Commentary (Part 4)

This week I have been blogging comments and observations on life from my own perspective. This is the 4th and last entry bringing me up to 100 comments. Feel free to read the previous three "commentary" blogs as well if you wish. They are all thoughts meant to lead the reader on a voyage of their own thinking. They all occurred to me when thinking about my own life and its circumstances but they are also more generally applicable.

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71.

Revenge is really a matter of ego and ego, quite often, is not a very helpful thing in a social context. “Winning” can happen in such as way that the win is both entirely sour and entirely hollow. And what good is a win that doesn’t feel like a win?

72.

There is no feeling so powerless as not being able to communicate. Spare a moment’s thought for the voiceless.

73.

“The criminal prospers, and the just are brought low.” True enough, life is not organised on strict moral principles. People do not pay for their crimes and often misdeeds result in earthly success. I wish I could ascribe to one of these figmentary flights of fanciful imagination that religionists have where they extend earthly justice into some ethereal realm where justice always happens and criminals always pay. Alas, I think the law of the universe is “Take your chances, you might get away with it.”

74.

I know there are things I am good at. My problem is that I can think of no reason why anyone else should care about that.

75.

It was suggested to me the other day that even the amoral have morals. That may well be true but I don’t think that understands the term “amoral” correctly. To be amoral is to eschew public values and, instead, to take your own without regard to others. Now does anyone truly act without regard to others? Not if they have any mind for consequences, no.

76.

Death as comfort. The big escape. Perhaps this is the hell and that the paradise….. of nothingness?

77.

I have some sympathy with those spiritual people who speak of emptying yourself and of nothingness. It can be seen as a foretaste of the hereafter.

78.

So many words. And yet, there are always more.

79.

With maturity comes the expectation to act and think for oneself. So why then do so many still try to influence and cajole you?

80.

I will try not to use my upbringing as an excuse. But, you know, you are the sum of where you’ve come from….. or something.

81.

There is a certain kind of naive political campaigner who bemoans the fact that there are the powerful and the powerless. Their hearts are in the right place but it’s as if they don’t realise that the world is a dirty place and their opponents will be more than happy to get down and dirty. Good is not achieved with your head in the clouds but with your hands in the muck.

82.

When I think how many times in life I’ve been hugged or embraced I’m staggered by how startlingly few times it is. This causes me to reflect on my form of life again and its relation to my views. As it should.

83.

I stood in Tempelhofer Feld again, all too briefly. I cycled there especially in a 50 kilometer round trip. There was an hour’s worth of torrential rain. I didn’t really care even as the rain worked its way through my clothes and I stood there literally dripping wet. The Feld was almost completely deserted, as you might expect, and I stood under a tree which was not up to the task of shielding me from the downpour. Then, when the rain ceased, I did one more lap of that special place on my bike in soaking wet clothes. I have a kind of romantic glow about it even as I write now. If there was a heaven that would be it.

84.

Is life a constant struggle to be yourself, unashamed and unbending to social pressures and mores? It can seem that way. I cut my own hair the other day, as I have done for decades now. I wasn’t very careful because I could care less what it really looks like. But I went out and wore a hat. I didn’t want people to laugh and point. I hate myself a little bit for that show of insecurity. I was just saving myself the little bit of stress that comes from having to deal with it. I’ve been laughed at in the street just for wearing cargo shorts when the weather was thought not suitable for such things!

85.

What would real isolation be like? I obviously have no idea. I’ve lived a “one foot in, one foot out” kind of life.

86.

What is worst in life? To be merely tolerated.

87.

I don’t want a tombstone. I want to be forgotten. I want time and space to rush and claim me and wash over me, blotting out that I ever existed.

88.

Living life with your eyes shut sets up some strange conditions of life.

89.

Honesty to yourself is perhaps the most important thing you can ever cultivate.

90.

In life you often need to accept loss or lack of control. If maturity is about accommodation to the circumstances of existence, then this is surely a decent part of it.

91.

When you’ve had enough of rejection, you stop trying to be accepted. But I’d be a liar if I said you ever completely give it up. But it’s head and heart. My heart would risk it all again. My head is determined I will never ever let that happen again.

