| (no subject) |
[Aug. 21st, 2009|01:13 pm] |
|
My father died Thursday August 20th at 9:05pm of respiratory failure. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Aug. 13th, 2009|02:09 am] |
My maternal grandfather died the night before last. Of all my grandparents, he was the one I knew least well. Until recently, I hadn't seen him in about seven years, sometime prior to going to university I think. I'm not sure what he died of, other than that it was probably connected to his jaw cancer, which was making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe and eat. There will be a brief family meal in Ottawa on Saturday at which we are forbidden to discuss him or his death, in lieu of a funeral as per his wishes.
I was sleeping when my mother woke me partially yesterday (the 11th) to tell me. My response was "I will process this when I wake up," and I then fell back asleep. We discussed it later that day. There wasn't much to say: My mother is sad, and powerless to stop being so. She had visited him last weekend to speak with him and see him before he died. He had been repeatedly faking unconsciousness while her brother and his wife were there because he had overheard them talking about his then-imminent death and wishing that it would be peaceful and swift. He had also been trying unsuccessfully to escape from the hospital / palliative care centre he was at. Before my mother left on this trip, I had gone to the kitchen for a drink of water and encountered her crying over the sink. I hugged her and told her that it would be good for her to get away from the vigil by my father's bedside - that she ought to take a few days and go visit her father and relax. I asked her how she was feeling. She said "How should I be feeling? My father is dying, my husband is dying." I said "Strive for equanimity." She cried into my shoulder for some time after.
Of my grandfather, I know that he went to work after my great-grandfather died in a hunting accident from a hangfire, which has always made me leery of hangfires while shooting guns (in the Boy Scouts, in China). I know that he was born in Cape Breton and worked for Parks Canada for some time setting up L'Anse Aux Meadows and various other national parks across Canada. I know that he was an excellent rifle shot, a skill he passed onto my mother and her sister; that he drew pastels that have not survived of wildlife; that he was known for his hot temper. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 11th, 2009|01:15 am] |
The Glass Heart
By Jack Liberty [2nd Draft]
To know of the heart to crave the heart. This is the curse on our unhappy fraternity. It is strange that such a symbol of purity and release should have given rise to such a terrible history of murder, theft and betrayal.
Consult any history of the heart, a few folios published by obscure vanity presses and collected only by private collectors for their own inscrutable purposes, and you will find the same tale:
In the previous age of the world, the Buddha-to-be Avolokiteshvara had finally reached the end of his time as an incarnate being, even as a Boddhisattva in the Pure Land. He stood at the gate by which he could pass into "release without residue". But the gate was narrow, and when he tried to squeeze through, he would not fit. First, he took off his clothes, but even naked and sandal-less, he could not get through. Next he took off his arms and legs but even so the gate was too small. He shed his loins, his abdomen, his torso and his head, and each time, he found that the gate too narrow to let him pass. Finally, only his aura of grace, concentrated in his pure and compassion-filled heart, was left. It was filled with the accumulated good karma of his many lifetimes of saintliness. Its bulging virtue would not allow Avolokiteshvara to pass through the gate into release. Even this too must be discarded by the Buddha-to-be.
As his heart tumbled to the ground amidst all the rest of Avolokiteshvara, he stepped through the gate into release, where all time is an opalline lotus of instants, and attained nirvana. The heart vitrified as it was abandoned, turning into a flawless glass heart that lay ignored until long after, when a peasant found it amongst Avolokiteshvara's bones and other relics scattered in the grass.
This is the pre-history of the heart, of its time in the world before. Its first appearance in a modern sense, its emergence into history, is after the first Opium War in 1840, when a Sir John Heston serving on the H.M.S. Furious, a British frigate stationed out of Hong Kong, claims to have found it on a Chinese pirate hulk, its crew having murdered one another while at sea. Sir John's diary, preserved in a private collection, is the earliest record we have of the heart's curse. He records that upon first seeing the Glass Heart clutched in the fist of a Chinese corpse he was seized with an urge to possess it, an urge so strong that the poor British lieutenant hacked off the hand with his sabre and stuck the bloody appendage still clutching its prize into a pocket for later examination. His fellow crew, occupied with treasures of a more base nature, failed to notice his vicious desecration of the corpse. He reboarded his ship with them, keeping the existence of his prize a secret as his fellow crew boasted of the gold and silk they had recovered.
The remainder of his diary until his murder in 1841 is most curious. At first a record of his love for the heart, within a few days, less than a week, he grows to loathe it. He cannot bear to look at it. He cannot stand to touch it. The mere thought of it almost seems to cause him pain as he writes of it. But, he also cannot bear to be apart from it. The record of his thoughts on day 10, when he attempts to leave it in his sea chest as he performs his duties, is nearly unreadable, scrawled as if he was torn between terror and jealousy. On days 61-62, when he misplaces it, his diary is filled with paranoid rambling, lists of possible locations with each ticked off as he searches them, excessively complete lists of possible thieves amongst the crew and their motivations for theft, of crew members he come in contact with may have seen it and desired it just as he does. Most interesting are a series of marginal notes that mention his relief at being rid of the heart, at having freed himself, even if only accidentally. By day 63 he has found it and the journal returns to the swings between hatred and desire for the heart.
