No one gets a grip on living. The uncanny fact of existence is elusive. This is, no doubt, due to the transitory nature of mankind.
How well can existence register in a mere eighty years?
Are there any mortals that can pluck the flower of being?
Such questions may never be answered.
Even if one were to take into account the emerging trend of transhumanism.
Such an extension of faculties would merely yield an excess of yeses and no’s.
One’s and zero’s, life and death, light and shadow – the inescapable binary of mortality.
Suppose one extends this one material life we know. Suppose one extends it to eternity, whatever that is.
What then?
Can an eternal biological calculator fathom the mystery of being? Why there is an is, its relation to is not and the peculiar arrangement thereof?
Perhaps, but this perhaps is tenuous.
This past century mankind has exponentially increased its capacities. Yet such an increase has yielded more of the same. The same miasmic binary that limited Plato limits the 21st-century technocrat.
What are we to do in such a dispiriting situation?
Perhaps the answer is nothing.
All this wild blossoming is indicative of one thing.
The best thing to do with the flower of being is to water it.
Isn’t it interesting or perhaps more fittingly alarming that we have precious few markers of passage? A letter is such a finite thing. Perhaps no more finite than a tweet but certainly more tangibly finite. Because the leaf, the bit of tree, it will yellow and curl and return to earth. The words that it held in scripts so reflective of the man and mood that etched it, they are so personal, and thus so exquisitely temporal. You can picture these textures in the grand tapestry of time. Yes, of such markers there are precious few.
The modems hum, the screens glow, the constant podcast prattle. These innovations are worth celebrating. Yet as much as they inspire they alter the nature of inspiration. What is the qualia of this novelty?
What sort of poems, novels, philosophies, and sciences will flow from the omnipresent memory of machines? From these mirrors into which we can instill our favorite reflections and gaze thereupon to our heart’s content – can we expect an accurate picture? And if high definition does indeed provide accuracy is it fertile? Or is it merely a reflection of saliencies that serve onanistic solipsism.
It is difficult to tell how we will change. It is perhaps impossible to know how altered we already are. It is definitely impossible to know how altered we were at the advent of the transistor. For such knowledge is ephemeral. It is gone with those that possessed it.
It is precisely this thing, ephemerality, that we must watch.
For a flowers beauty is in the rareness and brevity of its blossom.
A beauty which the plastic rose destroys.
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Not Just Zazz…but Pizzazz
Too high class for regular Zazz?
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You.
You there.
Yes, you with the hair so like the leaves that autumn brings.
Do you know why fall is my favorite season?
It is not just the hint of chill in the air.
It is because rings are made.
Yes.
I love fall because I love decay.
Because I love the evidence of life that has been lived.
The gentle descent of death into rivers as cool, and deep, and gray, as those eyes you’ve fixed upon me.
You shudder and wonder what’s so great about rot.
Well look at the tree’s hair that’s just landed on that delicate shoulder, so near your own leafy crown.
How I love the slight bend in your neck.
How tenderly the angle travels to the collarbone.
You know I see you as a skeleton,
Shhhhhhh… relax a bit,
you’ve drowned your cigarette in gin,
I’ve no desire to harm you.
Here take mine,
a famililar act should steel the nerves.
You know that such lovely lips should not be chimnneys.
But while we’re on the subject of smoking,
why is it that we love it so,
the wrapping of these dead dry leaves and their cremation?
We inhale decay.
And in rings the evidence of life’s passage curls round us.
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In any case the TL; DR version of this is every time you sit down to write or learn; you’re not only doing it one more time but also one less. Cause the Grim Reaper is standing right there, playing Yo-Yo, and sometimes he gets real impatient and chokes you with the string.
Recently. Just today in fact. I’ve had to process mortality.
Again.
Fun stuff.
I’m not really emotional about anything. I honestly feel rather clinical. So clinical as to be a bit perturbed. Which is why I mentioned to a friend that some people may find my nonreactivness to be cold and off putting. Or maybe the fact that I don’t really grieve long enough. Whatever long enough is.
I guess what I imagine bothers people is I take death in stride. A fact I attribute to having lost my father at five years of age. I guess I’m bothered by it too since I feel that I should feel something. I do sometimes. But not enough apparently. Maybe.
Anyhow, that’s not what the story is about but rather a framing device or maybe somewhat more precisely – something that helps me take disparate thoughts and tie them up with a bow thus rendering it intelligible as a gift.
Currently, I’m studying the Web Stack (JS, PHP included) as well as Java it’s something I’m doing in a roundabout way. Very roundabout. I started poking at Java in 2008.
My dog has cancer. He didn’t show any behavioral signs at all. At least none that would suggest a grapefruit sized tumor. He did have some weird-looking growths that I didn’t really take note of because they were round his nethers. I thought they were just a skin irritation. And due to the location and my schedule I’d often forget about them. Until they started to bleed. It’s not necessarily unsalvagable but it’s not especially promising since Brownie is old.
So as I’m sitting here looking at arrays, pointers, objects, etc I’m thinking what if I have cancer? How long have I been putzing around with these basic bitch concepts. And why?
Well, if I do have or get cancer or get hit my a car, or assaulted by a gang of enraged hipsters for dissing Ruby…meh so what…whatver will be will be…serah serah…etc.
As to why? Cause it’s fun and I’m doing it primarily to sharpen my attention and logic faculties and most career aspirations are somewhat on the back-burner. Except using my skills to make TFJ less shit.
In any case the TL; DR version of this is every time you sit down to write or learn you’re not only doing one more time but also one less. Cause the grim reapers standing right there playing Yo-Yo and sometimes he gets real impatient and chokes you with the string.
