#335

"Why the hell do you write a blog???" a teenager asks me.

"Cuz I'm old," I reply instantly. Much the same function as your rude-assed reveal that you've read my screen from behind being because you're a twerpy little kid with half a forebrain, I say to myself--of course, to say so aloud would be bad diplomacy. Like John Adams, though it is in my nature to be as frank and forthright as possible, I am mindful--when able--of my diplomacy, my courtesy, and my respect for the infinite mystery of the other and their path in existence, so similar to and different from my own. All of us being small ships in the same stormy sea, bristling with as much cannon as we can float, fostering peaceful relations is important. Too often, interactions take the form a broadside and a fusillade right back, when tacking intelligently would be far the superior maneuver.

Perhaps I've mentioned it before--not sure, won't bother to check--my Myers-Briggs personality type is INFP, the Mediator. No matter how many sharp edges I generate--and publish on my blog--interpersonally, throughout the fracas of life, I present all smooth roundness. Honesty is the best policy, yes, but the best presentation for honesty is a gently sloping Aristotelian path towards a Nietzschean/Platonic ring/sphericity. I have always held that the Socratic method is best turned towards oneself or the abstract in a level field than applied to others; the object lesson in that was presented magnificently and unequivocally by the man himself. The polemical style is also best reserved for the written word. 

In short, you don't have to be a jerk about being right. You can be Right, which is Good, and it could get you killed, which if not strictly Bad, is for the most part at least Counterproductive.

*

Rereading what I've just written, it strikes me that a Nietzschean ring interpolated three hundred and fifty-nine times one point each time around a stable centerpoint is a Platonic sphere. The centerpoint is Aristotle. The field is Socrates. Everyone else just observes and reports. Geometrically speaking, of course.

--JL

#238

What news, I ask myself, is worth recording? I ask purely in a sense of what would be fun for me, then try to winnow down into what might be entertaining for others. Then I have to play with the cat, for she, too, cries for entertainment. Just as in humans, this ludic need seems to be both fickle and bottomless.

Do I have any bright ideas, I ask, if I don't feel like news or the delights of minutiae. 

April did not prove itself a month of bright ideas. The cat played a lot, though. Both cats. Each cat unit.

*

Every avenue of thought is made up of more traps and pitfalls for the thinker than any kind of clear passage. There exists no thought so pure that the vanity and arrogance of the thinker cannot mar, no thought so sensitive or fine that a callous or brutal personality could not fashion into a weapon for itself, no healing that a tortured person cannot turn to pain. If truth exists, and is absolute, then it is a good and fine thing, but not utile for the "thinking" ape. We will not be able to agree upon it, no matter how it manifests, and it would be boring if we did. Truly, it would signal the perhaps irretrievable end of something vital, something human. At any rate, the truth will continue to be, without needing anyone to acknowledge it anyway.   

I was thinking that, and just now I thought abut how personality has no gender; it is affected by gender and gender as experienced in embodiment, but the personality itself is referred to as the personality itself, while we think of a person as a them, not an it. But since the personality can be said to be the person, and indeed the most personable part of any person, should it not be thought of as the primary part of the person? Well, it is, and it is an it: the it that thinks that it is he, or she, they, me, or you. And who knows how much other nonsense, this thing, this it, believes and thinks! Hilarious.

In the end, we can only gather to ourselves our notions which approach what we believe may be the truth, and serve them best we may. 

*

The man is all vaxxed up and fully incubated, folks, and how very brave new world it all is. Our advance into the delightful blend of the Orwell, P.K. Dick, and Huxley futures marches apace! The other Huxley future, the more sublimely Nietzschean vision of a spiritually reborn and wholly revalued world, still has its chance, I believe. I also believe that a lot of the people saying so in so many ways are trading with false coin, but that does not worry me unduly anymore. 

When I was a kid I wanted the world and its climate and ecosystems fixed, the truth discovered, enshrined, and set as the highest possible good, and all the human choir to sing with one voice the body electric and the universal tone. This is still my dream, but I have come to understand that this dream is not for me. I live in a world whose systems are in violent transition--all its systems. The truth is further away from us than I could ever have known as a child, when I held it in my mind, obvious and perfect. Our riot, our chaotic disharmony, which hurts and strains the ear so, has its perfection and its tone is as universal as every tone. Each life is small to the life of this small world, each as essential to it as it to each of us. 

Let the process go. River's gonna flow. 

--JL