Alas, Sir John failed to keep the heart a secret. His gardener murdered him in 1841 and vanished with the heart. Authorities never found him, nor Sir John's diary (You may guess the circumstances of how I read it yourself).
This first story sets the pattern for all the other stories of the owners of the heart. Each time, the previous owner is murdered (in one aberrant case the former owner survived but was imprisoned as a lunatic), the murderer flees with the heart, taking or leaving behind a copious body of personal writing indicating the former owner's alternating emotions of aversion and desire.
It is these unhappy seeds that have sown future sorrow. To read these writings, diaries, rambling notes in the margins of other books, in one case a piece of graffiti sprayed onto an alley wall, is to be struck with the desire to possess the heart oneself. Even knowing, as one quickly discovers through even cursory research, that possession inevitably brings despair, the urge cannot be overcome. You must have it. Perhaps you fantasise that you will be the first, the only owner to overcome its curse. You will appreciate it as these others, these fools, could not. Your love will redeem it. And of course, one discovers that this is a lie. A self-serving delusion. You come to hate it, just as all the others have. Your love is no more redeeming, no more pure, than theirs.
I am, as you may already have guessed, the current possessor of the heart. I remember the long hours of research, the search to discover the identity of its then owner, the hunt to track him down. He knew, just as I did, that others were searching for him, and he had taken precautions. I remember training myself with a discipline and seriousness I now find impossible to pick locks, fire a pistol, to creep silently, to infiltrate and kill. I remember dispatching his guards, one by one (he had three, all victims of the heart, though not as my quarry and I were). Only three, I remember thinking with relief. My own heart had no room left for compassion in it, only the terrible need to have. No one, not even I in the years I spent discovering the heart's history, have ever counted the deaths this need has caused.
I did not surprise him. How could I? To own the heart is also to possess the knowledge that it will one day be taken from you by another. He sat with dreadful calm as I advanced on him. He would not reveal its location, even when I threatened him with my pistol. I shot him mechanically before searching for it. He surely hadn't hidden it far from himself, and even that separation must have drawn on all his reserves of will. His face in death had a calm expression, relieved. Mine was a monster's mask, frantic and contorted in a mirror on the wall. I found it, of course. I cannot describe what I felt then. It remains the most powerful emotion I have ever felt. I fled so that I would not be discovered and, more importantly, the glass heart taken from me.
In time, I too came to hate the heart. The remorse for the murders left me despondent. The intensity of that remorse is the particular effect of the curse on me. Even my guilt must be understood through the lens of the heart. I did not redeem the heart. I damned myself. And yet, I cannot bear to be separated from it. It remains the token of my doom, of my insatiable craving.
I have come up with a plan to free myself. Not to give up the heart. I cannot. I want to die with the heart. To be united in death and yet be beyond any emotion. I will throw myself from a high cliff into the ocean, the heart clutched in my hands. I will take this essay and all the other writings I have collected with me. I will not record where, which cliff, which ocean. I will hide all traces of my existence, my journey, my destination. No one will find me. The heart and I will go. I must do this. I must.
End. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 17th, 2009|01:21 pm] |
For a while, the radio and chemo worked. On Thursday, a routine chest X-ray revealed that the cancer is back. Yesterday, my mother told me that based on an unofficial estimate my father has perhaps six weeks before he is dead. The most likely cause will be suffocation, since his lungs are bleeding and slowly filling with blood. Chemo may buy him some time with the actual tumours, but they have metastasised and have damaged much of his body. Due to the specific development of the cancer, he will not experience a major degradation in his quality of life prior to death, though he does have to take morphine as the cancer presses on his bones and organs. He may need some oxygen, but he remains mobile and able to work, and he has decided to work for the rest of his life, or so long as he is capable of doing so. Earlier today he was irate when I came upstairs with the newspaper because he was on the phone with his boss, for example.
My mother is preparing for his death. On Friday, she told me that I will share power of attorney for her with my sister should anything happen to her. She just showed me his obituary, and had me proofread it. While driving her out to a car repair shop earlier today, she told me that she had picked out a "beautiful blue urn" as my father will be cremated and the urn buried with his parents. She cries intermittently.
Her father, my maternal grandfather, is also dying of cancer. He has jaw cancer. He is my last surviving grandparent. The tumours have eaten through the soft tissues of the jaw. I hadn't seen him in about seven years until earlier this month when we went up to visit him. He wears a padded bandage under his chin. I sat next to him once and the bandage was loose and I could see the tumour, staring right back at me. He can no longer eat, and must be fed a nutritive paste through a shunt placed in his chest that hooks up to a peristaltic pump that moves the nutritive paste through a clear plastic tube into the shunt. He is in agony and I think he wants to die, and I felt bad that I couldn't help him do so. He has a maximum life expectancy of about 6 mo. A good outcome here is that he will choke to death in his sleep on his own vomit. The other outcomes are more painful, longer, and end inevitably in his death. My uncle will handle the funeral arrangements. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[May. 11th, 2009|04:01 am] |
I went on a vacation to America.