92.

Better to dislike oneself and question yourself than to think you are the greatest thing since sliced bread. 

93.

The key to happiness: peace and enjoyment in yourself in the moment, creating a self that is not at odds with your existence. Happiness can never be about the external situations of life, although they can obviously affect you. Cultivate your being.

94.

The 9 year old has sat down, the tears have run out. What is left is a child sitting by the roadside, resigned to never reaching his destination. (Confession of a boy who got lost aged 9 and was found in the street crying.)

95.

People don’t choose the path of their lives. They will kid themselves that they do, but they don’t. So don’t listen to the (often American) preachers of “positivity” who say you can do anything you want and it’s all up to you. Even an idiot can figure out some of the myriad things in life you do not control. Take me. I do not control even the thoughts in my head, affected as they are by mental illness in the form of anxiety and depression.

96.

One of the things that makes you feel most powerless is realising that you cannot grasp time. You cannot stop the clock. It ticks, and only in one direction. Human finitude is a deeply profound thing.

97.

I think these people should mostly forget me. Oh, they have.

98.

I find this comment exceedingly strange. It’s a rare example of me looking forwards. Something I hardly ever do.

99.

It’s easy to be negative about the human race, very easy. And so we are. Rightly so.

100.

It is a fact that I am much more popular as several fictional Internet characters I play than as the physical being I legally am. What does this mean?

Commentary (Part 3)

This week I am publishing a series of blogs simply entitled "Commentary" which is a selection of thoughts on life in general and other thoughts as they occur to me. The format is somewhat open and how these thoughts might be relevant or link one to another, or to other subjects, is left open for the reader to decide. It is hoped that these thoughts of mine may lead to thinking of your own.

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41.

The stream of consciousness.  Isn’t everyone an accident? Isn’t everything? Isn’t the idea of causal relations just another mirage? As Nietzsche showed, it’s a concentrating on some things and not others.

42.

They say that time heals all wounds. Is it not rather that it just causes you to forget, to lose the detail and be left with a vaguer outline?

43.

What’s the difference between willed ignorance and willed innocence? And what are their relative merits? Fine margins.

44.

See comment 31 (Commentary, Part 2).

45.

The problem, as I see it, is many-fold but, at bottom, arrives at a basic lack of the necessary tools and insights to be able to account for our Being, for meaning in an empty Universe, for giving any thoroughgoing purpose to anything. “Change and transitoriness” is all around after the metanarratives and metaphysics die, after all the false gods of knowledge, reason and rationality are exposed as insubstantial, after the crisis of (lack of) meaning has become apparent. We are nihilists in a world of nihilism.

The caveat to this is that this is not wholly true. There is still your situation, culture, society, options, opportunities, personality and motivations - even at bare minimum. Nihilism is the non-existence of universals and not the non-existence of anything at all. You are, in that sense, fated to the perilous path of freedom and creation. Seek only not after universals.

As a result it is not clear to me immediately why the response to Nihilism should be despair - although it often is. Might it not be seen as an opportunity, a place for creation and re-creation, a place where you can cut your cloth accordingly? This is not to say that the life of our lived experience is a playground where anything goes. Anything that can be made to go, goes (as Stanley Fish said). But if things can be made then they can be re-made.

46.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a beguiling enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. That, in retrospect, is probably the fatal mistake, to think there is a truth, reason, rationality or a necessary amount of knowledge to find. We need to stop up our ears to the siren songs.

47.

Life is the process whereby infinity constantly slips through our fingers.

48.

Life is a fate you can escape. Living is the price you pay for it.

49.

Can it be doubted that people are their own worst enemies? If you were creating a species you wouldn’t create a human being. What mixtures of wonder and madness we are!

50.

It’s been hell ever since.

51.

It’s not that I am frustrated and defeated; it’s that my own thinking, choices and actions are what must bring it about. The world is so (dis)ordered and (dis)arranged that every good turns out to be a seed of destruction. Here are perfect grounds for becoming an absurdist - for all is absurd.

52.

