#107

Two dudes who are older and ostensibly wiser than me both brought up weakness to me today.

One was my father, and he was talking about me. This is cool; my dad and I are cool like that. He was calling me out for smoking cigs, and, y'know, I'm not gonna fight him on that. Smoking cigarettes is a weakness in me. No hard feelings about that statement, I hope I own it. Written some couplets about it. A cigarette tango, some have called it, some who have read my books, which can be easily accessed via the permanent hyperlink robustly installed somewhere not in the text field of this blog. In case you wanted to confirm for yourself that I write about cigarettes, since I have been known to smoke them.

Cigarettes. They are what is for dinner.

While we were smoking a cigarette together, or, cigarettadjacent, the other dude called someone else weak. You've heard dudes call someone weak in the way he did before; certainly it was not my first time to that tonal rodeo, and once again, I did not take the point up with him. I even casually assented. Why shouldn't I?

Weakness isn't a big deal, frankly. Lord knows I possess strengths and capabilities my father does not, and that he possesses weaknesses and cognitive dissonances of his own. People who think saying that is a put-down pretty much misunderstand life. For while I get where these dudes are coming from, while they're not wrong, it's not the whole picture.

Every living thing is weak, is rife with weaknesses. Every living thing is born the weakest it is likely to ever be, and the most probable thing is that it will die soon; most life dies young. Seems brutal, but it isn't. It's pretty metal, but it is not a thing of brutality, of cruelty--it is life, tremendous life, cresting surging bursting crashing life, which subtracts from itself with titanic abandon so as to multiply exponentially.*

It is perfectly true that smoking cigarettes is a nonsense thing inside my head that doesn't do me any good. It is perfectly true that every human being is full of nonsense things, in their heads and other places, that don't do them any good. If one could produce for me a human being that did not possess one single flawed idea, one single vice, no physical flaws, no weaknesses of any kind, one would break reality. Such a thing is a contradiction in terms, like a solid block of oxygen on a beach with a seagull perched on top. Such a creature would be a golem, a construct, a figment, an incredibly weak and flawed human idea. How you would even begin to quantify it without being immediately disingenuous is beyond me, and I would assert, beyond inquiry. You are dealing in irrationalities beyond unreason, in terms that mean something different to every entity that attempts to grasp them.

People who pretend they have conquered all their flaws and vices--through whatever medium, and if they acknowledge ever having had any at all--and live a strong, righteous life using a correct system of thought, belief, and action are some of the funniest punchlines on the planet. They are truly unable to see themselves.

No matter. There will come a day when we all see each other for who we really are, and come to know what a ridiculous and perfectly inane thing it was to waste any little modicum of our lives thinking bad thoughts about each other. That bright day will bring with it the understanding that were all trying our best, struggling with the incomprehensible and fighting the unbeatable every day of our lives, and we will see that each of us, in our own way, triumph.

Basically, I would argue that it is unnecessary to make people feel bad for being weak, that it is unproductive to call them weak, even if you're using shorthand to let them know that their weaknesses are adding up to more than their strengths in a particular context. It'll be worse for everybody if they agree deep inside themselves, which can happen no matter how you say it. Weakness can breed resentment, and resentment is the opposite of strength. Resentment smothers the opportunity for strength.

Rather, tell them to try and be stronger, to make themselves stronger. The chances will be better that they will find that strength in them, that they will believe that strength is within them and can be found. And it is. That strength absolutely exists. As every living thing has its weakness, every living thing has its strength, has its own measure of power, and no power, whatever its apparent size, should ever be underestimated**.

Small stones are indispensable to vast mountains, and play their roles in the greatest upheavals.


--JL

*Some German dude said some stuff like that, adding that life, while not cruel, has made incredible use of cruelty in the human animal, which through the cunning application of cruelty, made itself the strongest living thing; part of that process has been inventing ways to combat its own cruelty lest it murder itself outright. This is a risk all human organisms and all populations deal with in their own way.***

**J.R.R. Tolkien said some stuff like that. And, y'know, God and Jesus Christ. Mr. Tolkien had, there is no doubt, given this some thought. Frankly, it's kind of a theme everywhere you look.

***I'm taking this opportunity to come out as a big fan of this German dude, but I shall not use his name openly for fear of attracting the wrong manner of attention; I do not have any use for cranks, or any desire to rehash all the same arguments in which I have killed bystanders with the singular frustration in my voice. No cranks! No cranking.