I do not like vacations. I have not taken one in about ten years, though I have been on a few trips to various places around the province when I had free time (a four-day camping trip while working part-time and two weekend visits to someone's cottage) during those ten years.
My vacation was to Hilton Head, an island off the coast of South Carolina and near to Savannah in Georgia. I stayed in a resort with my parents. My father was sick the entire time, and my mother insisted on hanging around with me despite disapproving of my smoking, drinking and lack of desire to go shopping.
We used to go to this resort when I was very young, and I stood one evening outside the pool where I learnt to hold my breath and swim, sadly smoking. I went swimming in the ocean twice, and peed in it both times. It was very cold, and I was reminded of why the Atlantic is the superior ocean to the Pacific: The Atlantic has no patience for us.
I don't like vacations because they make me sad. Admittedly, I am some combination of sad and angry most of the time, but vacations bleach out all my anger, my vitality. The thing I most like to do on vacations is walk around smoking and not talking to any one, pretending that I am on my way somewhere which inevitably turns out to be a chair or place to sit, where I sit pretending to wait for someone until I get tired of sitting and start walking around again. I can occupy myself for days with this given enough cigarettes.
After a few days, I took a vacation from my vacation. I went to Atlanta and visited M. Tommasi, who is doing his Ph.D at Emory. We had many good discussions, and I read Baudelaire's essay The Painter of Modern Life, which convinced me that my decision not to shave during my entire vacation was the correct one. Since coming back, I maintained a thin, awful mustache but shaved it off so as to avoid people staring, since people had begun staring at it. Also, I wanted to impress a girl.
I spent four days in Atlanta, most of it in Decatur. Since writing that sentence, I've spent two days with this window open trying to figure out what to write about it. It's smaller than the city I live in (Mississauga), or the city that the city I live in is a suburb of (Toronto). It's much friendlier than either one. During my first two hours in the city, I walked past the CDC and thought it was an organ-harvesting operation until I walked another half-kilometre and found the first sign yet explaining what this fortress-like structure filled with children was. I regret not going to SWAT, since North American Black culture is much more prevalent in Atlanta than in Toronto (the majority of black people in Toronto are from the Caribbean). Atlanta is like most other mid-sized North American metropolises. It's nice. Very thick foliage. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 27th, 2008|10:49 am] |
John: Thank God we don't have to go to church on Christmas anymore
Mother: Why is that?
John: Because I'm an atheist and have been for over a decade.
Mother: Well, how do you think you were created then?
John: Er... I thought through the usual way? |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Dec. 4th, 2008|10:22 pm] |
A thought prior to my upcoming birthday:
As I grow older, my urge to die grows stronger. About seven or eight years ago, I decided that there was a small list of things I would like to do, and a few conditions that would be in place, and after all the conditions were met and the objectives accomplished, it would be time to shuck off this life like a set of unwashed clothes and go back to the business of simply not-being, the state I spent most of the universe's existence in. I am eager to get back to old habits, as it were.
I've been skivving on those goals, but if I may be permitted the hubris of a birthday resolution, I hereby resolve to get to work accomplishing those goals. Ideally, I would like to be in a state of absolute completion by age 50 (I have pushed this up over the years due to impatience, admittedly - my original desire was 65 or so), capable of simply waiting in good conscience for the last few conditions to be met before offing myself. This will mean that as of this birthday, my life will be (optimistically) half-over. I don't know how exactly I will commemorate getting over the hump, but I'm thinking perhaps of a radioactivity-themed party. I just need a venue, preferably one in Toronto. Torontonians are cordially invited to both suggest possible locations (bars preferred) and to attend once a final location has been decided on. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Sep. 12th, 2008|12:38 am] |
|
We are selling my childhood home and moving into the city proper so that the ambulances servicing us will be from Princess Margaret or Toronto General Hospital. My father has a stage 3 malignant tumour in his lungs that has metastasised and spread to his lymph nodes, combined with multiple clots in his lungs that continue to form despite the blood thinners. In the hospital, he has contracted MRSA. They cannot perform the lobectomy due to bleeding, clotting and the positions of the clots relative to the tumour. He has months to live without treatment, maybe weeks. With radiation therapy and chemotherapy simultaneously he has a 20% chance to survive, but they are unsure whether they will be able to perform them simultaneously, and may have to stagger treatment. This reduces his chances of survival significantly. There is a 1 in 1000 chance of being permanently paralysed from the treatment. There is a significantly higher risk of bleeding to death from the radiation, as it is known to cause internal hemorrhaging in some cases. If he survives, he will have permanent tatoos on his torso that outline where the tumours were. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Aug. 21st, 2008|02:56 pm] |
I suspect my father is going to die. He has malignant lung cancer, multiple blood clots in his lungs, and pneumonia. Doctors discovered the lung cancer approximately 1 mo. ago after he went in for an examination about long-lasting cold-like symptoms. The day before yesterday, he went in for a biopsy and had to be resuscitated after being given anesthetics (a "Code Blue"), so that they could not even progress far enough along to intubate him, let alone biopsy the tumour. He cannot walk, though he retains the congenital male Bell attitude of contempt towards death and suffering. I lent him some George Grant, Isaiah Berlin, and my copy of Kafka's short stories yesterday. He is often on the phone working remotely with his office as he refuses to stop, though he has agreed to reduce the amount.
