Author Topic: Quandaries  (Read 533 times)

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Nation of One

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Quandaries
« on: October 02, 2017, 10:20:59 am »
If life itself is not worth living, how can anything be worth doing?

Well, I suppose one would have to have the attitude that, even though life itself is not worth living, as long as I am living, and since along with this comes the primordial desire to remain alive, let's see if we can learn some mathematics while at the same time continue to ponder how to get through a life not worth living.

Studying math then becomes part of the strategy for getting through a life not worth living.

All the hype about preparing oneself for the workforce or becoming a "useful citizen" does not even come into play here.   I take a much more cynical approach.
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Nation of One

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Re: Quandaries
« Reply #1 on: June 09, 2020, 12:43:10 am »
When the heart is heavy with anxiety, when the haywire brain begins to demand instant relief from a cigarette, demanding strong black coffee upon regaining consciousness ... the cycle, while pleasant during the "medicating sessions," brings along with it an undercurrent of intense anxiety over storing such "precious medicine" for tomorrow.

I have always found addiction to substances to be a "close to the bone" example of the mechanisms operating in what we call the Lebenswelt (Life World) - or the projection of that which is experienced by our organisms with its sensory apparatus.   Another glaring example is the imposition of having to eat to live, which implies killing to live.  Later in the evening, it is sometimes impossible for me to just pick up a math-textbook and dive in with enthusiasm.  Maybe in the morning in solitude ... but some nights nervousness refuses to allow me to take the reins of my own brain.   It ... well, it has some kind of autonomy divorced from the consciousness writing these words. 

Holden once inquired as to why I so very often write in mathematics notebooks (Scratchpads) in pencil rather than pen.  This protects the continuity of the "sessions" from that which might go off on some philosophical or political tangent.  My rhetoric or poetry or even dark satire has no place in my "modules," and yet it will creep in immediately if I am using pen/ink.  Using pencil reminds me that I am trying to focus.

I have found that solitary "diary-form" writing allows more freedom in probing my own brain and figuring out the mechanisms of my own brain, thinking against it somehow,  noting how I am manipulated by the chains of biological existence, and trying to minimize the discomfort anxiety that is hard-wired directly into the fundamental operations of the organism-I-am, this Creaturely Presence that breathes us, that shits dead animal life through our intestines into the sewers.

Nature mocks me because I have always been trying to figure a way to outsmart it, or at least find a way out of what really does, at bottom and in the long run, feel like a trap, a hamster wheel, a trick, a farce, a mockery.

Is the world of mathematics on a page even real?
The events which make the news - how are they to be interpreted?  There are wellness gurus giving lectures on yoga, meditation, eating nutritiously, and yet they show utter disdain for something as interesting as Analytic Geometry.

And they think I must be an awful one to listen to about life, seeing the horrifying condition of my teeth from smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and not brushing my teeth regularly.  They think this and their beautiful (for now) fleshly bodies make a mockery of my "mathematical scribblings in never-to-be-read encyclopedias of notebook.

Holden mentions the possibility of a Dostoevskian Underground Man who is obsessed with mathematics.  I imagine there may be many heartbroken and schizophrenic "former students" of such scientific or otherwise sophisticated disciplines who find themselves living in some personal Hell, that is, bullied by blockheads in their day-to-day monkey sphere, and mocked all the more viciously by those who show disdain for such disciplines when they can see no recompense for your decades of interest.

This all has the potential to produce a very specific type of madman, one whose madness has more clarity than all the violent maneuvers of crowds and the Powers which aim to control those crowds.

Maybe waking up in the morning and revisiting Linear Algebra (or Logarithmic and Exponential Functions) seems like a great way to seize the day, and it might, it is more likely to proceed as most mornings do: confusedly, depressingly, and anxiety-filled (over the predicament of my dependency upon a world I am not entirely committed to existing in).

Schopenhauer said that we can flip the script, that the world is just as dependent upon us as we are on it.

He meant that the entire cosmos evaporates along with the sentient creature.  The Creation dies with the Creature.  This defies the social institutions and their obsession with history.  Nature does not belong to History.  I do not belong to history.  I am not even what this writing consciousness thinks it is, most likely.

One of the benefits of being a nobody who has already been forsaken by hometown and other local political entities, is that I am not afraid of being scandalized or threatened with degradation.   I think life has humbled me, but in the thick of it, I am an angry ape who has become quite addicted to tobacco and coffee, just to mention the most Fierce with respect to the discomfort anxiety induced by its absence.   

I do not feed into the Wellness Culture Hysteria and their anti-Tobacco campaign.  Tobacco had been a comfort to "the poor" for generations, but these ZooKeepers on this here plantation/reservation have the prices so high on tobacco, I'm afraid the potential for a Collective Nicotine Fit of Jungian Proportions is quite inevitable.
« Last Edit: June 09, 2020, 12:45:03 am by Henry the Fool »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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-van Gogh.

Nation of One

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Re: Quandaries
« Reply #3 on: June 10, 2020, 07:48:25 pm »
That is incredible, fascinating, and inspiring. 

Thank you, Holden.

It makes me consider an aside made by Thomas Ligotti:   "At this time I've run out of other people that I want to be. My ideal persona these days is that of an inmate in a minimum security prison. That really seems like the good life to me."

And yet, I had been in such a camp, and I think Ligotti may be romanticizing the monastic aspect of what turns out to be another zoo.

I can also imagine the spark that ignites this inmates brain each morning.  He must have had some kind of ritual he performed in the mornings to "get his head out of his ass" --- or, what I prefer to call "being in my mojo."

If one were permitted to store and have some kind of organized access to one's personal library, with some way of earning funds for notebooks, pencils, access to computers.  Better still, a library such as the Cannibal has in Hollywood film Silence of the Lambs, with more freedom of movement, more respect as a natural organism with a brain, rather than simply as some kind of cartoon/comic-book character mutant/freak - but the thing-as-it-is in the cosmos, without the flood of mass-minded opinions about the "moral status" of the so-called "soul" that is said to reside somewhere inside the Creature-in-itself.
« Last Edit: June 11, 2020, 12:20:23 pm by Without a Leg to Stand On »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~