Tag: ponder

we’ll always be together in electric dreams

Ever had a dream that made you wake up laughing?

So I was at a writer’s workshop where some dude was trying to get under my skin. Then we became best friends. Tom Brady also showed up because he was trying to get his acting career started. Why he was at a writer’s workshop was never explained.

Then, like a ghost from the past, appeared an old friend. In real life I haven’t spoken to him in nearly 15 years. His brother was actually my best friend and our friendship ended in the worst possible way: in a courtroom (we both lost btw). It’s one of my biggest regrets, and in truth, I dream about him often.

But his brother shows up, and I confide in him that I think highly of his sibling and I miss them both. In fact, I tell him that I am at this workshop because I am writing a fictionalized version of our friendship.

The Brother tells me that I can’t do that. I ask why and he disappears into a bookstore. I go looking for him and I find him with three small children. I ask him again why I can’t write the book. He tells me that his brother’s dead and that one of these children is his son.

It was a poignant moment in the dream. It reminded me of the passage of time, how we were once small children, and how we are now creating the next generation. I tell the Son of my best friend that I too have a son, how fortunate he is to have his uncle, and that his father was a good man.

The Brother disappears once again, and I help the Child find his uncle. As I walk with the Child, he tells me to not have regrets, and that he hopes to meet my son. I tell him that “that’s a very nice thing to say,” and that I hope they meet someday too.

Finally, we find his uncle standing outside. He’s with two men in suits. I tell the Brother that per his wishes, I won’t write the book. One of the men in suits spoke up and said “that’s a wise decision.”

“Are you an attorney?” I ask.

He nodded.

“What if I changed all the names and events? Can you sue me then?” I said.

“Well clearly he (my best friend) is everything that he’s not,” the lawyer replied. Whatever that meant.

I look over to the Brother. “Did you invite these guys here?” I ask.

He did.

“Well fuck it,” I said. “I’m writing the book.”

I then pointed at the lawyer’s shirt like he had a stain. When he looked down, I lifted my finger up to his face.

“Fuckin loser,” I said.

Then the dream ended.

😀 Hate mail! 👍

I never thought anyone would take my shit posting seriously enough to write out an entire comment longer than the initial post itself. But I forget, “the internet ruined everything”.

Btw, this comment was made on my “your damn right ignorance is bliss!” post.

I don’t know if this person was real or some bot trying to spread some article around (about COVID, a subject that I don’t recall discussing on this blog), but my response was “the post was a joke”.

But then I got to thinking: was I joking?

Sure, the intent was to post some stupid thought that crossed my mind. But the more I think about it: hell yeah an existence void of desire and knowledge of good and evil sounds pretty damn good!

Of course, that’s not how my hater saw it. He/she thought I was embracing “keeping the masses ignorant”, or “listening to establishment propaganda”, or blah blah blah.

I get it. I got lost down that road of political ideology too. I’ve spent all of 2021 trying to get over it. That’s why I created this blog for fuck’s sake.

But there is no truth in ideology. That’s why it’s ideology. We have to form these ideologies. You know why? Because the truth is too terrifying to handle.

That’s why I always thought that Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the shit in The Matrix, “the truth shall set you free”, etc. kinda miss the point. To get the gist of what I’m trying to say, Slavoj Zizek, whatever you think about him, once said about the shitty film The Joker (paraphrase): “it’s through the mask that we can be our true selves.”

Because there is nothing underneath the mask.

So you want the truth?

Here it is:

The “establishment”, however you want to define that, doesn’t give a shit about you. They don’t even give enough of a shit to form a conspiracy to fuck with you. They don’t think about you. They don’t fear you.

You are nothing.

You were born from standard biological processes and one day you will return to nothing. Most people you know do not think about you. When you die, only 3 or 4 people will truly mourn for you. After a few weeks, you will be forgotten.

This has been the story of billions of people throughout history. Statistically speaking, you will be totally, utterly forgotten.

Beyond this life lies nothing.

So in this life, there is absolutely nothing stopping you from doing the most heinous crime you can think of. Absolutely nothing. You can do it right now.

So what are you gonna do with that freedom?

You think there’s someone pulling the strings? Well guess what buddy, it’s worse than that: NO ONE’S pulling the strings.

The universe is just there. It’s infinite. YOU’RE NOT. You will never make sense of it.

I hope everyone reading laughs at this, because that’s the only sane response.

So now you can understand why I want to be “ignorant”. We should admire the Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, Hindus, etc etc. Hell, I’ll even admire Conservatives, libs, leftists, rightists, libertarians, etc. At least they believe something.

There nothing wrong with sublimating our beliefs and desires into ideologies, but, taking from Sigmund Freud, the aim of this life should be to “sublimate well”.

Anyways, gotta go. Left my wallet at Hardee’s. Bye ✋

jesus the cynic?

It’s interesting to view Jesus scholarship over the last 50 years. Most of it seems to reflect more on the political climate of the era it was written rather than on the actual historical Jesus, i.e. by turning Jesus into “Jesus the Revolutionary”, “Jesus the Mystic”, “Jesus the Philosopher”,etc.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Arguably I make it when I refer to Jesus as a “populist” figure of the time (I don’t mean that as a compliment. I mean that in its most literal sense: Jesus was addressing working class problems in a religious/political context.) It’s very difficult to separate our biases from the subject being analyzed, especially one as controversial as the historicity of Jesus.