A few weeks back, when he first went into the hospital, he was merely being treated for the blood clots in his lungs (they had not yet identified the cancer). He took, and still takes, a large bag of rat poison (Heparin, a blood thinning agent used to eliminate rodents) which causes him to bruise easily. Laying there ill, covered in purple-green bruises and coughing uncontrollably, I became convinced he was going to die. When he came home from that first visit, he could not eat anything other small berries that could be swallowed quickly in between fits of coughing, and the occasional glass of tea. His den is filled with the paraphernalia of an addict - syringes, a medical waste disposal bucket, various vials of Heparin, instructions on the proper use of these.
I am smoking about a pack of cigarettes a day for nausea and exhaustion, and am drinking heavily. No one has lost the irony. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[May. 20th, 2008|01:50 am] |
|
I just found these: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]. They're quiet clever little parodies of those WW2 documentaries you get on the History Channel all the time, except now used to hawk video games. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[May. 1st, 2008|02:51 am] |
I hate my new job. I hate the working conditions, I hate the tasks required of me, I hate the people I work with, I hate having to wake up at 4am to go into work for 5am, I hate everything about it. My immediate superior asked me the other day what I enjoyed about the job and my response was "I don't enjoy anything about it."
Later that day, her superior asked me "Surely you don't come to work every day with a feeling of dread?" "No, not every day."
I took this job under the impression that I would be managing a sales team that was also responsible for stocking about half the store. Instead, it turns out, I "manage" a stocking team that is also required to sell things when they are not otherwise engaged. I barely manage it because my immediate superior takes control when she's around, and when she isn't, our senior receiver, who does not like me, hijacks the department. This is not the job I agreed to take, nor conditions I wish to work under.
I'm going to quit as soon as I find another job.
Edit: Also, I just read this article and am now highly interested in getting a copy of this book. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Mar. 16th, 2008|02:23 pm] |
The Perfect Crime is the best book of Baudrillard's I've read yet. I find with B. that people focus too much on the idea of simulation, and particularly, its recursive character. It's a constant refrain in Baudrillard studies of "the simulation cannibalises the real" or "Look at how simulations are just like reality, but even moreso." Eco for example, wants to maintain a distance between hyperreality and reality, as can be seen in his essay on Disneyland.
B. on the other hand, by the mid-90's, had gone far beyond that, into an idea he calls "integral reality". Integral reality is where simulation and reality no longer refer to one another, but are diffused throughout one another, interpenetrating and integrated. It's not that the simulation somehow mocks reality or kills it, but rather, simulation has taken reality within itself so that even the real has become part of the simulation. The real has been "liquidated" - and drunk.
This becomes important later on in his thought, particularly in "The Intelligence of Evil", which I read last year and finished the day before he died. Baudrillard plays on the puns in the title, where the intelligence is both the cleverness of the ineradicability of evil (le Mal) and problems (les mals) and our knowledge of evil ("intelligence" here in the sense of intelligence gathered by spy agencies). Integral reality has no place for evil within it - evil is liquidated just like truth, and taken up within it. We torture to protect justice and freedom. Justice, freedom and torture are not outside the system of reference by which we evalute our actions, serving as standards to which we can point, but rather exist _inside_ it, so that to say that one is working for justice is far more necessary than actually being just.
The knowledge of evil, will not cure us of integral reality and its hysterical escalation towards singularity and implosion, but it can at times serve at least as a kind of sabotage. Baudrillard speaks of those who know evil highly - Heidegger, Celine, etc. They are not good people, or even brave or subversive or whatever, but they scout and explore the terrain of evil so that we may know it more fully. This knowledge has been obtained at great cost (metaphysically, in that the knowledge we gain of evil reconciles it ever more with integral reality and brings us closer to the implosion-point; ethically, in that it sacrifices both the thinker and the victims of the evil that must exist for them to bring us knowledge of it - the genocide victims, the dupes of fascism and tyranny, etc.) and must not be squandered nor ever fully reconciled with integral reality.
Two lines: "Where the danger lies, there also the saving power grows" and "Those who hunt monsters beware, lest a monster they become. For if you gaze overlong into the abyss, the abyss gazes also back into you." |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Mar. 5th, 2008|02:29 am] |
Gary Gygax is dead.
For those of you who don't know, Gary Gygax, along with Dave Arneson, created Dungeons and Dragons, the first roleplaying game, back in the 70's. Roleplaying games are pretty much the most fun thing I do. I don't have many hobbies - I don't play many video games (I do play a few when with friends), I don't skateboard or listen to music, but I do play roleplaying games, and I have pretty consistently since I was about 11. That means that for fifteen years of my life and continuing into the modern day, I have derived enjoyment from the intellectual descendants of the work of Gary Gygax. I am very grateful to him for creating roleplaying games, since my life would be much less happy without them. It is unfortunate that he is dead.
I am, even as we speak, rolling up a character after the death of my character in our last session of play. Gil D'Aquino, an expert in sabre fighting, was struck dead by a psychic parasite channeled by a dying scientist-magician whom he had shot in cold blood. My friend Rob has been maintaining a blog about our most recent game here. I play Wayland Theodore Dessinger, a young man whose lust for power is getting him into trouble.
