why care?

The ironic thing about care: affective and effective motivation may sometimes fall into mutual exclusion. On the one had sustained emotion indicates (though probably doesn't cause) a situation where behavior will be controlled by certain outcomes. So vital is the state where we may move with great passion toward those interests that our human affections support! On the other hand, the same scenario might mean that the "self" will revert to coercive strategies when progression toward the "desired" fails or slows. How many of us have ruined our most avid cares with the destructive power of dread and desire? How intimate is escape with fulfillment?

I fail yet to discern a fault line between the want and the successful reward (success defined as controlling of the organism and adaptive to the beloved), though the world might yet be holding it firm and still and uncaresssed. I feel the tingling desire to touch it - to dance in understanding rather than blindness with the one that lends "meaning" to the other. Sort of a Russian doll game. One can sympathize with the mystics when such paradoxes arise.

As always, sensitivity to incremental pleasure nicely swells to the exact proportions of the void. Find a place where care controls (or is co-controlled) in one direction only - find the contingencies that not only liberate us from desire but also bestow upon us the single-minded ecstasy of the fact: a rare world is ready for revolution but now is, irrespectively, always the time for better in every frame. (Oh my little animal! - At the least here grows your comfort if not also your answer: the dynamic flow of a fourth dimension and its parent pressures... the cataclysmic fluid that comes from that sacred union... it is evolution and motion itself, not the forms that appear to make it up. Transformation: the illusion and the fact and the chaos - that is my life. We are each a population and a wave. I wish I could tell them that time didn't chain us as we always thought it did. We can each anticipate with every motion the approach of the sweet consummation of every inevitable reinforcement, and thereby will each moment be filled with the power of that selector. And each moment we can meet a new animal.)

I've come to realize that many tears are to be tasted and kissed with loving gratitude. As always, the form of a thing has little importance. It is function that is life. And transformation. Always.

mine mine mine

The root of desire is positive. The painful bits arise only from the absence (or a negative image of a scant presence) of that which is amazing to us. Whenever I therefore feel the want of a thing, I need only focus on the few bits of that thing which do presently contact me - something I do or some stimulation that occasionally contacts me. Were there none, I could not desire, and so the desire acts as a signal to find them. There may be not much more than a memory to turn to, but when the covert nonverbal dialog focuses exclusively thereupon, the lightness that comes from desire fulfilled is mine.

And what if through repeated practice, the memory is worn out, changed, tainted? The beauty of pure tragedy is that one must lose all sense of the thing lost before it is truly gone. At that point, the one who suffers the loss cannot suffer, because there is no indication remaining that anything at all is missing. If it changes, one can only hope that what remains is less than the feeling of something forgotten.

The choice, should one have multiple practiced approaches available for execution, is between systematic destruction of our contact with that which we love, or the toleration of some pain that comes before we can isolate and preserve what we have of the beloved. The first is oblivious tragedy the second self-controlled optimism.

Love for Last Fruits

Some of those who think of God find Him to be an acceptable endpoint, as though the caricature of the universe somehow explained it. What drives us mad, though, is not the lack of meaning (because what the hell is that, anyway?) or the cruelty of a confusing universe. Why do we care what we name “what is,” since it changes the system at hand not at all? Why do we want to solve a problem before we have one? We cannot establish inconsistency between what we know and what we don’t know. If we’re left without a touchstone, we’ve only technically come back to where we started: the inescapable experience that leaves us with the ecstasy of response, the loneliness of biologically intrinsic isolation, and the driving need to believe in an autonomous reality that we can only ever infer. And what do we do with what we started with? We can ignore it or try to understand it or simply persist amid one great silent scream. We arrange the concepts and rearrange them. We elaborate and simplify. We decide we can use it to know more, and then we decide we can’t know more at all. We adopt new values and call new things good. Now it’s survival, now it’s peace, now it’s power, now it’s parsimony, now it’s logic, now it’s lawfulness and empiricism, and above all it is our own center. But we never contact that thing that we crave - the autonomous authority to verify the absolute verity of our very best assumptions. So we judge, we guess, we test, we believe, and above all we change. Those of us who can meet the universe and trust it to speak honestly with us must walk another new circle in the muck, with no more reason to call it better than any other road to nowhere. But we hope for somewhere; we hope beyond hope that hope is enough to keep us going and that there is a world that guides us. In essence, our lives and our strength is built on crazy hope. It’s not that we have nothing left to lose; it’s that we hope that we have it, we hope to name it and understand it, and we hope it is at all.

A true skeptic must embrace the possible, and in so doing risk the invalidation of all, while paradoxically believing that some level of understanding is possible and that some level of empirically-based selection of ideas is useful and progressive. It’s an invitation not from the vine to the branches but from the rock to the sculpture: to rest and rot on passions enflamed by impossible hope and the never-ending pursuit of an invisible lover. I like it that way.