2.12.2008
10.28.2007
is this a manifesto? no, just some thoughts.
I maintain a conviction that what I'm doing with my life has some purpose. Some greater purpose, that is, than the stuff of just living, just getting by. I'm learning. I'm improving things for myself and therefore, by living in the way that I want to, I'll be improving things for everyone. Eventually I hope I'll get to a point with these ways of expressing myself that it'll really make a difference. I should be writing more. I need some satisfyingly eloquent way of expressing myself, and I haven't been maintaining any of the venues I've cultivated proficiency in so far - music (the saxophone, the piano, sometimes the bassoon...), academics (?), y'know, whatever else I've been really good at in life so far. Public speaking? Hah. That digs into the whole can of worms and what-ifs that Unitarian Universalism fills at this point in my life. Not in the mood for that right now.
As great American novelist-philosopher Robert M. Pirsig says, there is a keen metaphor for the workings of the hyper-rational mind, that of an analytic knife. The knife defines our view of the world in analytic forms, and it doesn't always cut very keenly. For those who learn to guide their thoughts with the steadying power of rationality and logic, it's becomes easier to see the shape of their worldview - the edges of perspective formed by the ever-moving surgery of this knife. We're deep into metaphor now, but bear with me. The shape of one's worldview is one thing to consider, but also keep in mind what would happen in these metaphorical terms if one were to have a very very keen rational knife, a great logical mind, and nothing to balance it; a very small view of the world, a whole lot of black and white, with clear edges of faith everywhere and an unassailable core of reasoning to defend it all. That's surely not too unpleasant of a way to live one's life, but I can't help but feel like it misses most of the potential that we have to revel in our human flaws.
Face it - we're inherently flawed, wonderfully imperfect creatures. It's one of the deepest truths I've uncovered. Follow any philosophy deep enough and you either are blinded by confusion and close your eyes in blind faith, or you uncover your eyes and see that there's something imperfect, mortal, limited, somehow fundamentally dissonant about being human. There's room for improvement. There's a gap between what we are and what we want to be. There's something worth struggling for. This struggle is, I guess, a somewhat bizarrely stark representation of something I try to understand about the nature of faith. How can people accept so willingly and wholeheartedly, so many very different answers to the question; why we are here?
Mmm, heady stuff. Back to Pirsig's knife. I've been working for some time now on honing mine, that is, intentionally 'flexing' mental muscles, as it were, and thinking hard about something. I hope everybody does that, by the way. I think it'd be very sad if people didn't stop every now and then and take a while to tackle some mental exercise the way that you'd tackle any other project, from baking cookies to fixing a car or doing the crossword or researching a band or reading scientific papers or walking the dog. All of these sorts of projects require mental effort, sure, and varying degrees of it, but just as it's healthy to do some purely physical exercise every day, I just want to remind everybody to do some purely mental exercise too. And spend the rest of your time balancing the two. Seek balance. [Yes, I totally feel like an advice columnist or something now, all giving prescriptive advice and being preachy and this-is-how-things-are. Sorry.]
So the question I'm tackling for myself these last couple weeks or so is this: Why am I so fascinated right now by learning about my parents' pasts and what am I getting out of consciously and subconsciously emulating the successes and failures of my parents?
The answer, I think, came to me tonight. Well, an answer. Maybe it's not the best one. Maybe it won't make sense tomorrow. But I think that it all adds up... I'm forging an identity. I'm making this complex, tangled web of experience and perspective that we call a sense of self, and I'm paying particular attention right now to the ways in which I reflect and refract the discrete identities of my parents in the way I am, myself. And this is all very normal. Everybody does this, or at least has the opportunity to do this, all the time. Figure out who you are, ask yourself why you do the things you do, and let the picture of yourself that you paint in your mind with the answers to these questions be both an encouragement and a warning when considering all that you do next.