Beyond just that, however, I am also creating a setting for the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons, which I will run once our current campaign concludes, however long from now that might be. Details can be found here.
I am going to London, Ontario, for two weeks soon. Some of you may remember that I had a plan for a roleplaying game last year that featured Buddhist monks. While in London, I will be training for a new job, but will otherwise be fairly isolated. It is my hope to get some work done on that roleplaying game, since it has otherwise languished since an initial burst of creativity.
I would not be doing any of this without roleplaying games, and I am indebted to Gary Gygax for that. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Feb. 7th, 2008|01:24 am] |
I realised a week or two ago that I'd become a passive, will-less fuck. As long-time readers will recall, I resolved to become a nicer person, to be more considerate and sympathetic, etc. I spent the past two years trying to do this, but all it did was cause me to utterly renounce agency in this world. That's pretty fucking pathetic. No more of that.
The main symptom of my overall decline was my irresoluteness in disputation. I just stopped standing up for what is right and true and started letting every dipshit with a stutter and some crank belief about the world get his way. I stopped having goals. I will no longer conduct myself in this way.
Changing this will be a gradual process of readjustment, just as falling into this habit was. The emoton I am going to harness for this purpose is anger, my old standby. I've spent the past two years constantly angry, but unwilling to clearly indicate my anger to others. I thought I could be a loving person, or a kind person, or express other emotions in a consistent and forceful way, but the reality of the matter is that I am not really capable of doing so without becoming some sort of repressed, pathetic individual. My other emotions are tepid, childish and underdeveloped. Only my anger is mature enough to form the basis of my emotional character.
I was talking with Peter Holm, a fellow I used to hate but now am friends with, the other day. There are three philosophical papers I have come up with ideas for in the past year, and I am planning to write at least one of them in the next little while. The three papers are an analysis of the intuition of sameness, an analysis of mind that denies its actuality and substantiality and places it within the space of possibility through the operation of the imagination, and probably finally write a paper on technocracy and freedom. Talking with Brian Scott at a bar, I realised that I must also elaborate my cosmology, which is beginning to reach a level where it is robust, if still unsophisticated. I'm reading epitomes of mediaeval philosophers for inspiration.
I'm going to resharpen my mind. I spent this year reading fiction. It wasn't a waste, but it must be regarded as a break between bouts. A line of Nietzsche's followed me this year, about the great lives of history being ones of toil without respite rather than pleasure-seeking hedonism. I am getting a new job, possibly within the next two weeks, depending upon when they want me to start. It's still retail, but it pays more and is more dignified in general.
Edit: I just realised that I've lacked a writing table this entire fucking time! Jesus, what have I been doing?
More later. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jan. 28th, 2008|12:52 am] |
I'm back.
In the approximately ten months that I have been gone, I have become an utter mediocrity. I don't exactly recall when I realised this, but it was a few months back and I was outside. I had been holding out some hope for redemption until then, but lately I've been drifting along wishing I was dead.
In the time I have been gone:
I have continued to work a retail job, though I have been promoted to an assistant manager for my store. I make nine dollars per hour doing this job. This is less than our most junior associate. My main responsibilities are nagging the associates to clean up after themselves, filling out paperwork and controlling my temper while being screamed at by irate customers. I am severely underemployed.
I have not worked on my novel(s) (I have an idea for a second one now). I have not worked on the roleplaying game idea I have. I was a carpenter without pay for a production of Rebel Without a Cause, which I did not see, and have never seen. I have written a few campaign settings for personal use in games of Dungeons and Dragons as ersatz productive behaviour.
I felt up a girl I knew through work and was utterly bored by it and never spoke to her again afterwards. I chased some other girls and nothing came of most of it. I've come to the conclusion that I'm incapable of ordinary human love any more (if I ever was). I am also incapable of ordinary human sexual relations.
I am backsliding morally, and I keep on trying, and failing, to resist this process.
I did do some productive intellectual work with M. Tommasi while he was around, but since he left for grad school I've mostly been drifting intellectually, reading novels and other fiction instead of philosophy and history.
My best friend's girlfriend started hating my guts and tried to poison our relationship. She eventually left him to go and become a theoretical lesbian.
I've been feeling depressed lately. I'm finding that my cycles are getting worse - longer and with more anhedonia. I have not taken my pills in over a year now. My phobia of crowds causes panic attacks whenever I'm in a crowd now, though I've become better at controlling my behaviour in these fear states.
In conclusion:
I am back. 2007 was the worst year of my life. I don't know how 2008 will go. Life is garbage. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[May. 11th, 2007|03:55 am] |
The end.
I am finishing this journal. I will not reflect on the journal itself, but explain my reasoning for doing so.
The person who wrote this journal is dead. I am not him. I am inhabit the same body, possess the same name, and have an identical history, but am no longer that person. I bear the responsibility for what he did and said. I have profited and lost because of his conduct. But I am not that person and I do not conduct myself in that way. I have enjoyed your company, and will miss it. I am going to leave this journal up rather than delete it. I may be reached at johnbell17@gmail.com.
