Sunday, October 26, 2008

Refusing to Die

Much of this has been said before by folks with a better grasp at language.

Magic can be one of the hardest things to break. How does a person smash an already flexible view of reality? It’s something that needs to be hardened and then cracked for the gooey unspeakable phantom crap to burst out like a New Orleans levee. I mean, we could pretend for a moment that magic is the aforementioned unspeakable phantom crap, but all I’ve found is that magic is just a way of comprehending it. We can argue ad infinitum about what events constitute magic, and that, in and of itself, makes the damned thing invincible. Some of it we hold onto tightly; we make legions of conjectural structures on a handful of philosophical points. Some of it we let slip through, hoping that the wash of nonsense will accumulate a universal, true structure that underlies all things. That last one’s the most arrogant and tragic. That view has this arrogance in believing that the measly, slapped-together human mind really can perceive a structure greater than its senses or the cultural structures created in the former work. Isn’t it all just reaction to a spooky world beyond experience? Is it just angry dismissal and reaction against experience? Can we really just sit there grinning about how there’s “just this moment”? I can tell you, when I’m puking my guts out from food poisoning, I’m praying for the moment when it’s out of my system.

Our experience left without validation leaves us without any drive. As a superorganism created from deformed monkey stock, this self-aware and variable mental framework became fragile after separation from direct involvement with natural threats. Apparitions compose most of our societal taxations and structures. Separation from the toil of the hunt has come to the toil of a possibly meaningless occupation of time to receive imaginary liquid assets in order to acquire nourishment that’s been killed on an assembly line or in a threshing machine. Guilt over this lack of participation leads people to go to great lengths to “buy organic” or “fair trade,” in order to assuage their guilt over a total lack of interaction. This framework develops arts of combat, still beholden to rules that keep true savagery at arms length. It brings people to create preposterous tools in order to tackle the ordeal of a natural structure that those who live alongside it would rather just respect and let alone, as the hardship of that environment is a regular occurrence. Many of these excursions leave those primal sources of danger worse off. Who will clean Everest of the litters of oxygen tanks and non-degradable thermal jackets from dead mountain climbers? Still, when pressed to hear the story from a person who has been in physical peril, envy creeps in, then guilt, then defensiveness. The drive to prove the worth of one’s traits by besting the throes of death still lives in the furthest abstractions of life, no matter how divorced it is.

These apparitions and theoretical compositions still have major ramifications. A lack of an arbitrarily decided trading unit in a given area can devastate a population, no matter how hard it works, due to a handful of individuals in decision-making positions attempting to increase the stock of that trading unit for themselves in an overvalued sense of self-preservation. That these individuals will have a legacy of terror means nothing to them; the idea that they will have a legacy at all means everything to them.

Without connection to natural events, cycles of psychological development have become just as dangerous to the individual as the external. Without justification for existence, and without a close connection to nature’s randomness to experience survival instincts, the individual falls into what many call depression, characterized by the passivity and irresponsibility of early development and/or desire for the termination of the existence deemed invalid by the evaluating perspective of the individual. One way to posit depression is to perceive both the passivity and the thanatoic drive as methods for the mental framework to alter itself. Without perception of separation between an individual’s own structures, the perceiving function can draw the action to encompass all levels of an individual being, that function could easily judge the entire structure as invalid. However, the separation of those structures can allow the perceiving function to articulate changes in the individual framework and how the being can respond accordingly.

While the separation might seem inauthentic, perhaps untrue to humanity, this current state nonetheless exists. Once externalized, an idea rarely becomes undone. Often, a flow of events renders this idea obsolete in the acting structure of the psychological landscape of humanity, yet these “obsolete” ideas become valid either through revision or through a separate psychological landscape adopting it for its own means of development. As much as humanity lives in a physical world, its imaginary world seems to equally affect its existence, and often this concept becomes marginalized. Responsibility for the psychological environment equals that of the physical environment, as one often reflects the other. In the darkness of modernity and in the possibility of global devastation, some small fragment of meaning must be found, or the thanatoic response will have the capability of extinguishing the entire species, if not much of what can be considered life.

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Snarls from Beneath All Things.

The thought of walking out into the cold and freezing to death seems so appealing. Closing the mind off from the body and letting it die... it's coming around again. It's been years since I've been this depressed. It's getting harder to rationalize my way through it.

I've gotten through it before, but each return makes me wonder if the way through was just finding ways to ignore that darkness. It's completely self-absorbed, but that urge to erase all traces of having existed and wandering into the scary wild with the intent to die feels... right, sometimes.

Much as a personality could make broad, sweeping statements of "nothing can do X" or "everything's just so Z that I can't stand it," it's not so grandiose this turn. The mind meets an irreparable paradox in its framework, and excessive association with the mind can lead a being to ignore its other faculties. The unknown factor of this paradox leads the framework into a state of destruction, although this destruction of identity and association can be confused with destruction of the entire being. We have the technology.

I need the "wilds" again. I must set forth into my own destruction, to preserve my existence. This round has a sense of humor: In the season I feel the most alive comes the inescapable sense of wanting to die.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Der Hexen and Old Timey Crotchety Business

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