Saturday, November 01, 2008
My turn for a sembreak epiphany
Sembreak has officially sunk in, mostly due to the lonely feeling of going back to everyday drudgery that comes each time people visit the house. Add to that the fact that we (Karize, Ilia, Charet and I) had to go and spontaneously write a song that has 'I miss eLBi' written all over it. Sure, I don't have as much a right as the graduates to rant about the whole 'I miss the laid-back life in the mountains', but something tells me this last sem will be over before we all know it. Hi thesis, how're ya doin'? Don't say bad words.
Life is currently one big routine of waking up late, going on the Internet and reading and playing my ass off until the wee hours of the morning, with a bit of reading here and there. I feel static. But they say that there is no victory without defeat, no beauty without ugliness, no happiness without sadness. Difference, as Derrida said. Not even a sameness without the idea of difference itself coming in to change everything.
Change. We all thrive on it. See the philosophies of Plato and Kierkegaard, which state that humans really are programmed to not be pleased with the mere finities it understands. This makes us trapped within a vicious existential pit, to forever desire what we may never be able to achieve. This, in turn, fuels our libido, and not only in the sexual sense. Libog, as they say. Passion. The force that drives us to keep striving for things that border (only border, mind you) on the infinite and the unknowable. Thus we are set apart from every other species on this planet (and probably those on other planets, if we are to follow the Fermi paradox). There is no escape from this angst; even saying 'sucks to be human' simply makes you fall into the same paradoxical pit.
So we wallow, the only cure for which is other people's attention, since let's face it: everybody is an attention whore. Cue Locke's 'man is a social animal' which is probably really cliched by now, but what the heck it's true. As heck. Without attention, people simply wither away and die in the midst of wallowing in their own misery. So people turn to more desperate methods, like the Internet and all its time-consuming pseudo-attention outlets (I think I'm looking at you, Plurk. You're even more extreme than Facebook), which make our real lives feel even more worth less. Throw in the amount of miscommunication potential (nonverbals count, after all, for about 93 per cent of our communication), and you've got one big mess of an interpersonal interaction going on.
Nobody needs chat buddies, everybody needs real people to hang out wih, to talk about anything (no matter how disjointed the associations between discussion topics end up) over a cup of coffee (coffee is my hang-out-for-a-long-while-and-talk drink) and a Go Nuts donut or two (Krispy Kreme if you like them better). Sure, staying home and staying 24/7 online is wayyy cheaper. If you want artificial attention, that is.
Trying to write, not coming up with anything new. So, trying to revise old content. Problem is, I stare at the screen and eventually end up reading something else on the Internet (if I'm connected) or playing (if I'm not). Think the problem is that there isn't enough happening with my life. It's a delicate balance, in my opinion: too little happening in your life, and you're stuck imagning things up, and people know how dangerous leaving somebody to rely solely on their solitude's imaginings is. Too much, and you simply do not have enough time to rite. Yes, that was a typo, but a fortunate one. Because writing, I believe, requires the sort of preparation and attention to detail similar to what one undergoes when doing any sort of ritual. Put extremely, we have to be in the so-called 'writing mood' which may not differ that much from the trance people enter when doing a ritual, sacrament, pot session or whatnot.
Stasis is scary. Silence is scary. Because it makes you think things. Things that you don't think of because they're impossible to think of while you're moving and noisy (in short, living your day-to-day life). Things like the future, and how extreme, inexplicable, and at times extremely inexplicable, it is. How, like Neil Gaiman and every other fantasy writer who figured out how to kill a god, it is so much worse to be forgotten than to simply die; to leave this planet without having realized (as in, made real) or passed anything of value on to those of the future. And from this basic anxiety other anxieties rise, culminating in the most superficial of paranoias (paranoiae?), the most basic of which may be the paranoia over the future itself. 'Damnant quod non intelligunt' after all, and what concept out there is less intelligible than the future?
No, love doesn't count. Too complicated (but not untelligible enough) a thing to talk about; just ask every 'It's Complicated' out there in Friendster and Facebook.
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