Goodbye. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Mar. 30th, 2007|03:51 am] |
I am no longer in love. It started two weeks ago, and the process of falling out of love is pretty much finished at this point. It was prompted when a friend informed me that the girl in question had made a comparison between me and a fictional character. The comparison wasn't insulting (though I will admit it's to a character I don't like, but am often compared to), it just struck me that anyone who would compare me to that character didn't really know me all that well.
And that was it. To be in love, you've got to imagine that the other understands you in a way no one else can, or at the very least, that the possibility of such an understanding exists. Once it's been revealed that no such understanding exists, and it almost certainly never will, there can't be any love.
I've talked with a couple of friends about it, and they basically break down into two kinds of responses. The people who haven't met the girl in question insist that she knows I was in love with her, and that she has chosen never to let on for one reason or another (they each provide a reason in line with their personal views on human motivation). The people who do know her take it as an accepted fact that she doesn't know about it. I tend to favour the latter opinion.
This is actually a good thing. It means that now that I am out of love with her, there are no consequences or problems that will come up. She did not know that I was in love with her, and now that I am no longer in love with her, there is no reason for it to ever come up. I am free.
I am doing a good job avoiding bitterness. It's true, I am not as charitable towards her character as I was when I was in love, but neither do I abhor her. I am capable of seeing her flaws as well as her good points, and of forming a critical but fair evaluation of her character. I understand her more now than I ever did when I was in love with her.
I avoid bitterness by taking personal responsibility for the failure of my desire to attain its object. It's not that women are all bitches who can't love me, etc., etc. woe, woe, woe is me and all that crap. There are basically two reasons that I am unsuccessful with women, even women I love.
The first is simply that women are concerned that I do not respect them. This is actually a more general problem, in that most everyone I know is concerned that I do not respect them. This is the case even when I do respect them, even when I love them. I am not good at showing my respect in a conventional manner (I am also not good at demonstrating that I sympathise with a person, even when I do - the two are related problems). Actually, I am not sure how one shows respect ordinarily.
This pretty obviously causes women not to want to pursue relationships with me, or to fall in love with me (it is an open question whether anyone has ever loved me). I have resolved to change this, but I do not yet actually have a plan to do so. There are several problems that must be thought through prior to a plan being developed. The first is whether or not my virtues are capable of being arranged so as to accomodate conventional methods of demonstrating respect (presumably through an arrangement that amplified them somehow), or whether doing so would mutilate my character. The second is whether my character is valuable enough as is to warrant saving from such a mutilation, or whether some amputation and prosthesis is necessary for moral health. The third is what kind of arrangement would resolve the problem, whatever methods are required to attain that arrangement. Only after these are adequately thought can I begin to think about what steps I can take to achieve them.
The second reason that I am unsuccessful with women is that I often display too much vice and not enough virtue. Not merely through the things I say, but the way I act. I present myself as too lecherous, too rash, too cruel. I certainly am these things (I try sometimes not to be), but they are not the primary colours of my character from which all my other traits must be obtained. I must more carefully control my expressions of vice, even when they are expressed in an unserious manner.
I think if these two things are done, I will be more successful in love. I think I would like to be more successful in love. Therefore, I resolve to do them to the best of my ability. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Mar. 12th, 2007|02:13 pm] |
The 300 is a fascist movie. It advocates the violent extermination of non-whites by a professional warrior caste of whites bred for the purpose. If you like the movie, you like a film that makes being a fascist look cool, and if you like the characters in 300, you like fascists. If the Nazis had won World War 2, we would be watching these kinds of films.
The movie has nothing to do with the accurate depiction of history. Exonerating it or condemning it on those grounds is pointless. The movie was made in the modern day for modern audiences and all the swords and shields and whatnot are simply aesthetics designed to displace the fundamental fascism of the movie so that you don't realise it without critical examination.
Many people will point to the constant sloganeering about "freedom" and "reason" as evidence that the movie is not fascist. This is false. Those are just slogans. There is no real articulation of what freedom means. Why does submission to law-breaking Leonidas or to the unjust rapist ephors not make one unfree but submission to Xerxes does? The claims about "reason" are similarly misplaced. The Greeks act in an irrational way, albeit a very brave one. Last stands are not rational. Choosing not to retreat when it is a sound tactical option is not rational.
The Greeks in this movie are not free, nor are they rational, and so everything they say about fighting for freedom and rationality is suspect. That leaves us merely with their atrocities.
I watched the film last night, and there is a scene where the Spartans are killing Persians injured on the battlefield. Leonidas is standing around eating an apple, indicating that this is clearly not mid-battle. A Spartan messenger runs up and he and Leonidas banter back and forth a bit before they head off. While they are trading jolly witticisms, we see Persians screaming, groping and kicking on the ground, even seeming to beg for mercy as the Spartans spear them.
The shocking part of this is the audience's response. People were laughing at the juxtaposition of atrocity with Leonidas's prosaic act of eating the apple. It was not nervous laughter.
