10.3.15
Losing My Religion
I think today, I'm losing my religion.
I'm sick and tired of the mindset that many people get, that culture is faith, because they confuse the two. Religious principles and scripture are married with societal expectations, into a toxic formula that creates rivalry and close-mindedness among the faithful. Mad zealotry ensues when the suggestion that something cultural could be incorrect, because when culture becomes intertwined with doctrine, challenging culture is challenging doctrine.
But once the lines are blurred enough, do they cease to exist?
Should this be the case, I'm losing my "religion" to find the doctrine I believe in.
28.1.15
Idiot Philosophy - The Gamble
"Life is a gamble. Once I came to terms with this, so many things became acceptable."
~Anonymous
~Anonymous
27.1.15
25.1.15
Faith and Frog Legs - The Next Great American Story
-I fear that I may have gone quite mad.
-Unfortunately, this isn't the first time. Or, perhaps I should be glad this isn't the first, for the logic of experience suggests that should help, in dealing with madness.
-Madness isn't logical.
-Madness is a lot like children - or, perhaps madness is a child, of a sort, a tiny thing on fast legs moving, each utterly alien from the next, all capable of more destruction and joy than form and structure would suggest.
-But there is such joy in madness. I mean, real joy, the kind that makes a man rip his shirt off on the top of a building and scream his lungs out, a primal sort of experience that keeps him laughing so hard that tears waterfall from the corner of his crinkled eyes as he pees his pants, because a cop is tasing him.
-Such sweet madness.
-I perhaps first came in contact at a very early age. The world as you might know it (who knows if anyone sees the world even near the same as another) never quite had the same grip on me as it did on others, you see. It was like trying to grip an oiled fish with buttered fingers. I'd just slip out and swim in what was, for the moment.
-Unfortunately, doing so much escaped swimming made life a more difficult, shuddering experience, akin to the violent back-and-forth jerking of manual transition under the shaky hands of a new driver. It gave me whiplash, that's what it did.
-This made school a series of unique experiences, as I was never quite on the same wavelength (mental or physical) as the other students, or the teachers. I could blame the Asperger's, but really I just didn't like them, and refused to condescend to their level (or perhaps rise to it - the jury is still out on that one). This isn't to suggest that I didn't have friends, I most certainly did, but at times I felt like a little monkey on a leash dancing for peanuts. Oh well. While they laughed, I filled my stomach and got some exercise.
-But I liked to entertain, still do. Those born strange either spend a lifetime entertaining, or else killing, so I chose the most pleasant sociopathic route and emulated a contemplative comedian, a thinking stand-up, the jester philosopher.
-I regret to say that puberty was a normalizing period in my life, though I can't say why (this cursed period of life tends to have the opposite effect on others). It was almost as if the collective, amorphous entity that represented me was shifted so far left that my body felt the need to harpoon it, pull me and trap myself in a physical fleshy prison. But harpooned isn't quite the right way to describe it, as I felt no pain (perhaps my body coated the harpoon with a powerful anaesthetic before launching it into my mind), Mayhaps I should say I netted me, and to drag me into the fuzzy fiction that is reality.
-Suddenly, life developed blurry edges, the world wasn't in quite as sharp contrast. No, I didn't need glasses or contact lens - I could see, I just couldn't see any longer. See?
-I missed the Strange and regretted my separation from it, have struggled to find myself after that (life made so much more sense when it was clarifying chaos). Or, has my self struggled to find me? I need to discover who is doing the finding and who is doing the struggling, and if they are the same individual, separate and distinct, but one (my mental trinity - me and me and me).
-But a slow-made point that can be taken away is, it's gotten harder to see, anymore, harder to be made to care. As always, there's a madness there, lurking behind my eyes, staring inward, but it's a new kind of madness. Heavier. Wetter. Thicker. Softer. Like a big quilt, anger without the sharp edges, all soaked in rum. But I can't light it on fire, no matter how hard I try.
-And I still can't taste the sweet, intoxicating alcohol madness.
