In the end a little light may be all
We can hope –
A little devil in it
‘s miscalculated throws
Little candle left lit – you’re out –
Mask or make – just a smell we smell instead
a risk to take the house – the whole house
A very little light
Wanes in and out
flicks swing to
catalyze a …
a thread we pull insisting it pull
On some shadowy soul
I love music. I really do. I also love good writing. Let me take a moment just to appreciate a place where both of those things coexist: Levi Weaver’s song “We Married Strangers.”
He opens up describing a scene in a piece-meal kind of way (which makes the audience feel most smart when they notice it) from a first person perspective. Pulls us in with:
The blood that trickles towards my elbow
Um, intrigue much? So there is blood trickling. On your arm. Do tell.
Looks like a map of Anaheim
Ok well that is super visual. Damn. Such a concise way to describe the way blood drips and intersects with itself. The detail of referring to a specific place makes this more personal too.
What used to be the bathroom mirror
Is speckled red with highway five
…hold the freaking phone. You just punched the mirror didn’t you? Oh yeah, the blood dripping down your forearm. Also, let me just point out that the metaphor of blood being like streets was never explicitly established. That happened in the head of the listener, and it sooo did happen in my head. “Blood trickling, looks like a map” oh that must be like the streets? “Okay, hold on to that. Now… Highway five is on the mirror.” ..Well f*k me! That is so strong. Just. He let our brains do so much of the work to construct the narrative and then just trusts it worked the way he wanted it to and then drives it home.
Here is a map of Anaheim btw. Freaking hwy 5…
You look for eyes to reassure you
Okay, so now we have another character “you” to consider. This is the first clue we get regarding who this work is intended for (written to).
I’m staring holes into the ground
Damn. So they’re looking at you and you’re looking at the ground. They are looking at you and this damn broken mirror and the blood on your arm and they want reassurance. This is a letter to that person then isn’t it? And we, the audience, are just eavesdropping. #extrapersonal
Such a strong scene all established from a first person, super intimate, perspective that lets the audience sort out for themselves exactly what is going on.
You’ve fifty faces there to choose from
But none of us can make a sound
…ouch. Now you’re just going to attack the person who is staring at you after you broke the mirror? Saying they have “fifty faces”. Ah well I guess you guys probably just had some blow out fight and that’s why you broke the mirror and you’re still pissed. Got it. But yeah, now no version of yourselves knows what to say in a moment like this. Yep.. that sounds like real life for sure. #preach
[Okay I’m just going to let you read the rest. You got this. It’s pretty straightforward.]
So let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again
To fall in love, to fall in love again
Let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again
…Actual tears on my actual face at this point…
We married young, we married strangers
In front of family and our friends
No warning signs about the changes
No one told us we’d forget
The love I see there on our faces
In all those photos in the hall
That smile I couldn’t seem to straighten
A hope that swore we’d never fall
So let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again
To fall in love, to fall in love again
Let’s begin, oh, let’s begin again
So help me out, I’m quickly losing myself
Help me out, I think I’m losing you
[sobbing uncontrollably]
i want to scream the world in order
a dead neck to loose the head
to turn toward our first history
then forever after death
and through rubble a thousand years settled
I’d let it out
first little diamonds then a blistering curse
unbending what we made to be “curved”
un-curing what they meant to be cured
like god I’d speak my way into being
nvm scream, I’d scream to make it clear
no doubt could be excused
no curse would be excess
every judge under me [assimilate]
to the only mind I trust
the only key I have
it isn’t much to remember that we are here
what that entails is what we forget.
if you don’t want to say that only you exist, then you’ve got to take a position on what everyone else is. Are you among them or excluded from their collection? How could it possibly be the case that everyone is living in the same way that I am. Locked in their bodies, never knowing how they came to find themselves here, or what the future holds for them. If time is just an axis why is it that we cannot move about it? If there be more dimensions why is it that we cannot occupy them? If there be more colors why only this many is it that we can see? And if I cannot ask these sorts of things, what ought I be asking? If you think you know, you should be ashamed of yourself.
A limitless universe will hear not of your demands. If I cannot take myself to be capable then it is only an increase of folly to suppose I have found someone else who is. To doubt oneself is to destroy the only mechanism available to us. I cannot say I trust someone else more than myself in offering me answers, since I am the one doing the trusting, and therefore all sense of reliability bottlenecks at the reliability I take myself to have in discovering truth. The trust I have for scientists is necessarily a fraction of the trust I have for myself. There is a way to die while others go on interacting with a body they call by your name: to deny ones conscience. So be honest about your ego and be honest about your err. There isn’t anything this world has which you have special access to.
One does not believe a thing they do not take to be the case.
