why should I add my voice to the all-pervading chorus, why add one more outspoken asshole to the deluge that's drowning the world in cries for attention? More importantly, why should you, to quote my literary betters, give two tugs of a dead dog's cock about what I have to say? Both of us, it is fairly certain, will die at some point, secure in the knowledge that the time we spent on these words was nonrefundable. What can I do in this tiny space, with these twenty six letters, that will make it worth a portion of your finite existence, and can I do it without sounding like a pretentious asshat? Apparently not. But let's put that aside for a moment and hearken back to a time before the internet, before movable type, before Jesus buried fossils to trick homosexuals into having abortions, back when the human race huddled in caves so the twitching glow of their guttering fires danced up the cavern walls, carrying their crude, bulky shadows with them. What did they think, those creatures so unfathomably different yet eminently recognizable, when they saw the pale echo of their shape pinned to a surface that must have seemed so hard, so old, so eternal? The smart ones no doubt turned back to the fire, to the meat sizzling above it, to the needlework huddled on their lap, to the dark entrance where the night waited to disgorge a thousand kinds of danger. But I like to think that one or two looked at their shadows and kept looking, holding themselves still in the hopes that if they stayed still long enough their shadow would stick to the wall. I imagine that once in a great while someone would fall asleep doing just that, their drooping eyes struggling to remain fixed on the stone cradling their dim, faltering likeness, their last thought before sleep enveloped them the vague, absurd hope that the fire would not go out.