[Editorial note: I can tell that this writing seems, as a style, to be excessively normative, and I'm unhappy with it's rigidity as such, and the lack of respect for general relativism that it suggests. However, if the reader will be so kind as to 'push' out one level of analytic dimension, in the sense of dimensional 'push' and 'pop' that Hofstadler describes, these opinions of mine will seem much more appropriately humble. They are simply a mark of how I think at this point in time, and not at all something that I write at this time with the thought that it could or should hold true for all time. This disclaimer, by the by, if applied to all philosophical writing, could ameliorate a good deal of frustration with how stuffy those goddamn philosophers are. I think.]
So here I am, son of my father, son of my mother, etc. with the exception of my father's brother Chad, who insists on calling me Uncle and whom I obligingly refer to as Nephew - he says he feels old enough anyway without being called 'uncle', and I guess I believe him. I'm not going to try to sum up who I think I am, because that's not the point. I don't think I'm that interesting, or rather, I don't think I want to spend my life now talking about my life before now - I'm too busy trying to live it, so I'll have more to talk about later. And this is the struggle. For me, and maybe for a lot of other people. How much of my life do I spend as a means to an end, and how much of it do I spend vicariously? Really, it's a constant flux, an irregular dance of the bars on a graph, the skittering of needles on the polygraph, the static in the recording; this switching between modes is what creates such dissonance for us. The modes are, for purposes of this idea, the experiential and the analytical (my labels), roughly analogous to Pirsig's romantic and classical views of the world, in turn analogous to Kant's dichotomy between the immediacy of experiential reasoning and the a priori knowledge of the mind.
We switch back and forth between modes, jumping the chasm of this dichotomy, all the time. How wide the chasm is and how difficult a transition it is for us from one side to the other also depends on the lay of the land - that is, what we're doing with ourselves at the moment, what influences we're under, etc. The way in which we cut up our perception of the world and the edges of what we take to be meaningful are under our own control to define - such is the work of the knife I keep coming back to. If we can precisely and intentionally, thinking, quite simply, becomes easier.
I'd better make sure I'm making sense here and not lost in too broad a generalization or too specific of a metaphor. Perhaps examples of what I mean by experiential and analytical. Living primarily in the experiential mode, I might spend a whole day running, jumping, and climbing trees, (as Eddie Izzard once described). I'd be DOING things all day, you know, waving at strangers, practicing random acts of kindness, talking, dancing, reveling in the senses and being relational in the interpersonal sense, making social connections. In a primarily analytical day, I could have just as wonderful of a time sitting at home, reading - the paper, a magazine, bits of a book or three, wikipedia, allmusic, blogs, facebook - and writing, doing puzzles, working on origami models. I'd be comfortably alone in my own mind, reveling in the flow of information and the richness and complexity of intrapersonal relations, making intellectual connections. It's a world of a priori, conceptual analysis and thought, all captured in a very small and uninteresting physical world composed only of some papers and screen, and I suspect that some people can only see that sort of living as somebody sitting on their ass instead of getting out in the world and doing something 'important'. I think that's unnecessarily judgmental and close-minded, only because it ignores the challenge of finding a way to comfortably balance both by claiming that one is better than the other. There's some definite value in seeing flaws in either mode alone, because neither one is very valuable without the other.
Depending on the level of detail you apply this analysis to, the switching back and forth can be seen as an almost constant process, so keeping the analysis broad is most useful - the patterns you can see are much more interesting on a larger scale than from moment-to-moment. Labeling everything as motivated by either experiential or analytical inspiration is exhausting after a while, and is itself a highly analytic process.
Essentially, the point of this concept is to encourage others to seek self-awareness in a similar way, or whatever way works better. As I see it, honing one's analytical knife to as biting a sharpness as possible makes it possible to think more clearly all the time, spending less time 'in the air' while jumping the gap between modes of thinking and more time with both feet on the ground, enjoying the best of both sides. That's the idea, right? Make the most of this life. Find a way to get somewhere with your struggle.
I think I'm leaving this awfully unpolished, but it's starting to feel late. Thanks for reading, please leave a note if you read the whole thing and give me some perspective on whether this sort of writing is more 'hmm, interesting' or 'wtf'.