Well here I am, a few videos into a series I hope to maintain and already I feel the pressure to offer up a defense of myself. I’m not really educated in the way our society acknowledges. I’m something like arrogant I think, or egotistical, maybe prideful at best. Who am I to start thinking I could educate anyone? Well, that’s sort of the thing, I don’t think I’m anyone to, and for the most part, I don’t really think anyone actually is. We’re people, you and I, and so is everyone else you’ve ever met. I’m not sure how to be a trustworthy historian or an authoritative biologist, but so far as philosophy is concerned one should like to believe that an argument stands for itself. That is, I should very much like to believe that when an audience is presented with a rational way we might arrive at some conclusion, well then the audience will see the case as clear. People can be free to agree or disagree, and by free I mean they are free to take a knife to a premise and expose it’s being false.. It’s like all I can say over and over again is “it seems to me” and, while it’s apparent for most who hear it, still it does not satisfy; I also do not think it should even be necessary at all for me to say. Of course it seems to me, just as it seems some way to you, and that is made obvious by your saying so. Furthermore, to affirm that it seems to you or I to be some particular way does not itself establish something as true but does establish that at least we think that it is true. There is a distinction, namely, an epistemological one.
Knowledge is when my belief happens to accurately reflect an objective reality, but knowledge to its possessor looks mostly identical to belief. There is a difference, I remind you, between knowledge and ‘mere belief,’ but as far as I can tell to the subject they share the same face when seen from the relevant perspective. I have only formed a belief to begin with because at some point I set it into my brain to behave as though a particular proposition is true. It is in this way that I am sometimes unaware of what I believe, that is, when I attempt to recall to my mind my opinion about some proposition, it comes with it the predisposition with which I stored it. Now of course the ideal is to sort of all this out, align my brain states and recalling mechanism with what I currently take to be the truth of things. It just takes quite a bit of work of course to do this sort of thing. I’m up against all the forces that be. I think minds are the kinds of things that posses the faculties to discover what truth is, and brains are the kinds of things that minds use to deal with stimulus from the senses.
All this to say, of course I think I’m right, and even in your deepest skepticisms you too are making a claim about the nature of things, a claim I might add, that you think is right. You believe it. You have counted it good to catalog it with the other propositions you take to be true, I know because even your most primitive actions depend on your having stored such data. Had you not formed the belief that the pumping of your lungs is good for maintaining life then you would not find yourself today with lungs pumping. If this example rubs you, then you haven’t yet seen what it is a belief is. It does not bother me that I might have beliefs that I do not recall forming. I mean, really, you think you’ve got to remember when and where and how it was you formed the belief in order to admit that you’ve got it? Many of my beliefs I suspect were formed in the womb when my brain was in it’s most malleable form. But that does not make the beliefs less mine and therefore any less my duty to sort out.
I don’t know why you and I choose different words sometimes, but I think if we work at it long and hard enough we can sort things out. We can convey meaning. We will have to sort out vocabulary words and define things far more exact than we’ve ever done before. We’ll have to be comfortable with deep disagreement but maintain our sense of journeying together. This is ultimately all I hope my videos will at least get at accomplishing. Getting some words on the table, some thoughts from those who have come before us, and help us learn how to see our personal views with respect to those famously articulated.
Who knows well we will finally know something, were I alone in my room perusing worldviews it might be that the truth is passed up upon my first objection to it.. hence why I absolutely must know that there are others coming along this journey with me, others whose biases keep them investigating the models I have passed up in my ignorance. It is unlikely the truth will have no objections, after all, were we to encounter it, it would be the only thing of it’s kind.
Am I gonna die like this still
holding out
to give my limbs to
actualize a desire that love’s alchemy would not bewilder me for
what could I exchange for
that which is what I live for;
surpassing the cumulative value of everything
that I can think of at least?
Men missing legs at least
at stop lights try
speaking to me but I just can’t conceive
that men missing legs at stop lights might
say anything worth my hearing and
much less. Shit. I realize why God doesn’t speak to me.
There are those moments when things wear off and we become one of the crowd again. Or, maybe, such moments in fact propagate the entirety of our lives so that they are not ‘moments’ so much as simply the way things tend to be. Nevertheless, once in a while, I do not feel among the crowd; and then perhaps I enjoy the sensation so thoroughly that I choose to stamp it down in my memory as though it were more frequent. Then again, it’s not as though I treat all pleasant memories as though they are frequent… regardless, the thought that motivated my writing this evening is one of some anxiety. I remember realizing there were some very large questions that I had never asked, so I began asking them, and I found such sweet reward simply by pursing the answers (without always finding them). After only a few years of this I arrived at (within myself) a feeling that I was no longer among the crowd, so much so that if you’d demand I put myself and you on a vertical scale I’d have put my level of knowledge slightly above the masses. It turns out, however, that I value knowledge very much, thus by seeing myself as having gained it, I found I valued myself more than I valued the masses; just as one who possess more gold than the masses. It was a position I fought for: to feel I had answers beyond the status quo, beyond the answers I accepted in my ignorance. It was so sincere a feeling. Unshakable at times.
