When i was young,
younger than today
i did not think in terms
of the limited number of days
i would have on this planet…
…
on a darker note
i reassure myself now
with the consolation of suicide.
i say i will “end my existence”
(i use to say “end it all” but now
i am sure the world will continue
without me) at the age of sixty…
or thereabouts, depending
on personal circumstance…
some eat ice cream for relief
i dream of death which (i hope)
is permanent
…
this perpetual suffering..if the Buddhists
and Schopenhauer are to be believed…
…
pleasure is the alleviation of pain
and therefore a negation.
…
if you can
“don’t worry be happy”
but most cannot
…
life is suffering
desire by definition
cannot be satisfied.
…
every separation: a death
every reconciliation: a resurrection.
…
Now you understand the difficulty of a relationship ending…and why many endure despite their toxic potentialities and actualities…the beaten wife..the abused husband…relationship in name only…marriage is a sham argues Engels…
I repeat:
separation: a death reconciliation: a resurrection
cool…sounds religious and biblical…well in a sense we all wish it was…
…
as the old saying goes, “All neurosis is vanity but even that will be misunderstood…” said doctor so and so.
…
Now why is death so difficult to accept and why does it cause it us so much anguish?…it is probably easier than we imagine
on an individual basis one person gone in the midst of billions is not a big deal…not even Barak Obama is that important…yet my personal death will affect my first person immensely and drastically change my perception, if i have one at all…the great unknown…no more “I” and mercifully no more persona which is at the root word of person…
Have I only worn a mask?
of course other people’s death is a non-event unless i know them and it affects me personally… can we all really be that selfish…?
…
the banality of evil
a physical death offers no possibility of reuniting on the earthly plane so some reassure themselves they will meet up in the after life…wait for me in heaven…
…
Some say life is a task to be completed others have an aesthetic approach in search of constant gratification.
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“I may not be as unambiguously hostile to capitalism as many people are, but what I don't like about it is the commodification of personal experiences, it turns everyone into actors."
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For the keeners:
Two extracts from 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray
Post-Modernism
Post-Modernists tell us there is no such thing as nature, only the floating world of our own constructions. All talk of human nature is spurned as dogmatic and reactionary. Let us put these phoney absolutes aside, say the Post-Modernists, and accept that the world is what we make of it.
Post-Modernists parade their relativism as a superior kind of humility – the modest acceptance that we cannot claim to have the truth. In fact, the Post-Modern denial of truth is the worst kind of arrogance. In denying that the natural world exists independently of our beliefs about it, Post-Modernists are implicitly rejecting any limit on human ambitions. By making human beliefs the final arbiter of reality, they are in effect claiming that nothing exists unless it appears in human consciousness.
The idea that there is no such thing as truth may be fashionable, but it is hardly new. Two-and-half-thousand years ago, Protagoras, the first of the Greek sophists, declared: "Man is the measure of all things." He meant human individuals, not the species; but the implication is the same. Humans decide what is real and what is not. Post-Modernism is just the latest fad in anthropocentrism.
At the masked ball
"I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife." In Schopenhauer's fable the wife masquerading as an unknown beauty was Christianity. Today it is humanism.
What Schopenhauer wrote of Kant is no less true today. As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs. In Kant's time the creed of conventional people was Christian, now it is humanist. Nor are these two faiths so different from one another.
Over the past 200 years, philosophy has shaken off Christian faith. It has not given up Christianity's cardinal error – the belief that humans are radically different from all other animals.
Philosophy has been a masked ball in which a religious image of humankind is renewed in the guise of humanist ideas of progress and enlightenment. Even philosophy's greatest unmaskers have ended up as figures in the masquerade. Removing the masks from our animal faces is a task that has hardly begun.
Other animals are born, seek mates, forage for food and die. That is all. But we humans – we think – are different. We are persons, whose actions are the results of their choices. Other animals pass their lives unawares, but we are conscious. Our image of ourselves is formed from our ingrained belief that consciousness, selfhood and free will are what define us as human beings, and raise us above all other creatures.
In our more detached moments, we admit that this view of ourselves is flawed. Our lives are more like fragmentary dreams than the enactments of conscious selves. We control very little of what we most care about; many of our most fateful decisions are made unbeknownst to ourselves. Yet we insist that mankind can achieve what we cannot: conscious mastery of its existence. This is the creed of those who have given up an irrational belief in God for an irrational faith in mankind.
But what if we give up the empty hopes of Christianity and humanism? Once we switch off the soundtrack – the babble of God and immortality, progress and humanity – what sense can we make of our lives?
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