As great American novelist-philosopher Robert M. Pirsig says, there is a keen metaphor for the workings of the hyper-rational mind, that of an analytic knife. The knife defines our view of the world in analytic forms, and it doesn't always cut very keenly. For those who learn to guide their thoughts with the steadying power of rationality and logic, it's becomes easier to see the shape of their worldview - the edges of perspective formed by the ever-moving surgery of this knife. We're deep into metaphor now, but bear with me. The shape of one's worldview is one thing to consider, but also keep in mind what would happen in these metaphorical terms if one were to have a very very keen rational knife, a great logical mind, and nothing to balance it; a very small view of the world, a whole lot of black and white, with clear edges of faith everywhere and an unassailable core of reasoning to defend it all. That's surely not too unpleasant of a way to live one's life, but I can't help but feel like it misses most of the potential that we have to revel in our human flaws.
Face it - we're inherently flawed, wonderfully imperfect creatures. It's one of the deepest truths I've uncovered. Follow any philosophy deep enough and you either are blinded by confusion and close your eyes in blind faith, or you uncover your eyes and see that there's something imperfect, mortal, limited, somehow fundamentally dissonant about being human. There's room for improvement. There's a gap between what we are and what we want to be. There's something worth struggling for. This struggle is, I guess, a somewhat bizarrely stark representation of something I try to understand about the nature of faith. How can people accept so willingly and wholeheartedly, so many very different answers to the question; why we are here?
Mmm, heady stuff. Back to Pirsig's knife. I've been working for some time now on honing mine, that is, intentionally 'flexing' mental muscles, as it were, and thinking hard about something. I hope everybody does that, by the way. I think it'd be very sad if people didn't stop every now and then and take a while to tackle some mental exercise the way that you'd tackle any other project, from baking cookies to fixing a car or doing the crossword or researching a band or reading scientific papers or walking the dog. All of these sorts of projects require mental effort, sure, and varying degrees of it, but just as it's healthy to do some purely physical exercise every day, I just want to remind everybody to do some purely mental exercise too. And spend the rest of your time balancing the two. Seek balance. [Yes, I totally feel like an advice columnist or something now, all giving prescriptive advice and being preachy and this-is-how-things-are. Sorry.]
So the question I'm tackling for myself these last couple weeks or so is this: Why am I so fascinated right now by learning about my parents' pasts and what am I getting out of consciously and subconsciously emulating the successes and failures of my parents?
The answer, I think, came to me tonight. Well, an answer. Maybe it's not the best one. Maybe it won't make sense tomorrow. But I think that it all adds up... I'm forging an identity. I'm making this complex, tangled web of experience and perspective that we call a sense of self, and I'm paying particular attention right now to the ways in which I reflect and refract the discrete identities of my parents in the way I am, myself. And this is all very normal. Everybody does this, or at least has the opportunity to do this, all the time. Figure out who you are, ask yourself why you do the things you do, and let the picture of yourself that you paint in your mind with the answers to these questions be both an encouragement and a warning when considering all that you do next.
[Editorial note: I can tell that this writing seems, as a style, to be excessively normative, and I'm unhappy with it's rigidity as such, and the lack of respect for general relativism that it suggests. However, if the reader will be so kind as to 'push' out one level of analytic dimension, in the sense of dimensional 'push' and 'pop' that Hofstadler describes, these opinions of mine will seem much more appropriately humble. They are simply a mark of how I think at this point in time, and not at all something that I write at this time with the thought that it could or should hold true for all time. This disclaimer, by the by, if applied to all philosophical writing, could ameliorate a good deal of frustration with how stuffy those goddamn philosophers are. I think.]