The stealing of innocence is the saddest thing of all. I’m always brought to tears when I see examples of it.

53.

Memories to me are often like wounds. Pain is so close to pleasure.

54.

The effort required in life is often more than I am prepared to give. The lazy die as surely as the motivated. In all things there is an internal cost/benefit analysis.

55.

Silence. It cleanses the soul.

56.

Your story is the story of your imperfections. Imperfection has the benefit of authenticity and authenticity, it turns out, is more valuable than an unattainable perfection could ever be.

57.

It is good that lived experience is a constraint and limiting. It is foolish and deliberate misunderstanding from those who would have us believe that anything goes. The very idea makes no sense. There is a world and it impinges upon us. It is good that we don’t control it. Many times the world has brushed up against me, often harshly, but it has made me think and examine. We should welcome such occasions, though they be painful, as aids to our progress along the way.

58.

I have no doubt that every single human being maintains themselves by use of illusions with which they are wont to delude themselves. Not every statement or thought need be perspicuous to some imagined reality. It would be an illusion to think it did need to be.

59.

In a world become mechanism, we are all aliens.

60.

Everybody’s different.

61.

In the practice of understanding your illusions you emancipate yourself from yourself. That is, rightly done, you engage in a constant practice of surmounting your own limitations. And it must certainly be assumed from the very beginning that you are a mass of limitations.

62.

All those who would try to codify and, formally and logically, delineate the world need to remember one thing: the Universe abhors predictability but it loves the unexpected. It might also help to have an entirely appropriate humility. Do we ever really KNOW what’s coming next?

63.

Mine has been an often solitary walk down the path of life. I’m not sorry for that and, reflecting, I don’t have any real feeling that I would want to change it. In any life there will be pluses and minuses for there is no perfect way to live and mistakes will always be part of the game.

64.

People who learn habits of self-reliance (learn to) need other people less. But they should continue to remember the benefits of another point of view, something they will never be able to supply for themselves.

65.

Innocence is something I value so very highly. I wonder now about it’s relationship to naivety, speaking as a man who has written music titled “I’m Naive” about himself.

66.

Sometimes I wonder if I have not just been numb since I was pulled, screaming, into this world. I lie at night and worry that I will be pulled, screaming, out of it too.

67.

Can people be blamed for who they are? It would seem an oversimplification.

68.

I once knew someone who felt beguiled by going astray. I actually am astray and the thought terrified her. Maybe it should terrify me too but I just think “What’s the worst that can happen?”

69.

Why don’t more people revolt from their lives of minimum-waged servitude? Is a diet of X Factor and Premier League really that worthwhile?

70.

The end is not always known from the beginning. Warning for fools.

Commentary (Part 2)

This week I'm running a series of blogs entitled "commentary". They take the form of a series of personal reflections on life - a bit like if someone were looking in the mirror and reflecting. Each acts as a self-contained thought but some may be linked together. It is for the reader, of course, to decide if any of the comments offer insight of any sort.

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21.

I don’t understand the sense of ungratefulness some people feel (or accuse you of) when you say that you wish you had never been born. Life, for these people, is regarded as some kind of sacred gift and you are meant to feel, first of all, profoundly thankful for it. Is this the overflow of some religious sentimentality? I honestly don’t understand it at all. Life is random, an accident. It might never have happened, as I mused in one of my musical pieces called “Point Zero”. Point Zero, I considered, was that moment at which you were conceived. But what if it had never happened? What if mum had been washing her hair that night? What if dad had been tired and turned over and went to sleep? It’s not as if any of us are fated to exist, much less willed by a higher power. Nothing chose you. We just are, a cosmic accident, the work of a moment that might never have been and yet, right in one moment, was.

22.

Life is a large pool of clear, refreshing water. But it only takes a little piss (or one conspicuous turd) to contaminate the whole pool.

23.

We all have drives and sometimes the desire to satiate them can be overwhelming. Experience is one means by which to counter them. Providing we can learn from it!

24.

