I began to see my feet
as though I were viewing them through a camera lens
"these are almost not my feet"
the internal monologue in my head thought
"hold on... there was no internal monologue until I started to think about the monologue..."
What's happening here is the mental equivalent of the measurement problem in Quantum Physics
...you're thinking yourself into a mental ellipsis Iris Priest
Think about something else.
"TURN RIGHT"
I love the latent (or inferred) poetry of street directions
GIVE WAY
better still, the one you occasionally get beside the motorway
KEEP YOUR DISTANCE
In Ireland the signs at crossings say
YIELD
...I like this too...
I imagine a general relinquishing of control at these points
Become horizontal in the face of highways
You're still thinking
I'm still thinking
But what is it to think?
And is it I who is doing the thinking?
Who am I?
An articulated package of fibers and waters?
A body with consciousness?
Is thought thinking?
Is thinking I?
What is the difference between I and thought?
Why do I assume these are my thoughts at all? Or that thoughts are autonomous entities, echoing through my empty mind?
If, as today's philosophy group supposed - whilst we were enfolded in a Hellenic mythological system - humankind is puppetry to the Gods, then perhaps I'm just a syphon
(Like Iris)
Not like Iris. Iris was part-God, she had agency.
Like a human puppet to dark Gods.
Invisible Gods.
What was that? What?
That.
I thought the post box was
was beginning
was beginning to
I thought the post box was beginning to droop
You were thinking about Gods
Oh yeah, actually I was thinking about the non-existence of Gods
The absence of God
God is a God-shaped void
God is otherness
That's not God, that's your mind
How can you imagine what's not in your mind?
....
Where have you gone?
I had more to think about!
... what about the nonexistence of Gods?..
.....
Nevermind.
.....
I am not who I was this morning.
No.
No you are not.
I am you are no more the person who you were this morning than you are that drunk man across the street fumbling with his elasticated waste band... or this flattened sprite can...
From moment to moment we are (dis)continuous beings
But I feel so much like me
Like who?
...
Exactly.
We were thinking about Gods...
I wasn't. I was thinking about a dark well.
A cave?
Prehistory.
A swamp?
No, a burning field.
What
about the muses?
What
about them?
Are
they burning too? Where are they? What are they? Are they ghosts? Are
they me? Are they consciousness? The divine? Death infecting life?
Where do they come from? Why can I never call communion with them
anymore?
How
should I know?
Well,
because you're like me only freer because you don't have a face or a
body.
That's
relative.
I
don't understand.
Of
course you don't.
…..
…..
Loosen
your pedagogy.
My
what?
Did
it work?
You
ask too many questions too quickly, I'm a slow processor. That's what
I found problematic about tonight – shifts in perspective which rub
against what you've always 'felt' to be reality, or rather 'the way
of things'... They take time to consider and apply... particularly
where deep emotion is involved...When you've spent 28 years
(un)consciously building walls against certain things or giving
aspects of life a certain name and shape it's difficult and slow work
to take them down... And it hurts (even though the walls were built
to protect you)... They don't come down in an evening... it's a daily
exercise that has to take place... a gradual chipping-away at the
mortar... a slow erosion... The Philosophers were expecting instant
results. But these things take time.
Plus
I'm still not entirely convinced by their entire argument... At the
moment I think it is too complicated an issue to imagine that life
either follows the course of free will 'or' fate (they were arguing,
in the mode of The Ancient Greeks, for fate affecting life). I tend
to think it is something of both, like planting a garden: The
gardener can do their best with choosing the best seeds, sewing them
at the right time and in the right conditions, cultivating the land,
keeping it free from weeds and pests but, in reality, they can
neither control the environment nor the plants propensities (genetic,
hereditary, according to situation, etc)... Gardening (like art) is a
continuously 'controlled accident'... You can do your best and
achieve almost nothing... Other times you can do as little as
possible and wonderful things come about... Life is not … But I
cannot believe it is wholly governed by fate, by some ineffable pre
determinism... What was most poignant about that conversation with
the philosophers was the idea that “if a person is not
wholly themselves - i.e. in control of their thoughts and actions -
then when they do something terrible (hurt another being for example)
are they solely and fully to blame and punish for their action? Or is
there a larger ecology of influences which ought to be blamed and
punished? And should it not be those which are treated as much as the
perpetrator?”... and this I find difficult but poignant. This
conversation also reminded me of another which I had once with a good
friend. We were talking about suicide... he used the analogy of
suicide being like an infectious spore. The spore of suicide
contaminates the environment around it, quietly (sometimes invisibly)
poisoning people, spreading blackly... But there are always causes to
suicide... a dark lacy web of influences... a web which becomes a
net... and then, man, swaddled by the heavy black net, hears a word.
The
word is not spoken, nor is it imagined...
It
is as though the man were in the womb again, the word is without and
within, it is so much bigger than him and it is the first, the last
and the only word he would hear and know. The word is known not with
the intelligence of learning but with the knowing of fingertips and
follicles. The man would hear and know the word not through his
abstract mind but through the intelligence of his blood and
sinews...his skull is a black and hollow vessel ringing with the echo
of that word... the word is
YIELD
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