Anyway. today is raining hard, and it has rained all week. it's been crazy, especially walking up and down to university, not being able to drive, not having any close by buses, and having only non-waterproof shoes. Rain is weird. Anyway, what Iwanted to do is sit down and finish off some off the stuff I've started on here recently and not finished. So now I'm going to spend like 2 hours or how ever long doing that. It's all muddled in my head now and I've got no idea where it will go and how it will come out.
(from thursday?):
and I think, we can't think everything at once, and everything is too much, and there is too much everything, and if we can't even properly understand people, how can we properly understand god. who is much bigger. But god understands everything. My diagram above is really courtesy of my history teacher last year, M. Savage. with some minor judgements, but essentially the same. We just had long off topic discussions in that class. so first understand X as god, Y and Z are humans. Savage's intrepreation/use of the diagram was about humans growing in understanding and acceptance, becoming more like God/Gods. so there, Z in an improvement on X. and it's like over time, as humans have grown in knowledge, become more all embracing, societies become more and more accepting, we've expanded out. I've tweaked mine though, for it necessarily works in the opposite way. For a start, with pessimism, my Y and Z are much shorter, you can see. Of course, God, X, is infinite in all these cpacities, so there is no diagram that can be truely drawn to scale, but the realative sizes/size of advance between Y and Z is intended to be symbolic. humans are so finite in their capacities.
The diagram, the x axis part of it, can be put in a number of ways. acceptance is one, as stated above. God accepts all things, people, etc. etc. but humans are not so good at this. they get angry. or want to challenge things. etc. etc. granted, some people are alot better at acceptance than others, but still understand, in relation to X, they are only Zs. This is my view, anyway. In a Christian sense, Love I think is a good one for the x axis. Jesus loved everyone, I understand. I mean I don't know anything about these things, and I know like in Michaelangelo's painting, in revelations, he was getting pretty angry, but I think I have the jist, you know. Anyway, unconditional love. Humans, though, find it so difficult to unconditionally love everyone else. to give unconditionally. to accept everyone in all thier different states. that's hard. but they should try. stretch thier arms out, as it were, and you see the diagram works that way too (if I had mad paint skills, I could have made the ends of each line hands, the lines themselves even arms, you know. it works like that. acceptance, love, understanding, knowing. we can only go so far. and it's not very far at all. and I think they're all intertwined as well. to understand everything is to love everything is to accept everything. to understand the beauty in every action! the ecstacy in every action! the beauty and god of all the world (and then side note, that starts going down a pantheistic track)! To have no hate, but to love even hate, or those who hate, or create hate in the world, unconditionally. Is Leonard Cohen's 1964(?) 'Flowers for Hitler' about that? Maybe, probably, the Jew writing a book for Hitler like that, hmm. I'll hunt it down one day, but I understand it's not easily avaliable. I really don't know where this is going. There are so many sides to everything. I come back to that basic line of Keats everyone knows, with the truth-beauty beauty-truth, and that like above, the stuff before intoducing Cohen. But at the same time this point of view is terribly nilhistic, in the sense that you go down that path, where if you love everything and everyone equally, you assign then an equal value to everything. That value could be an infinity, but it could just as easily be a zero. and then you are a nihlist. and the removal of varying values, oh, I am totally confused and totally confuse myself! And loving God? But do you need to love God more than say John down the street? Or is loving John down the street loving God? And can you love John if you don't really do anything nice for him really, just.. I don't even know? And even if he's mean, and kicks cats? It's crazy to accept him as you accept other people. But no it's wrong because, you should also say that if, if you unconditionally love him, properly, properly, he'll fall out of chaos in his head and stop kicking cats and see the light, as it were. becuas ehe doesn't really want to kick cats, he's just gone a bit crazy coz of something, and he's probably rather unset inside. anyway you don't love him for kicking cats, you just love him. and then he comes to love. but then the world is proposterous! humans can't love that much, they'd go mad! things become stagnant and pleasant and you want again, chaos, madness, change difference violence primal chaos. it's true. there are alot of questions about everything. I think loving unconditionally's an intresting topic. I remember savage telling us about trying to embrace the idea, going to parties, people telling him that they liked his jacket, and he just giving it to him. and then his like life spiraled down. maybe that's no proper loving unconditionally. but then what is? And how does equal assignment of values work? And surely loving people who kick cats the same as you love your best friend, or God, is crazy. it works somehow but. you know. and anyway this all proves the point that our line thing of understanding is so small. it's the whollleeee point.