Once again, this film is not a documentary. It has eliminated many incidents from the mytho-historical accounts of the battle of Thermopylae, and it departs entirely from what we know on many other occasions. Therefore, saying that the Spartans would have killed the injured Persians historically cannot be a defense of this scene. The filmmakers chose to put this scene in, and to stage it in this way. The killing is systematic, merciless, mechanised. The Spartans execute the helpless Persians with rapid, repetitive motions.
It needs to be pointed out that we live in an age where executing the helpless and injured is bad. We know this is an immoral act, something the bad guys do. This film is made in the modern era when we have such an awareness. But the director and writer chose to depict this scene, and to attempt to make us identify and idolise the people who systematically execute the injured and helpless.
The moral problems of the film's depiction don't end there. Gays and the disabled get the short stick too, with Xerxes and Ephialtes. And the Persians are actually depicted as physically inhuman monsters at several points (the Immortals, Xerxes' executioner, Xerxes himself).
Actually, one part that bothered me just as much, though it isn't getting any play in the reviews, is the insulting of the citizen-soldiers of Arcadia. This was where I began to realise the movie was fascist, and not just unreflectively violent. As they march to Thermopylae, the Spartans are joined by some Arcadians led by their king. We see about ten of them, but it's implied that there are many more just out of shot. The Arcadians have come to help the Spartans out, but they are dismayed to see that there are only 300 Spartans. Leonidas proceeds to shit-talk the Arcadians. This fellow is a potter in peace time, that one a blacksmith. Clearly, they don't compare to the Spartans at all. Later on in the movie, the Arcadians help ambush some Persians, and the narrator says that they are more like brawlers than warriors, whatever that means.
This is ridiculous, and goes to show you how fucking ridiculous this whole "we're fighting for freedom" business is. We're meant to identify with the Spartans throughout this film, but the Spartans aren't really us at all. They're an arrogant warrior caste fighting for an authoritarian regime founded on personal charisma. They simply happen to parrot the right kinds of catch-phrases about "freedom" to make us think, if we don't critically reflect, that they share something in common with us.
We live in nations, let us not forget, where our soldiers are more akin to the citizen-soldiers of Arcadia than the Spartans. We do not breed professional warriors, give them special privileges, and idolise them above all others. It is precisely a sign of our civilised attitudes that our soldiers are ordinary people and not a special privileged group within society.
Anyhow, there is tons more that is really awful about this movie. I will say it was it was technically beautiful, but then, so was Triumph of the Will. The comparison is deserved. There is a really good movie out there waiting to be made about the need to defend the best things about Western civilisation from destruction, but this movie is not it. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Feb. 18th, 2007|12:45 am] |
I drive now. My father has a 1998 silver Ford Taurus SE which I get at night time. He is capable of driving at night, but only just due to iriditis, which is some sort of congenital inflammation of the iris, and because one of his retinas briefly detached itself from his eye, and because he has cataracts. None of this is sufficient to get his license yanked, but combined with his complete lack of hobbies, a personal life and a need to drive anywhere at all once he has returned from work, it means that once he comes home, I have the car at my disposal until it becomes light again.
I am a good driver. Not a great driver, but a good one. I know when to speed, and how much, I drive defensively when possible, and I avoid most of the behaviours that I dislike in other motorists (refusing to give room when people are merging, failing to signal, wobbling over the road, following too closely). My car is generally in good shape, though it periodically runs out of windshield solvent unexpectedly, and its tires have not been changed since its purchase in 1999 (some hundred and seventy-thousand kilometres ago), which means that I get minimal grip in wet and icy conditions.
I enjoy driving. Tommasi and I periodically take my car and simply drive north, without any particular plan or destination in mind. We take backroads through small towns and countryside until we get thoroughly lost. Our general point of return is when I get down to about half a tank of gas or when the weather gets too bad to continue. The countryside north of Mississauga and Toronto is hilly, with deep valleys and curving narrow roads that cut through farmland and forest. The weather at the bottom of the valleys is always wet, whether foggy, rainy or snowy, and the tops are much drier, with stone jutting from the tops where inadequate precipitation prevents trees from flourishing. I find it tremendously peaceful to drive this landscape at night, except when someone is following me closely with their lights in my mirrors, as this prevents me from seeing anything but the area around the road.
One of the most peaceful experiences one can have is to drive familiar roads in an area where one cannot get lost due to a long familiarity with them. One's mind goes completely blank and one enters a light trance in which the world becomes entirely defined by a limited set of visual objects related to one another in such a way that there is nothing between them. One has the feeling that one has not actually moved in the slightest as one looks from the gauge indicating one's speed to the rear mirror to the car in front of one. Nor does time pass - these are simultaneous events. Driving is a Platonic experience. One looks past the appearance of things and perceives the shining forth of the structure which gives them meaning.
To a passenger, the highway is a mass of noise and confusion, where signs advance and recede, where cars all around one seem to merge and disperse cacophonously. To the driver, the highway is a perfectly structure, with the well-defined structure of a geometric solid. One cannot even describe the behaviour causally. There is no sequence of events that can be described. There is simply the moment of being on the highway, which begins as one accelerates through the on-ramp, and which ends as one decelerates to the exit. This moment, no matter whether it lasts for minutes or hours, is a unified in a way that few other spans of time can be.