But tonight I could not help but lose some apatite for it… listening to music, and feeling my posture say “I recall being as ignorant as the writer of those lyrics”… but, even if that is true, what have I gained? I’m just not sure. Once in a while it gains me a conversation with a thoughtful person, and if I’m quite lucky maybe even an attractive woman. But.. what the hell… All that reading and anxiety for a few conversations? The majority of conversations entail a person or two adamantly disagreeing with me but not presenting any rationality that seems sensible to me.. but that is the thing isn’t it, ‘sensible to me.’ What if it is ACTUALLY sensible to them? Well, that just has to be absurd. I want so to disbelieve it, and in many ways I think I still do disbelieve it, but why? Why can’t I accept this is a possible truth? well… well… I cannot give an answer. I mean, to trust my faculties enough to feel as though I know anything at all (even when accounting for the possible err of my faculties) then I cannot accept that perhaps someones can be other than mine. And SO frequently we all seem to agree. I just have to believe that if me and anyone on the planet had the time and the patience we could work it out… just work everything out.
What frightens me about all of this is that no matter what I do, it may be, that I am ever in the crowd. Maybe I cannot climb out of it into some higher level of confidence, maybe everyone feels just like I do. Maybe everyone is thinking they are just a little bit smarter than their peers, and do things just significantly different enough to be doing things right. That is, maybe everyone is close, but you’ve got it just right… I don’t know if I would say that I feel that way if I were asked, but, at a time like this, I think I might admit that it might be a little bit true. because.. because I feel I’ve fought for it, and that that should somehow justify the sensation of being a little bit more right… just enough more, just enough to be meaningful, just enough for me to take some comfort… just enough, but, maybe, it was always an illusion, so of course I wouldn’t have thought otherwise…
I came home from work earlier than usual today. Finished walking a hyper-needy boxer, showered, and turned on my pc just in time to realize my muscles had been struggling to keep my bones upright; like my brain finally gave my body the ‘okay’ to feel super miserable (I guess it was as good a time as any). With my final breaths I set Spotify to shuffle through some John Mark McMillan and tanked my rag-doll carcass onto the couch. I then spent about 5 minutes enduring the recompense of Wrigley’s (the boxer) grossly unfounded misconception that she, in fact, would fit reasonably well in the narrow groove between myself and the back of the couch. In time peace did find me, but per the norm, I found a way to muff it up. I got all eclectic. Traversed some memories, looked up old girlfriends new boyfriends, and began a conversation with an ex-girlfriend the same way I always do: in my head.
“What I would do… what I would do to be with you” I said with an uncomfortable sense of longing.
Imagined her here. Imagined five or six possible responses she might offer if I found some way to actually communicate those words to her (through the magic of the internet). I could tell her all the stuff I’m sorry for, the stuff I will be better at, and acknowledge the stuff I did to her that she just absolutely never deserved. I would know that my words mean almost nothing, know that my actions would have to prove it, and know that my asking for another opportunity is a misconception as grossly unfounded as Wrigley’s. Since, per the norm, I muffed previous opportunities. These sorts of conversations tend to develop a gravity (given their density) that generates a vacuum into which every proceeding thought for the next hour or so would be consumed… but instead, after only a few exchanges of dialogue, I felt something climb into my consciousness like a young man climbing into his lovers window.
“What would you do to be with Me?”
Now, when a moment like this arrives you’re faced with a few options: you can try to respond, or you can weep uncontrollably. I landed somewhere between those two as I was reassembling myself… I could go on to describe the implications of His words and the moment of intimacy that followed from this level of being so terribly humiliated (in a caught-red-handed kind of way) but… I won’t. Go get it for yourself.
Do you know what it’s like to be stuck as myself? You can just come and go from me, as you like, but here I am still in an endless state of being. Being absolutely myself. Some mean to resolve this paradox by concluding they must love themselves, but I am skeptical that this resolves it at all. For what is the paradox, after all?
(1) Persons can leave the company of undesirable persons
(2) Oneself is undesirable
(3) Oneself is a person
(4) Therefore I (person) can leave the company of myself (person)
If the conclusion is false then which premise is it that is misleading? It seems so sloppy to just add “other than oneself” to (1). A little ad hoc, don’t you think? So they try to attack (2) with everything they’ve got. They insist it is necessarily false. For if it were not false then the conclusion would follow, but the conclusion is clearly absurd! Whatever the case may be, it is a terrible way to live, trapped here with such an undesirable person.
You understand, don’t you? Of course not, you’re not me. If you dislike me you’re probably not reading this therefore only those who are at least remotely amused by my inky expressions are here to begin with therefore it’s unlikely you relate to the sensation of just out-rightly detesting Nathanael and therefore maybe cannot completely conceive of why someone might; well they do. Lots of people do.