I suppose I do not really regret the things that have happened to me. It’s natural to wish things had turned out differently but, then again, each situation is an opportunity for many things and not just one. There is always the opportunity to learn, whatever happens. Things are never uniformly good or bad.

25.

“Travel broadens the mind” is a truism. And true. It should be compulsory. Isolation breeds only mistrust and easy lack of empathy.

26.

I have an inkling that the most important of philosophical subjects is our human relationship with time. Temporality is a subject that towers over us, much as space puts us in our true place in the physical realm. Even thinking that all our sense perceptions, intuitions and thought processes are time-bound and time affected is a huge subject. We are defined as beings and as Being by our relationship to time. It makes sense why Heidegger would write a book called “Being and Time” and why it would be a pre-eminent philosophical topic of discussion. And yet…… it’s all relative. What is the meaning of time in the context of infinity? (Irony: my song “Stream of Consciousness” plays as I write this.)

27.

I still have great moments of ego. I should keep working on it. The Ego is nature’s gift to us for survival but the way it operates is most strange and completely selfish. It’s literally there to ensure your survival…. and that’s it. I would like to think, in my more cerebral moments, that I am learning to countermand and control it. But maybe this is yet more self-deception. I would like to think I can rise above it but then I ask myself why I would even want to do this. Is conscious thought somehow more pure or noble than the unconscious prods of Ego? What version of me is it trying to save? In every sense "I" is a fiction.

28.

The human being is a random beast. In public they prefer order, considered thought and coherence of thought with action. In reality, they are vain creatures of habit, drive and inconsistency.  It’s a consistent phenomena we see through the history of human thought to find an ideal of their own making which human beings do not live up to.

29.

“Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” - Jean-Paul Sartre

30.

Humans have a will to meaning that mere beasts, perhaps, do not have. This throws them into a game they have no choice about - to make things mean something. Where meaning gaps or deficits appear this can only manifest itself as a crisis.

31.

Beware the lures of knowing

Imagine, if you will, 100 country mansions. In these country mansions are 100 libraries.

Every room in these country mansions is a library and each one of the mansions has 100 of them. In this great space you spend your life storing up all the things you learn, all your knowledge collected together. But what you don't have, in this fable, is any inkling as to what any of it means. What, then, I ask you, is the point of all this collected knowledge? Have you not simply spent your life collecting useless facts? Is it not just so much jumble? Is knowing an end in itself?

We switch focus. Consider the biblical tale of Eden, a place of innocence and freedom from the burden of knowing. But its carefree inhabitants lose their innocence and become burdened with knowledge. And now, as knowers, they are burdened with what to do about what they know. Their crime, if crime there was, was in wanting to know too much and our intrepid gatherers of knowledge and eaters of fruit did not realize the consequences of knowing. Human beings have a need to act when they know. And this knowing will lead to acting and, if they do not have other necessary qualities, their knowing will lead to bad and negatively consequential actions. Perhaps now we understand why the biblical innocence was to be preferred?

There is a traditional dichotomy between knowledge and wisdom. Some people (and, indeed, communities) prefer one over the other - and there are various intellectual and/or religious shrines to both in various places. Some people venerate knowing, and the need to know, above all else. (Examples could be those who wear scientism heavy on their brow or certain essentialist and foundationalist philosophers.) And I take issue with this. For knowing is not, and cannot, be an end in itself.

There is, of course, no end to knowing. We cannot imagine that there would ever be an end to all the facts. But the situation is more dire than simply letting a drive to know have its head. (I ask myself here what the outcome of letting a drive to eat have its head would result in - by way of analogy.) There is what we may call a crisis of knowledge - and a crisis of knowing - in that knowing is simply not enough. Knowing, of course, does not realize this itself because in its knowing it does not have the wisdom to know that knowing is not enough. (In the same way, Reason often doesn't realize that reason is not very reasonable, rationality doesn’t realize that it is not very rational, etc., ad infinitum.) And it’s not a case of the amount of knowing but of what simply knowing is able to achieve. A collection of facts, as I hope my parables illustrate, is actually a pretty useless (but also burdensome) thing. Knowing, by itself, is in the end both impotent and potentially dangerous. Other things, perhaps we may describe them collectively as wisdom, are needed to enable us to appropriately deal with the things we know. I can immediately think of 3 strands here:

1. You need to know what knowledge means (the question of meaning).

2. You need to know how to appropriately use the knowledge (experience).

3. You need to know how things fit together, or can fit together (understanding).

An issue with knowledge will always be that the knowing and the collecting of knowledge will never be enough. Knowledge leads inevitably to action and people almost always feel the need to do something about the things they know. And it’s precisely here where knowing, by itself, is impotent because knowledge does not tell you what to do with it. Its not part of the package but, instead, a separate skill and not one anyone is forced to have - regardless of how many of their 100 houses with 100 libraries is full of knowledge. The second issue is that that need to do something about the knowing is experienced as a burden for, in reality, people do not simply store what they know in libraries. This leads to the spectre of doing the wrong thing or using the knowledge badly. Knowledge is dynamite, it’s a dangerous thing with consequences.

In the light of these twin issues (and the at least three other separate requirements I mentioned above) it seems to me that wisdom dictates we can know too much. The drive to knowledge, if given its head, is a bad thing with a negative impact. It produces more data than a person (or community) can handle. The appropriate response is to curb the drive to know and, instead, have a sober and reflective innocence. Without the extra tools that wisdom provides knowledge becomes but a blunt instrument of possible self-harm. What those who wrote the story of Eden saw was the dangers of an inappropriate lust for knowledge, a lust which raised up knowledge and knowing above its station and made it the god at whose temple we all now had to worship. In those circumstances, knowledge and knowing were always going to be capricious gods who abused their power and destroyed us by virtue of attenuating our all too corruptible egos. In the end, the moral of the story of Eden is both that you can know too much and that knowing is not without burdensome consequences. It's a message we need to hear again and again.

32.

PS Who amongst us knows things they wish they didn't know?

33.

“What is the point of my life?” update! There is not, nor can there be, any antecedent point, of course. I’m currently drawing breath on the basis it is at least an opportunity to try and understand something, anything. Maybe myself or the world of my experience? Once all the metanarratives and metaphysics have been burned away by an innocent honesty what’s left is an empty space to fill. So rock on as much as the world of experience allows. You may end up trapped within a bubble of your own making (and without really knowing it) but what’s the alternative? Or the harm?

34.

Two people share the same belief but have completely different behaviour as a result. Would this not show that beliefs do not determine behaviour? Would it further show that beliefs and behaviour, theory and practice, are simply different and not necessarily related things? If you cannot determine someone’s practice from their beliefs then, with that, the idea of a one-to-one correlation is put in doubt. Where that leaves the idea of a coherence of beliefs with behaviour is then also a matter for discussion.

35.

I have mellowed (in my own way). I have grown more appreciative and reflective with age. Maybe this is natural and what happens to all human beings as they get older. I wouldn’t know about that though as I’ve never done it before.

36.

I am reminded on just how few crumbs a dream can actually feed. There is something to be said for the human spirit. Or is it a (sometimes necessary) blind stupidity?

 
37.

“Philosophy as music” is my motto for my musical output. It’s thought in sounds. Alternatively, think of my music as my opening a conduit to my insides and what is there flows out in chunks. “Its not necessarily good but it’s honest” is another way I have described it. Such naivety is my authentic signature. I’m like some dumb, fluffy creature unaware there are so many bad things that can happen to me in the world.

38.

Contradiction corner. - Is my musical practice a result of my anti-foundational, anti-essentialist beliefs? Is my focus on its directness and honesty, at the cost of professionalism or “doing it right” according to antecedent standards, because of what I value and what I don’t? Have I created an existential form of music or, as my friend on Twitter says, a “toe-tapping nihilism”?

39.

Suffer is what human beings do. Its the downside of feeling and thinking. Anyone who thinks for long enough will meet a crisis. Evolutionary fate has dealt us the cards and we must play our hand and suffer the consequences.

40.

Enough said.