So we come back of course, of course, to art, as a tool for stretching our arms wider. Being able to grab hold of more of the world, to embrace more of it, to take more of it in. as a tool for saying more than statements, more than just i duno. more than philosophical essays.
i want to cut back into what i was writing last whenever I was writing this, in links up, it links up, everything's the same, everything's the same:
Nausea. By Sarte. I haven't read it at all, but I want to, but I understand it's the same - there's a guy trying to write an autobiography right, some of the book is this anyway, and he can't he can't capture a person, in words. And it's a problem with language as much as anything, language's inability to encompass. it's neccessarily singular, specific, made for dealing with this world. I want to read Wittgenstein on language but, quite reasonably, I think, think I won't be able to understand it. so in place of language, what is there? Gestures? Eyes? paintings? Silence.
The only way we can think is with language. and language can not encompass everything, and it is impossible to fully get inside someone else's head with only language as a tool to get in, and it is impossible to get inside the world by thinking about it. and fuck, this is the sammmeee as bellow. and it's the same as a thousand people have thought before. and this is why people become monks and renounce language to come to know God, and understand and accept the world, and this is why (some) people take drugs, and drink, to stop thinking, and to just fall into swing with the 'drunk world' (see bellow), and this is where automatic writing/drawing comes from, not thinking, just creating, that sleeping subconious understanding seeping out into art, and this being considered more profound, and closer to X.
and I give up going down this path, and I cut back in here, and no worries with all the cutting and changing, becuase really, it's all the same threat of discussion:
there are pictures, but not as powerful as books for me, more engagement in books... but painting may work for painter, a process of intense and beautiful ecstatic creation of art and I think writing would work best for a reader, too. poetry as a great naked process of learning and understanding, but in a swirlier way (see bellow) that manages to get closer to a truth than a direct assult (philosophy) or silence (meditation). it's a human lunge in the dark at X. which is multiply interperetable and defineable, as below, that X. my head is stagnating. I need some new idea to think, new fictions to read. I will finish Dost. then on to something new. I think Bolano, I think and I want it to be so, but I'm not sure. but onwards. I should also be studying for university.
and chop and change:
I was thinking when I first discovered, first realised, the meaning of the term ecstacy. I don't know where it was, or how, probably maybe in the later stages of reading on the road, but my first memory related to it is in art history class, 7th form. the memory is neccessarily vauge, but it's just a feeling, a sense, with a dim image, and i just remember knowing what ecstacy meant. and another memory just similar of sitting in bed, and the dim image related to it is me looking up at my Smiths poster. madness.
I remember first reading Whitman's line (in some place or other):
"I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least"
and is it patheism or not, by the way, that quote? When I first saw it, I jumped, yes it was, but I don't know if Whitman would have thought similarily, and I think that in his mind was a rather christian sense of god, and can christianity recognise God in a pantheisic sense? In some respects yes, I think.
I remember when I was little, and hearing, coming to hear, that 'God was inside everyone' (something like this). And I always pictured a little minuture man (you know that classic media representation of God) inside your stomach, and the devil was there too I think, and they were just chilling, and I found it very weird. like if you had an x-ray and then you could see inside and there they would be.
and what is the holy spirit, and does it inhabit everything, and can it be understood in a patheistic sense?
I'm starting to grow attached to the characters in the brothers karamazov, or have, rather, to Aloysha, and Mitya. and have a bunch of affection for that Kratorskin (sp.) kid.
and there are no no new ideas in the world! where are the new ideas! i DON'T SEEM TO BE ABLE TO FIND ANY!! this is why i want to read the savage dectives next, perhaps it will have some new ideas for me. i also know there are some new ideas to be found in very complex philosophy, which is why I pursue it, shall continue to do so.
and books are swirly and they are great that they are swirly, to hold two contradictory opinions at once is to be god like, to hold an infinite number of contradictiory opinions at once is to be God, and for a human to hold wholly contradictiory opinions at once he is insane, and illogical, and this god, god is illogical, in that he is not logical, and logic is a human thing, a human thing, and do not criticize god becuase he does not add up in human terms, and this is why people get drunk, and they are illogical when they are drunk, and they are swirlier, and they are closer to God, and maybe it's all just a big mind-trick, and remember that, remember that. but the first part is true. to whole heartedly be a a national supporter and a labour supporter at the same time is to come to understand god, if you can come to understand this of course, but of course, of course, you cant do that! becuase humans are designed to be rational, and logical, to take one course of action, to make decisions, it's all about survial, survial, and yet yet! there's this other side of us! this strange other side, that other animals, that rocks & plants for sure, don't have, the illogical side, and as Dostoyevsky says, what principally distinguishes us from animals is our ability to curse, and so maybe God lies in curses!