So here I am, son of my father, son of my mother, etc. with the exception of my father's brother Chad, who insists on calling me Uncle and whom I obligingly refer to as Nephew - he says he feels old enough anyway without being called 'uncle', and I guess I believe him. I'm not going to try to sum up who I think I am, because that's not the point. I don't think I'm that interesting, or rather, I don't think I want to spend my life now talking about my life before now - I'm too busy trying to live it, so I'll have more to talk about later. And this is the struggle. For me, and maybe for a lot of other people. How much of my life do I spend as a means to an end, and how much of it do I spend vicariously? Really, it's a constant flux, an irregular dance of the bars on a graph, the skittering of needles on the polygraph, the static in the recording; this switching between modes is what creates such dissonance for us. The modes are, for purposes of this idea, the experiential and the analytical (my labels), roughly analogous to Pirsig's romantic and classical views of the world, in turn analogous to Kant's dichotomy between the immediacy of experiential reasoning and the a priori knowledge of the mind.
We switch back and forth between modes, jumping the chasm of this dichotomy, all the time. How wide the chasm is and how difficult a transition it is for us from one side to the other also depends on the lay of the land - that is, what we're doing with ourselves at the moment, what influences we're under, etc. The way in which we cut up our perception of the world and the edges of what we take to be meaningful are under our own control to define - such is the work of the knife I keep coming back to. If we can precisely and intentionally, thinking, quite simply, becomes easier.
I'd better make sure I'm making sense here and not lost in too broad a generalization or too specific of a metaphor. Perhaps examples of what I mean by experiential and analytical. Living primarily in the experiential mode, I might spend a whole day running, jumping, and climbing trees, (as Eddie Izzard once described). I'd be DOING things all day, you know, waving at strangers, practicing random acts of kindness, talking, dancing, reveling in the senses and being relational in the interpersonal sense, making social connections. In a primarily analytical day, I could have just as wonderful of a time sitting at home, reading - the paper, a magazine, bits of a book or three, wikipedia, allmusic, blogs, facebook - and writing, doing puzzles, working on origami models. I'd be comfortably alone in my own mind, reveling in the flow of information and the richness and complexity of intrapersonal relations, making intellectual connections. It's a world of a priori, conceptual analysis and thought, all captured in a very small and uninteresting physical world composed only of some papers and screen, and I suspect that some people can only see that sort of living as somebody sitting on their ass instead of getting out in the world and doing something 'important'. I think that's unnecessarily judgmental and close-minded, only because it ignores the challenge of finding a way to comfortably balance both by claiming that one is better than the other. There's some definite value in seeing flaws in either mode alone, because neither one is very valuable without the other.
Depending on the level of detail you apply this analysis to, the switching back and forth can be seen as an almost constant process, so keeping the analysis broad is most useful - the patterns you can see are much more interesting on a larger scale than from moment-to-moment. Labeling everything as motivated by either experiential or analytical inspiration is exhausting after a while, and is itself a highly analytic process.
Essentially, the point of this concept is to encourage others to seek self-awareness in a similar way, or whatever way works better. As I see it, honing one's analytical knife to as biting a sharpness as possible makes it possible to think more clearly all the time, spending less time 'in the air' while jumping the gap between modes of thinking and more time with both feet on the ground, enjoying the best of both sides. That's the idea, right? Make the most of this life. Find a way to get somewhere with your struggle.
I think I'm leaving this awfully unpolished, but it's starting to feel late. Thanks for reading, please leave a note if you read the whole thing and give me some perspective on whether this sort of writing is more 'hmm, interesting' or 'wtf'.
6.08.2007
well, here I am
Man, it's been a long time. There's so much I could write about, blah blah blah, but truth be told it's just not worth the time to go back and create a novel out of the last few weeks. It would take another week or so, and I could be out doing stuff instead of writing about stuff that already happened. So here's a quick way of being kinda interesting and providing some idea of the grand adventure that my life currently is without taking up too much of it in the telling - a list. Here's some of what I've done and seen and experienced in the last while, in no particular order.
Well, so it goes. More to follow!
- saw a man on the sidewalk flip off and scream obscenities at a passing ambulance.
- met a guy who was looking for his pet mountain lion and gazed in due wonderment at the very deep scratches all over his arms and legs. yes, they were from his 'mountain lion,' and he was fresh out of the hospital, drinking 22s of Alaskan Amber, and looking for his cat. he seemed really genuinely concerned that nobody was helping him find the beast.