Commentary (Part 1)

From time to time I write a commentary on things. More often than not this is on myself or my past or things that occur to me in life. This week I will publish a number of these commentaries for public consumption by unwary readers. Often these comments aspire to be nuggets of wisdom. It is of course for the reader to decide what they mean, if anything, and if they are of any use.

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1.

Still the same room. Still the same things. Still the same external conditions. And yet now I feel more hopeful. A sense of finitude can do that to a Man. Of course, my question concerning “what the point of me is” has not been answered. I currently think it’s one of those questions that can never be answered. To seek after generalised meaning or reason is a fool’s errand. Perhaps now I see life as a process of understanding, an awakening from an Edenic innocence, in which you try to make sense of who you are, where you are and why. This, you may agree, is basically a study of Being and what it means in a world without purpose or meaning beyond the local and contingent. I meditate, sometimes daily, on the fact that my life is but an Augenblick and my non-existence will be an eternity. In that perspective, how can any earthly, human, “cares of the living” really be that troublesome?

2.

Anything that can be thought of must certainly be a fiction, so wrote Nietzsche. How can my self-understanding, my telling of the paths and conduits of my life, be any less so? It is no privileged account to be sure. It’s merely my own as it occurs to me at a point in time. But I am lying to you and I do have my reasons. How could I not? And how could you not read me with your own needs to be satisfied? We are none of us here blank slates.

3.

The clock is ticking. That’s how important you are.

4.

Innerspace and Outer Space. Within your own imagination you can dream a billion dreams. Without, there are a billion truths you will never guess at. Each of us is stuck between the world within and the world without, an insignificant point of contact between the two. To one, you are of utmost importance. To the other, you are almost an insignificance. It is a source of wonder and mystery how consciousness could come of something so unconscious as the Universe.

5.

I got my wish. Am I happier? No. It remains a truism that people have little idea what is best for them. As a species, we are half blind in the fog, scrabbling around. For me, relationships are an excellent example of my blindness. The scars of bad ones get deeper and have more long-lasting effects over time. Of course, isolation is no solution.It merely solves one problem by creating another one. I console myself that at least no one else is involved in that case. But it’s a sticking plaster to deal with a broken bone.

6.

Are people basically honest with each other, or basically dishonest with each other? I come down on the side of the latter. Oh, I know that from time to time some people (perhaps Christian types) try to show that human beings are good and basically altruistic. However, I think they are pissing into the wind on this one. Of course, people CAN be altruistic but it seems to me that the fact you need to point this out speaks against it. The fact is that altruism is occasionally useful. But it’s the “what’s useful to me?” mentality that prevails overall.

7.

Not so much crying these days. Over the past year or two I’ve become very attuned to the solar cycle. Currently, as I write, we are heading towards the summer solstice. The days are long and the light hangs on into the night. I awake to sun beams through a gap in the curtain. I experience the beneficial effects of extra electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum (that’s light to you and me). I’ve noticed over the years that I seem very sensitive to the amount of light that is around. It’s no coincidence, in my mind, that my worst episodes of panic occur in early Autumn when light disappears. I know that there is a disorder for this (Seasonal Affective Disorder) and I think that I might fall within that category. Like everything else, I’ve never been diagnosed though.

8.

Power. In the end, I think that quite a lot comes down to this. Having it. Wanting it. To feel it, just for a moment. A lot of things can be explained by the idea of power. And that’s without being Foucauldian about it. Power, and powerlessness, are things that you could get very philosophical about if you wanted to.

9.

I’m still impotent, of course. But I wonder if I might not have settled for less. I was embroiled in an internet conversation in which I had taken on a false identity and I revealed myself to my unfortunate and unwilling victim. He took it quite magnanimously, considering, but then left a landmine of his own behind by suggesting that if only I used my clear powers of intelligence positively I might actually achieve something in life. It came to me as a slap in the face, I must admit. It’s good to hear contrary points of view. Humans are self-deceptive. They need it.

10.

Death can be a shadow, there is no doubt of that. And we can live in that shadow. I had always wanted to be able to die happy, joyously, having, as it were, howling into the void that I had existed. It would have been futile of course. But it would also have been my victory cry. “I existed! Fuck you all!”