-Unfortunately, this isn't the first time. Or, perhaps I should be glad this isn't the first, for the logic of experience suggests that should help, in dealing with madness.
-Madness isn't logical.
-Madness is a lot like children - or, perhaps madness is a child, of a sort, a tiny thing on fast legs moving, each utterly alien from the next, all capable of more destruction and joy than form and structure would suggest.
-But there is such joy in madness. I mean, real joy, the kind that makes a man rip his shirt off on the top of a building and scream his lungs out, a primal sort of experience that keeps him laughing so hard that tears waterfall from the corner of his crinkled eyes as he pees his pants, because a cop is tasing him.
-Such sweet madness.
-I perhaps first came in contact at a very early age. The world as you might know it (who knows if anyone sees the world even near the same as another) never quite had the same grip on me as it did on others, you see. It was like trying to grip an oiled fish with buttered fingers. I'd just slip out and swim in what was, for the moment.
-Unfortunately, doing so much escaped swimming made life a more difficult, shuddering experience, akin to the violent back-and-forth jerking of manual transition under the shaky hands of a new driver. It gave me whiplash, that's what it did.
-This made school a series of unique experiences, as I was never quite on the same wavelength (mental or physical) as the other students, or the teachers. I could blame the Asperger's, but really I just didn't like them, and refused to condescend to their level (or perhaps rise to it - the jury is still out on that one). This isn't to suggest that I didn't have friends, I most certainly did, but at times I felt like a little monkey on a leash dancing for peanuts. Oh well. While they laughed, I filled my stomach and got some exercise.
-But I liked to entertain, still do. Those born strange either spend a lifetime entertaining, or else killing, so I chose the most pleasant sociopathic route and emulated a contemplative comedian, a thinking stand-up, the jester philosopher.
-I regret to say that puberty was a normalizing period in my life, though I can't say why (this cursed period of life tends to have the opposite effect on others). It was almost as if the collective, amorphous entity that represented me was shifted so far left that my body felt the need to harpoon it, pull me and trap myself in a physical fleshy prison. But harpooned isn't quite the right way to describe it, as I felt no pain (perhaps my body coated the harpoon with a powerful anaesthetic before launching it into my mind), Mayhaps I should say I netted me, and to drag me into the fuzzy fiction that is reality.
-Suddenly, life developed blurry edges, the world wasn't in quite as sharp contrast. No, I didn't need glasses or contact lens - I could see, I just couldn't see any longer. See?
-I missed the Strange and regretted my separation from it, have struggled to find myself after that (life made so much more sense when it was clarifying chaos). Or, has my self struggled to find me? I need to discover who is doing the finding and who is doing the struggling, and if they are the same individual, separate and distinct, but one (my mental trinity - me and me and me).
-But a slow-made point that can be taken away is, it's gotten harder to see, anymore, harder to be made to care. As always, there's a madness there, lurking behind my eyes, staring inward, but it's a new kind of madness. Heavier. Wetter. Thicker. Softer. Like a big quilt, anger without the sharp edges, all soaked in rum. But I can't light it on fire, no matter how hard I try.
-And I still can't taste the sweet, intoxicating alcohol madness.
21.1.15
Racism
Nothing gets my blood boiling faster then prescribing guilt to me for crimes that past generations committed, that I was in no way part of.
I come to this thought because of a discussion in my English class today. We were discussing the book Native Guard (which has some very nice poems in it, by the way, I'm not putting down the book at all), and some themes that my classmates came up with were specifically racism and memory... And perhaps (I hope) I interpreted my classmates incorrectly, but the memory of which they spoke was the attempt to keep memory fresh, to treat the past as if it was alive today, as if white people should still be paying penance for past sins.
I am white, and I am not racist.
I have had no part in any racist activities, today or in an age where I hadn't even been born yet. I believe that prescribing the sins of a past generation to an individual is racism, a deceptively subtle racism that undermines attempts to encourage the world to see past color and just look at the individual.
Individual. That's such a beautiful word. That I can be myself, that I can choose who I am and what I do with my life, that I don't have to be what others assume.
That I can forgive and move on.