and see how that doesn't make any sense! and see how that is and isn't the point! and see how we cant get enough things in our heads, becuase our heads aren't made for it! and see how essays are silly, and to hold an opinion on anything is silly, and that books and paintings are better because thier swirly systems can hold more, can reach further than us alone, can jam pack more into them that makes them fit to burst, and means you can't write a silly english essay about them at all, without totally and completely mis-representing them!
anger and hilarous laughing.
Whitman:
"And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes."
"Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then,
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass,
I find letters from God dropt in the street, and every one is sign'd by God's name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe'er I go,
Others will punctually come for ever and ever."
I think I love most of all those last two lines, especially "And I leave them where they are". beautiful.
and oh gosh, there are more things to write about. when I'm in a more logical frame of mind, I want to write about the problem of 'irrational' (again, the term is used to bring out the fact that must be accepted, that faith is not rational, in that it doesn't rely on emperical evidence, strong conclusive conclusions, etc.) faith.
Ah.
And I just think I should chuck in at the end, more stuff in my box of drafts, because I'm not going to come back to it, it's just me, tiredly writing a few weeks back about importiant dreams. Good bye and oh gosh, this was the worst blog post of the lot and it had the lest sense in it and it's a mess. it's clarity is completely gone, everything is murky and ridiculous. anyway here:
Ah, my head hurts from so many things. I don't know, no one else, no one else! Where are you all, where are these people!
I had a dream last night, I think it's going to be one I'll really remember. There are not many like that, but they're importiant, and I'll have to get them down on paper some time. And dreams are so hard to get on paper. you just have snatches in your mind, images, words, peoples eyes, colours...
I hate how I write.
I'm sitting in Critical Thinking class, up the back, and this girl comes up to me. She's young, with big eyes, and younger than you should be if you're at university, I later learn she's 15 (so she says). I'm sitting up there packing up my things, and she comes up to tell me, and she tells me that my reasoning abilty is 'seriously flawed'. That I can't construct logical positions. Now I think it's because she's so young, and at university, which I assume means she must be pretty bright, which leads me not to just ignore her but demand why, why, what she means. I'm genuinely worried, and there's something inside of me that suggests she might be right. But she doesn't say anything, just smiles and laughs, and runs down the steps of the lecture theatre and pushes open the door. Of course I'm following, and I catch her in the hall outside. But she won't tell me anything, just looks at me with big eyes, I ask how old she is, what she means, she just runs off.
We run, I'm increasingly frustrated that I can't get any answers, I'm growing tired, we wind through the corridors, end up, eventually, eventually, in a brick garden, by which I mean it's a garden with a grass lawn, but with brick steps and brick flower beds with tall flowers in them, and specifically there are delphiniums, and maybe bluebells. We are still in the university (the bricks I think give that away to me) but there might be faeries is that kind of garden. So I've caught her but all she talks is nonsense, out-of-breath nonsense when I ask her questions about why she thinks my arguements aren't logical, why she thinks that I can't posit reasonable theses. She doesn't have any answers, she just keeps giving me these silly suggestive smiles and is near-panting for having been out of breath. I finally gather she's 15 and some sort of brilliant genius girl. She says something about that what I write is just silly, it's made up, it's just me playing games, and that I should try writing something serious. Everything I write doesn't actually make sense if you look at it she tells me, and she can see that. This annoys me as she's hardly being serious herself, she's just paying games, but at the same time I know she is right about something there. And all the time the central images/colours are the bricks (slightly mossy), the delphiniums, her big wide suggestive laughing-eyes, and a certian roundness of her face. Oh, and her name's Olivia, for whatever reason. And all the time I'm so frustrated I can't get clear, sensible answers out of her, she can't logcially form an argument to tell me my argument-forming is inadequate. And all the time at the back of my head too there's my two essays I'd just about killed myself writing the last three days before that friday (which is of course why this dream was happening). And she's just laughing, and talking nonsense, but I know what she's saying is sort of true, and it must be, because she's a 15 year old genius girl. She might finally grab my hand at the end there, I'm not sure.
It's all also because I picked up Yates again, too. that's the faeries and the delphiniums part.
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