But…you are you, aren’t you? You can’t leave, you can’t change, you can’t hop in some other body and take a vaca. But, come on now, have you seen the scorn I receive from those who once have know me so well? Someone is convinced I’m a psychopath. Someone is convinced I’m not well learned and talk out of my ass most of the time. Someone thinks I’m an egotist just living to stroke my pride a bit more. Someone thinks I’m terrible at my job and would be better of quitting and finding a job more suited for my strengths. And you know the best part? I’m mostly certain they’re right…
but…hm… you the reader, you have that to. You, who is also a person all the time. No matter what. All your super serious fuck ups you really just can’t do anything to take back… there they are. They’re on some figurative calendar buried in your nervous system. From the way your hands tingled that first time, to how your body rumbled as hatred roared out something dreadful, there is no date you can truly mark out… but everyone else knows it, they remember it, and they can’t mark it out either, and you’re half afraid it’ll happen again any day, and you’re half grateful they were too afraid to confront you about it, but you’re mostly mortified that that person is still you… a persistent identity doesn’t sound so good anymore… but you hold those same things against me, and I hold them again you, and we against them…
god I hope this self loathing is really just me… what if it was everyone doing it? …shit man. That’s not any good at all… all my self loathing just became empathy…
I got my hair cut the other night, that is, two nights ago (tonight no counting) and I had gone to my usual stylist. By usual I mean I had gone to her once before, per a co-worker(manager)’s recommendation, and I have intent to continue getting my hair cut with her for as long as sensibly possible. She brought up the Nye vs Ham, debate (which was publicized as ‘creation vs science’) wherein she actually assumed my position. Well, that’s actually how the debate came up to begin with. Let me backtrack a bit.
You see, I had yet to bring up Jesus in any of our conversation previously, I did, however, talk a bit about science when it was appropriate to our topic and I enjoy (as you know) challenging her to think deeply about some of her statements. Usually we talked about her estranged social life. What I’d enjoyed so much from my first visit pertained to her willingness to entertain my questions. Well, somehow or another I expressed a belief in the big bang, to which she replied (off-topic-ly) “oh so you agree with Bill Nye. Ha, I guess I should have known that!” My interest became thoroughly peaked. I inquired as to why she thought so, to which she referred to all my talk of science and philosophy. I let the moment settle so as to make sure I’d heard everything she was willing to say regarding this particular assumption she’d made. After some brief silence I interjected that I agree with Nye about much of the science but I side with Ham with regard to the nature of our Creator (namely, that we HAVE a creator). Her scissors stopped while her face displayed the perceived contradiction, which prompted a “…how do you mean?”. As I wrestled through explaining the complex relationship between science and religion I found myself still reflecting on the assumption she’d made that started all of this. By the end of our conversation all I’d managed to gather regarding her religious views is that she sees atheists as “gross devil worshipers” and that she is not a Mormon. I actually went on to do my best to tear down other assumptions she’d made about atheists and Mormons, but that’s another story.
Driving home I recalled an email I received from an old friend (only a few days prior) wherein he mentioned he’d met someone who reminds him of me. Describing him as “…very intellectual and a deep thinker. But, he’s also an absolute flaming atheist”. Go figure. This is not the first time events akin to these have occurred. There is some sense in which I’m disheartened to hear that the Christian identity is not somehow eking from my every pore. There is another sense, however, in which I receive it as a compliment –let me explain.
Culture has managed to paint a narrative that currently pits science against religion and intellectual thinkers indefinitely pro-science. Therefore, or so it seems to them, no serious thinking is not against religion, much less a part of one! In this way when someone presupposes I might be an atheist it actually serves as the first wedge I can use to pry off the stoney mask of a worldview they wear. It gives me an unexpected invitation to speak on behalf of thoughtful people (an honor none would dare bestow upon himself). It just takes a little bit of perception to find the meaning behind the words.
While situations like the hair stylists are wonderful because I could then leverage her presupposition to disassemble some bankrupt ideas the culture had constructed for her, nevertheless, I have to wonder if there is some way to bulldoze this ‘science vs religion’ misconception on a larger scale (preferable a global scale). The story of how it got this way is a messy one. More than anything, it’s a token of mankind’s fear of change, fear of challenges, and fear that something we’d believed for so long could possibly be wrong. While I do think the Christian side of this debate has yet to make a large-scale effort to prove otherwise, I’m also not letting the strictly scientific community off the hook. It’s very hard to move some bit of data from the ‘knowledge’ bin into ‘misconception’. No one side can bear the full onus for the current state of things, but simultaneously, I don’t think either side is taking the problem serious enough…
My guess is that the first step would be to get people to acknowledge the problem even exists… that is all I hope to be doing. Just, letting you know it exists. Now quit it.
nathanael.ink 