Don't let the history books forget, because a forgotten history repeats itself. But let the pain be forgotten. Let the anger, and the hate, and the mistrust be forgotten. As long as any group of people keeps holding onto these feelings like they are life themselves, as long as we as a people act like there are sides in the first place, things might get better to a degree, but there will always be those lines drawn. There will always be a divide.
And I don't want to sound like racism doesn't exist today, or that just ignoring it will make it magically disappear. It's a hard, consistent effort to scrub away something that ugly. But, to use a metaphor, when you scrub a stain out of something, putting forth hours of painful effort, all of your work is wasted, all of the pleasure you could be taking in looking at the newly cleaned and beautified space is poisoned, if all that you think about is the stain that used to be there.
It's time to stop thinking about old stains, and start cleaning up existing ones, to make sure that this house we share is clean and beautiful.
I come to this thought because of a discussion in my English class today. We were discussing the book Native Guard (which has some very nice poems in it, by the way, I'm not putting down the book at all), and some themes that my classmates came up with were specifically racism and memory... And perhaps (I hope) I interpreted my classmates incorrectly, but the memory of which they spoke was the attempt to keep memory fresh, to treat the past as if it was alive today, as if white people should still be paying penance for past sins.
I am white, and I am not racist.
I have had no part in any racist activities, today or in an age where I hadn't even been born yet. I believe that prescribing the sins of a past generation to an individual is racism, a deceptively subtle racism that undermines attempts to encourage the world to see past color and just look at the individual.
Individual. That's such a beautiful word. That I can be myself, that I can choose who I am and what I do with my life, that I don't have to be what others assume.
That I can forgive and move on.
Don't let the history books forget, because a forgotten history repeats itself. But let the pain be forgotten. Let the anger, and the hate, and the mistrust be forgotten. As long as any group of people keeps holding onto these feelings like they are life themselves, as long as we as a people act like there are sides in the first place, things might get better to a degree, but there will always be those lines drawn. There will always be a divide.
And I don't want to sound like racism doesn't exist today, or that just ignoring it will make it magically disappear. It's a hard, consistent effort to scrub away something that ugly. But, to use a metaphor, when you scrub a stain out of something, putting forth hours of painful effort, all of your work is wasted, all of the pleasure you could be taking in looking at the newly cleaned and beautified space is poisoned, if all that you think about is the stain that used to be there.
It's time to stop thinking about old stains, and start cleaning up existing ones, to make sure that this house we share is clean and beautiful.
16.1.15
Idiot Philosophy - The Road We Travel
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Robert Frost
Two days prior to writing this post, I was walking down Freshman Hill with a friend. For those of you unfamiliar with this road, it's a small blacktop path connecting the freshman dorms to the main body of BYU Provo, surrounded by pretty foliage. I forget what precisely brought us to out topic of conversation (perhaps that would allow me to make more sense of this), but being my usual self I couldn't help but make up some philosophical crap on the spot.
"Life is a journey, Amanda." I said, or something close to these lines. "We're all travelers trying to move from point A to point B or C or D. Some people make it as far as they're going, some people shoot for C and somehow end up running into number 5, at which point they feel confused because they managed to get so off course as to change from letters to numbers. So because there is never any guarantee you'll reach your destination, or perhaps even anywhere like it, what matters about this journey is two things: how you get there, and what you're striving for. How we get there is a discussion for another time. (although I happen to be walking at this immediate moment, don't you see?) What you're striving for indicates your goals and values. Why else would you be striving for something if you didn't value it? That says a lot about the individual. As for me, I'm striving in this moment to get lunch, so you could say that food is my life. Food is everything."
Your idiot philosophy for the day: if life is how you get where you're trying to go, in addition to the goal in mind, I encourage your goal to be food, and your method a brisk walk in nippy afternoon air.
Edit: Apparently I've used the above poem before. While not in and of itself a bad thing (I love this poem), I should start looking for more to keep a little... variety going on.
Edit: Apparently I've used the above poem before. While not in and of itself a bad thing (I love this poem), I should start looking for more to keep a little... variety going on.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)