The other peculiar feeling one has in a car, besides this trance state, is that of an expanded tactility. One feels the entire car to be one's body, or perhaps merely a body that one is physically linked with in a manner analogous to sexual contact. Certainly the fluttering of an anti-lock braking system attempting to grip the road in icy conditions feels much like the rapid, spasmodic pulsing of the vaginal walls during orgasm. It should be noted that there is nothing arousing about driving, merely an intimate connection with the machine. It a great prosthetic wrapped around one, like a claw bolted to a stump. One maintains multiple points of physical contact with the machine, and in ways that convey far more information than is available to the passenger. There is the foot on the pedal, the foot touching the floor separately, the buttocks on the seat, the back and head against the car, the hands on the wheel. It is particularly the hands and the feet that sense the car's state, and these give the experience its prosthetic quality.
When the two coincide - the feeling of the car as a prosthetic, and the unification of time and space effected by the trance - one really must regard the car as an otherworldly device. The world is transformed from an orientation founded in earth and sky - the ground is beneath me, the sky above - to an orientation of inside and outside. There is what is inside the car, then what is inside the boundaries of the road, then what is outside of the car and outside of the road. Buildings do not have insides when one is driving - they are pure exteriors one simply passes by. Even inside of a parking garage, one is still "outside". It is absolutely shocking to see furniture or furnishings in a parking garage, even if there is adequate space for them. The parking garage is still "outside" because one encounters it in one's car, which is the limit of "inside" and because the road is boxed in. Parking garages, without any particularly good reason that I am aware of, are often built with large holes that open to the space around them, allowing wind and rain to enter. A place that weather can get into will always be outdoors.
Yesterday, I met ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) bram with my friend Sean Tommasi, at the Pour House on Dupont. We had a pleasant conversation, and I hope that we showed him a good time. He has posted further about it in his livejournal.here. I am pleased by his account. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jan. 5th, 2007|03:28 am] |
Comrades, be on guard against false enlightenments. This topic is fresh in my mind because I recently got over one. This false enlightenment took place on New Year's Day, in the early morning, as Bryan and I stood outside a house where a party was going on. We were smoking cigarettes, and the door to the house was closing, but not yet closed. There was harsh lighting above us, and I saw my shadow on the doorframe. This shadow expanded metaphorically and became a symbol of my entire life. It felt the un-necessity of my own existence keenly, and that nothing I had done until then was more important than a shadow in a corner.
For three days afterwards, I was entranced by this thought. I chewed on this thought and felt its ghostlike touch on my tongue. I was reduced by it and functioned on pure rote knowledge of how to make one's way through the world.
Then, of course, I realised it was all a bunch of crap. The idea that one's life has, and therefore can lack, some sort of necessity inbuilt to it is crap. It was without merit to be reduced by this thought, and I ought to get over it rather than mistake it for any sort of true dharma. This realisation came when I was reading Roshi John Daido Loori's Cave of Tigers, which is a collection of dharma encounters.
Some stage setting:
For those of you who don't know what a dharma encounter is, they're a part of Zen monastic experience. Towards the end of the day, when the various teachings for the day have been propounded, and everyone has had a good argument about it in the afternoon, the various students line up and confront the teacher, asking questions about how to develop their Zen practice. These are traditionally when koans are presented to students, and a lot of useful, if sometimes obtuse, discussion ensues. It's traditionally an intersection of criticism and boundary testing. Cave of Tigers is one of the few records we have of dharma encounters (outside of koans), and was compiled by John Daido Loori, the abbot of Zen Mountain Monastery in New York, from dharma encounters he had with students over the years.
Anyhow, what ends up happening is this:
Student: ... When the ten thousand things move forward towards the self, that's like taking a walk in the woods and being surprised by a falling leaf.
Teacher: Yeah, that's the problem you know. That's the problem of really misunderstanding the teachings. We end up with misty landscapes and being startled by plum blossoms, which is all fine. But to carry the self forward and realise the ten thousand things literally means to separate oneself from the world..."
That's a warning against false enlightenment. This essay is similar. Both warn one against confusing enlightenment with every goddamn passing thought that happens to roost its fucking feathers in that empty box between your ears. This passage from the essay is key:
"Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it . He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can't tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I've ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment."
These two works saved me quite a bit of time. They set me on guard against false enlightenment, and I managed to get rid of this one within only three days, compared to the usual time frame of weeks, months, years and lifetimes it seems to take sometimes. Not that I've become a fucking saint and bodhisattva overnight, but I've managed to use my native hypercriticality to defend against a rather fucking poisonous piece of bullshit that would've rotted my guts left unchallenged. I remain unenlightened, but also unpoisoned.
Comrades, be on guard against false enlightenments.
Beyond the Buddhism (I am still not a Buddhist), Tommasi gave me a book by Karl Jaspers, a book on Iamblichus and a book on hermeneutics for my birthday and Christmas. I also bought Ian Hacking's Historical Ontology for myself, and the Derrida-Habermas Reader for Tommasi for Christmas. Charles gave me Cave of Tigers, and Tom gave me a LP of an orchestra rehearsing (but not actually playing) Beethoven's Fifth Symphony under a new (to them) conductor. I'm reasonably content with life at the moment. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|