So pet it while it’s alive and code it before the arthritis sets in.
Did you see that smug look! I thought I was being scholarly. There’s no such word as Genossischkheit as per my web query. Nonetheless I take poetic license and dub this Genussiness which is a word for enjoyment without abandon.
Subjects Discussed
1) Music and how neat it is that instruments are much more readily available due to financing options like rent to own.
2) ‘Violin Yoga’ or using an instrument to center yourself rather than some esoteric practice or as a complement to your esoteric practice.
3) How learning different instruments are good for getting a better feel for music quicker. IMO.
4) Genussiness – the best way to approach life in the context of the knowledge of death. Which in my opinion is using things like art and music to help you live life to the fullest without the opera buffa of being a ‘tragic artist.’ Enjoyment without abandon. The union of the bridge builder and the painter.
5) The environment through the lens of Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear and E.O. Wilson’s book Consilience.
6) How despite having an art friendly culture it’s often difficult to find work and get along with other artists.
7) An attempt to point out how good things are despite the serious challenges I brought up.
“The sensibilities of the hunter and the poet…” (Consilience – The Arts and Their Interpretation, page 237. Knopf)
I made it as small as possible because I don’t want to bum out the gentler sorts. But yes. This just happened.
I did feel a bit like I was hunting and that I had been successful. The universe, that vague thing we allude to when we want to convey the sense of a unifying and pervasive force, can surprise you. I’d been musing on the fact that trying to rush things leads to bad results. Haste makes waste, you know the old cliché.
Some trite things are true. This itself is a trite and true observation and I’m not trying to wow anyone with it. It’s just sort of necessary to get to my point.
There’s a Latin phrase: Memento Mori. It was something said to victorious Roman soldiers so that they would remember their mortality and not get overconfident. At least that’s how I recall the thing, and I can’t currently be bothered to look it up, because its Christmas day and I have work in the morning.
I went out for a stroll and fell into a bit of a reverie in the chill December air. I was thinking ‘you know there could have been so much that I could have already done in terms of a completed work.’ Why hadn’t I? Wasn’t it because I didn’t hustle enough?
No.
It was because I hustled too much. I’d missed the boon of impetus that Mercury delivers to the attentive. I’d heard it as a whisper and instead of listening more closely I’d attempted to shout back the rumor for confirmation.
Or maybe this is just me losing my point which is that it is very uncanny. It is very uncanny when the universe, that vague thing we allude to when we want to convey the sense of a unifying and pervasive force, puts a dead bunny on the path of your Yule Tide walk. Just at the moment that you are thinking about haste and death.
There are those who dismiss most everything as a coincidence I have at least a dozen teasing things that argue otherwise.
I do not mean to be morbid during the holidays. I suppose I should dispel the funk of death by explaining my view of it. Yes, the poor dead hare is leaping no more but such is the fate of all the things under the sun and it is not a bad thing. It is not a lingering illness. The physical life animate on this sphere is a song worthy of singing. But should one wish to sing the same song forever?
That bunny now knows eternal rest, and in his dusty bed, I read a poem that told me life’s completion lies in going at the right pace.
What is the right pace? I am still trying to figure that out but I think that the answer to this riddle could be that there is no pace at all.
I may be straying into obscurantism but that is not my intent. My final guess is that you can only gain the proper pace by listening to the cadence.
What is the cadence?
Perhaps we all know, perhaps we all don’t, whatever the case I hope the new year finds you well.
The feeling was headlong. It was like a vertical river rushing madly into some subterranean sea. That’s how I felt about the distance between her and I.
It felt stupid. It was like I wanted to meld into the girl. The stupid stupid girl with the wheat colored hair.
She of course could have been any girl or any friend or any of the dead that are the subject of longing.
But in that moment. In the cool breeze of evening with the amber autumn playing round me I was completely staggered.
The crunching of the leaves beneath my feet would never happen again. The old style clock on the corner of the sidewalk would turn just that way but this once. And then heaven or hell or who cares whatever finality there is stillthe now, noW, NOW.
I watched the faces of the fools, beauties, monsters, and saints behind their various windshields. Ensconced in mobile armor they regarded me in turn with the curiosity that a pedestrian comes to expect from the chronically commuting.
Such a perfect evening and my head so full of lovely things to say. Yet tonight I couldn’t see her. Couldn’t find her. Then when another evening comes I won’t have these things to say. I’ll be different. It’s always so.
Some Saxon shot me a condescending look as I rounded one of the churches littering the streets like discarded alien gloves pointing to a rose hued sky. I paused abruptly. And just looked with a blank expression at the driver. It was a favorite trick.
The cocky grin turned to confusion and I felt the silver SUV zip past. Cheap thrills for him and I.
Was he smirking because he knew that I’d return to a well appointed home but be unable to enjoy a single thing? All my books, and instruments, all my notes and papers would be of no avail to stop the sucking pain of being away from her for THIS one evening.
My victory now seeming hollow I increased my walking rate. But not so as to seem to feel too hurried. The phone in my pocket might ring. But if it did and it was her. Who cares? I don’t want to see the one person I want to see.
Doesn’t she understand that we will never happen again? Don’t any of these people understand that? Immortal souls or not. These souls. The souls of NOW will never happen again, and we just let our petals fall; till wilted in the end of some future evening, we go to ground, wondering where all the scattered parts now lie!
We crowded souls longing to fall into one another but ever slipping past like wet elusive drops of ocean.
The Fractal Journal 