I wrote this earlier, before Latin; I'm not posting it at 7:42 unchanged as really the only person slighted is my own ignorant self. And Lord knows I do that plenty with my every act of living.
ConWest can really get me down, y'know? All 'gloom & doom' (never, interestingly, did I expect I'd find prudent use for that cliche; just goes to show you can never know...) But now, with the baneful Writing The Essay between, I think I've found a little solace? The same solace, I think, but does that actually so diminish its worth as to lead you all to disregard this post, my words, my continue though ardent flailing? We'll have to see, I suppose.
I feel something inside of me; in the same places as always. My head is heavy, that's not so usual but likely I'm hungry or should take a lil ibuprofen--oh the heathenry of medicine, eh? `sigh` But there is a sort of pressure; in the past it's been hollow and imploding so I find this particular somewhat interesting. There's a sort of somber restlessness, a certain breathlessness--but that could be from the that cigarette. Oh, misappropriation, likely, so silly of me again and again to allow you to seduce me.
Downright crazy. But part of me is wondering if that may not be the point instead. It's been said--with more trite words so of course with only more trite thoughts--how so often artists are so insane. Poets too. I want to add philosophers too, but that's hardly new. Look at Nietzsche--he fucking lost it (and with what equanimity he introduces the first swear! it's like he's barely thinking as his fingers tap away at these keys in Upstein, watching the comings and goings of people he will never know nevermind never love! and yet he's supposed to love them still? care in the least? and by his own volition?). And it's be also tritely, of course, said and with cynical sneers that so often these artists and poets and philosophers--all these personages, perhaps not even just the few who are actually crazy, actually broke down, actually collapsed after what could probably turn out to have been years of devoid madness--are all hacks misinterpreted. And I wonder if perhaps the trouble goes further--perhaps they are all hacks terrified of their hackdom and trying by despairing and increasingly vain efforts to grasp this wild purpose of their lives, their souls, their hearts, their minds, their all-consuming ever-present madness. (And somehow keep a lid on it, too.)
I asked myself randomly, not that I have ever supposed myself to be among his fans but today found myself almost preferring Nietzsche to Kierkegaard (I know! The horror!) but still I remain among those too illiterate to answer their own questions with the vast wealth of answers many madmen have put before him, "What does Nietzsche believe in...?"
And you know something, I don't think he knew any better than I.
Have you noticed his roving question(s)? His brilliance leaves no stone unturned and why. Outrage? Bitterness? Utter-prickdom? (that one's for you, Mani; I know how you feel or felt last time we spoke on this still baffling philosopher) Truth?! HAH. He seems no more friendly with/to Truth than Kierkegaard or Socrates (Plato)--all of whom worship it. Is it not in his third essay from The Genealogy where he ends asking, more or less, "Where has all this Truth-chasing and Science gotten us? Are we any better off, any nearer to it?" And Socrates (Plato) seems too to see its ephemerality, its elusiveness, its perhaps intangibility {heh, 'perhaps'--how many times I've wanted to slap all of Science for its dancing about "Truth," as Dr. Renzi would put it, all that "hand waving" (which he used to describe, alternately with "passes over in silence," Augustine's dodgery; and perhaps it's true, or perhaps it was a ploy to make us laugh instead of question his own--Renzi's--"hand waving" and "silence," here perhaps more because he's dealing with college freshman in what amounts in the esteem of so many of them as a joke of a course--tell me, how many of the readings did you ever read, hm? Plus Renzi is a Philosophy Professor; well, so was Nietzsche, wasn't he?) so don't get me started on Philosophy--for all its trashtalking of sophistry, lawyering and politicking as it all is, why do I always end up so suspicious of it for the same sins? the same double-speak and rhetoric?} with those damnable (and likely unfairly named, but we shall passover that in the pejorative silence of "so-called") "Platonic Ideals." And Kierkegaard, over all his books and writing and characters/pseudonyms (I remember when I used to look up to him as a model in that respect; of course I still do, but do realize this is the same man who, between the flurrious efforts as writer/philosopher/theologian/whateverthefuckKeerkywas* dress up and stand around the opera-house during intermission to appear to be "a man about town" only to dash home for more of his own madness, his own dissociative/-ed/-ing Christian insanity.) wants me to up and believe! That's his grand message--to believe!? Faith is the answer!
For maybe the reason we do not know is that there is nothing there to be known.
For what is there of life that I can ever hold on to. Not you, apparently. Not me. (Though there is some respite, some life after the madness: Joan Didion {yes, i've been reading her; can you tell?} "Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages ofa notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor.") And I know this. The vastly degenerating world we cannot help but see isn't really there at all. It's in our heads. It's in the heads of the madmen at their quills and brushes and celluloid reels. For there is nothing now that wasn't then. NOthing that actually matters. Love. Beauty. Life. Even Truth.
We've sought them all all along. And never have we found them?
And so my question for you--reviled reader--in all of this, just who the hell are you?
But my mission; my mission. whatever do you suppose it is. Do you know? And that's just it, that's the joke of it, that last post, why I gave up in suicidal nihilism, what I'd hoped in some small gesture to elucidate with that last post--that failure!--was some sense of my purpose. But never could I say it; never could you hear it. But having put it aside and lived some of the day instead, it all comes back--how hard and wretched.
(And you wonder how I came to be such a pedant--life is too hard for living; I can sit and tear apart my passive periphrastics so much more easily than I can ever begin to approach your heart!)
Because that last post, where it was headed I realized as I reflected on my way to ConWest, was how it's all been such a failure. Even as I wrote it--in my usual language of superlatives and hyperbole (and of course let's not forget 'faux-lemic')--how so much of it was missing my point. How all I really am is just another mad poet hanging off the words--nay, barely the lectures, those few classes I actually ever attend, for I certainly of all people hardly read the readings through or beyond what get the paper written!--of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, a sodden jack-of-all-trades with a flair for writing and apparently some keen wit, such talent that--Madness!
And so I've thought of the description for this blog: Below the title shall soon appear: In some respect anyway: Do feel free to suggest a better wording--even flairs burn out:
"I hate my life--but, oh, how I love living it."
*I'm slowly going to slip into my nicknames for them; just you wait and see.
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