11.

I am 46 years old. Still NO actual friends. A lot of the time it isn’t that bad. I have time, such as now, to think and write. Life without other people is certainly less complicated. In an ideal world of my imaginings I wouldn’t have lots of friends coming round anyway. I like (or, I have learned) to keep myself largely to myself. And I don’t dislike that fact.

12.

“The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.” And isn’t that all that one can ask for in life? It’s easy to be negative. My autobiography gives some examples of where I am certainly that. But how about biting back? There can be no more perfect life but than that you took hold of your circumstances and lived the life you wanted to live considering the circumstances you had. I don’t mean this in some secular, economic sense. I don’t mean it in the shallow terms of capitalist society either. I mean that you followed your own beliefs and motivations through. Authenticity to yourself, that’s surely what counts when you have to look yourself in the mirror? On your death bed what comfort would it be that you had achieved material possessions or a life enviable to others in the world? I’d much rather lie there thinking I had been true to myself. You may occasionally need to justify yourself to others. But you will need to justify yourself to yourself every day.

13.

My life and my music are truly intertwined. For those with ears to hear, my music is the best guide to what goes on with me internally. Its the escape valve.

14.

I don’t honestly think that I have any duty to justify myself to anyone. Oh, of course, it may be that this is sometimes expedient. Sometimes, it may even be due to power and authority taking me in hand. But it’s all a joke, isn’t it? A game? I return to a perpetual thought of mine right now: my life is an Augenblick and my death will be forever. What do I care what you think about me? If you honestly wanted a genuine assessment from the horse’s mouth, I could give you one. It wouldn’t be pretty because I know the things I have done. But I’m not a very convinced bad person. When I do wrong its because I’m bored, because I can or because I thought it “clever” to do so. I often regret bad things I’ve done. My heart isn’t in it. I just want to be left alone really and “live and let live” seems to be the best policy for that.

15.

“Physician, heal thyself”. Pulling threads from the twisted haystack of life is certainly a perilous thing. I should heed my own, unasked for, advice. The women were largely a mistake and responsible for massive scars on my psyche. Do good times ever outweigh the bad? I find it hard to think so. If only there was a way to have good times WITHOUT the bad. A solution to this problem has not yet been discovered.

16.

Knowledge is not all it’s cracked up to be. This is a conclusion that gains more force the longer I live. What’s more, knowledge without wisdom is next to useless and dangerous. There is little good in the bare knowing of something. At a bare minimum you also need to know where it fits and what to do with it. This is why choosing not to know things is often the better course. It is hard to “unknow” and such is our make up that we often feel the need to do things about what we know. This way many bad things have happened and not just for me but in general.

17.

My origins are an absurdity to me. It must be true, I muse, that absurdity is the principle of the Universe.

18.

I don’t think that it occurs to people very much just how temporary and fragile they really are. Of course, the old and the sick have this reality impressed upon them more frequently and with more force. But, in general, we seem to have a consciousness which, on the good days, operates as if we are in some way eternal. And I suppose that makes sense. How could you live on an even keel if your every other thought was of how vulnerable and contingent you are? Well, let me tell you from experience that the answer is “Not very well”.

19.

“The crisis of Being”. Only now, as I keep reading, in fits and starts, do I learn that people have been discussing this for decades, if not centuries. Perhaps I’m not so weird and individual after all? This year I’ve written a suite of music in 10 parts called “Human/Being” which really functions as a musical meditation on what it means to be human and the whole subject of Being. If my life is become anything to me it is a process of self- Enlightenment, a process that will one day just be snuffed out. Gone. Unimportant. Another example of “the concerns of the living”.

20.

“The Wanderer. He who has come only in part to a freedom of reason cannot feel on earth otherwise than as a wanderer - though not as a traveler towards a final goal, for this does not exist. But he does want to observe, and keep his eyes open for everything that actually occurs in the world; therefore he must not attach his heart too firmly to any individual thing; there must be something wandering within him, which takes its joy in change and transitoriness.” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, #638.

I could accept this quite well as a description of me. If I am anything at all it is a wanderer.