- applied for a job at the Alberta Cooperative Grocery two blocks from my house.
- found graffiti on the outside of the fence around the back of my new house.
- found cat shit/vomit on my rug in the bathroom - not my cat's doing, either.
- hiked through the International Rose Garden with Abra.
- memorable moment - after hours of making fun of the crazy names people give their roses, I was totally noticed acting like a stoner by some guy with dreads and a camera. I was standing there with Abra and we were talking about the roses, and I said something like, "ah, yes, 'The Poet.' Fresh, vividly colored, yet maintaining that literary depth which earned him his name." (yes, I'm talking about a rose bush) And the guy was walking by and overheard me and just grinned at Abra and I and was like "hey guys, how's it going" and oh man, I was embarassed. I think I blushed.
- got lost at Washington Park with Abra, wandering along unmarked trails and crossing the intra-park railway several times.
- at one point we emerged from the underbrush just as a train was starting to go by, and I just stood there in my torn jeans and flip-flops, Abra on the hill about ten feet behind me, picking her way down the trail in ballet flats (yeah, we have great hiking footwear). the train was full of tourists and families 'seeing the park' from the safety of a wee train. I just stood there, smoking my cigarette, avoiding direct eye contact, feeling totally on display and trying to be cool. The exhibit was titled "hipsters taken out of their natural habitat" and it was awesome.
- it occurs to me now in trying to describe that that maybe you had to be there. but it was amazingly funny at the time. I looked back at Abra once the train had passed and she was just doubled over laughing, and imagining what it must have looked like from the train - I mean, there was no reason for us to be out there, we were following tiny little dirt paths, and there was nobody else around. Anyway. Maybe you had to be there.
- at one point we emerged from the underbrush just as a train was starting to go by, and I just stood there in my torn jeans and flip-flops, Abra on the hill about ten feet behind me, picking her way down the trail in ballet flats (yeah, we have great hiking footwear). the train was full of tourists and families 'seeing the park' from the safety of a wee train. I just stood there, smoking my cigarette, avoiding direct eye contact, feeling totally on display and trying to be cool. The exhibit was titled "hipsters taken out of their natural habitat" and it was awesome.
- I've been carded maybe eight times so far, either buying beer or at the bar, and only one person has ever seen a uniformed services ID card before. They've all asked and been reassured when I confirm that no, I was never actually in the service myself.
- walking with Abra & Megan back to my house from the Co-op, overheard the following: A guy gets out of his car and calls up to a few people outside on the porch of a house three down from mine, and he says "hi there! I don't mean to be rude, but I just got back into town from Washington DC and I grew up in that house (points across the street at a house) and, well, I just have one question... what happened to the neighborhood?" (everybody, on the porch and in my group, laughs) He looks over at us with a flicker of concern that he's pissed us off or something and Megan says "yeah, I KNOW!" (more laughter from everyone). I should explain - I'm in a neighborhood where people seem to act very stereotypically proud of their race. That is, black people live around here, and they seem to actively enforce certain stereotypes of what being black is supposed to mean. Like talking loudly and at all hours in very ebonics-tinged vernacular, and acting suspicious or demeaning towards the white people. The white people, in turn, reinforce other crappy stereotypes by acting aloof and holier-and-richer-than-thou, and it's a bunch of hogwash. So I'm guessing that 'the neighborhood' being referred to was one where it was pretty much racially homogenous and there weren't all these honkies hanging around. Anyway...
- while driving, I was stopped at a light, and a guy comes up to my passenger window and asks if I can give him a dollar for four quarters, and I'm stuck behind a bus and the light just turned red, so I figure okay, I can help somebody out here. well, he tried to scam me eight different ways and then asked if I smoked pot right as the light was changing, and said 'hey man, come back here!' and well, I just waved out the sunroof and said 'later man' and drove off.
Well, so it goes. More to follow!
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