I think there’s a (growing) minority consensus that Jesus took some influence from the Cynics. Some quack scholars might even say he was an outright Cynic.

I think this is an interesting question. In my view, the majority of mainstream scholars, both Christian and secular, wish to paint Jesus as a figure that almost emerged from a vacuum. It makes sense actually. All of the earliest, independently attested documents (The hypothetical Q…which survives almost in its entirety between the Gospels of Matthew and Luke…the epistles of Paul, Gospel of Mark, and Josephus) make no mention of Jesus’s origins (Q and Mark both start with the Baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist). So an attempt to say anything about Jesus’s influences, other than that of John the Baptist, would be pure conjecture. But there are some interesting parallels between Jesus and the Cynics: Mark 6:8, the location of Nazareth and its proximity to an apparent hotbed of Cynicism, Jesus’s confrontational style and eschewing of fame and fortune, embracing of poverty, etc. etc.

But read the Cynic texts. To the Cynics, Diogenes was their “Christ figure”. They all tried to emulate him. And to be honest, he was a disgusting asshole. While Diogenes definitely had his influence, I doubt he would have accumulated very many personal followers. I mean, many might have tried to ACT like him, but there’s no way anyone could have spent more than 10 minutes around him. Jesus, meanwhile, was probably trying to do something entirely different and would have certainly disapproved of things like…I dunno…MASTURBATING and SHITTING in public.

In my humble view, the Cynic modus operandi was likely something that was in the air at the time which some itinerant and apocalyptic preachers might have adopted. But just because that aesthetic was in vogue at the moment doesn’t mean that they were practicing Cynics.

While it’s fun to speculate, the simplest explanation is probably the correct one: Jesus was an apocalyptic Jewish preacher preaching to a mostly Jewish audience.

your damn right ignorance is bliss!

Ever wonder how nice it would be to not know how to read?

Or how about being a eunuch? You never have to have sex again. Sounds like a good deal to me.

What about being a monk? You know, never having to talk, being separated from society, and you get to read all day.

Or better yet, how about being a eunuch monk that doesn’t know how to read?

Sounds like my ideal existence.

the problem of good

Part of the reason why William Peter Blatty considered The Ninth Configuration as a true sequel to The Exorcist is because they both attempt to address the “mystery of the good.”

Blatty, from my understanding of course, was a devout Catholic so he understood these terms from a very spiritual perspective. While I find the phenomenon of religion fascinating, I don’t view the universe in that particular way. Nevertheless, I think Blatty was attempting to address a very interesting question, particularly with The Ninth Configuration (the film. I haven’t read the novel)

Much ado is made about “the problem of evil”, but that’s only a problem from a religious perspective. If the the universe is indifferent to our plight, and life is inherently selfish, then there is no mystery. Furthermore, there is no good OR evil…it’s merely a projection of human perception.

Many philosophers have attempted to formulate a model for morality, notably Kant’s Categorical Imperative and utilitarianism, with varying degrees of success. I personally tend to favor something that I heard Bart Ehrman say: I just know it when I see it. However I do find it interesting that nearly every religion has some variant of the Golden Rule: do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.

I don’t think that I have many philosophical convictions, but one thing I am certain of is that I am not a “blank slatist”. If we were born as blank slates, then nothing we do would be possible. Language acquisition itself provides some insight into the a priori nature of our being. What language can tell us precisely about our morality is unknown to me, but I think it warrants further investigation as evidenced by the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule may not be a “philosophically consistent” principle, but I think it’s intuitive enough that there could possibly be something revealing about it. Empathy might be an example. To my understanding, empathy is a phenomenon that’s scientifically falsifiable, but I’m just spitballing here. Maybe “good” and “evil” are a priori categories of human reasoning, I dunno.

Either way, from both a religious and secular perspective, “the problem of good” needs answering.

woyzek and ninth configuration

I swear that I don’t plan what movies I’m gonna watch. I sit on my ass and scroll through some app on my smart TV and find random shit.

Oddly enough, the two movies I watched back to back were Werner Herzog’s Woyzeck and William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration. Both films are about military personnel dealing with insanity and philosophy….not subjects that you find in most films.

This is probably not one of Herzog’s more appreciated films and I wasn’t entirely certain what to make of it. If you watch it, it probably wouldn’t come as a surprise to you that it was shot in 18 days. For a period piece, it’s very small scale and stage-like. But knowing this might help on a second viewing.

Klaus Kinski plays the titular character Woyzeck. He’s a lowly soldier that’s essentially being gaslit by his commanding officer and a quack doctor. He’s a loving father and husband, but his wife sleeps around with another officer and that officer publicly humiliates Woyzeck. Finally, he murders his wife.

Other reviewers called this an “anti-Enlightenment” film. I think that’s apt. The two men egging on Woyzeck’s decent into madness are obsessed with science and philosophy. The officer even mocks Woyzeck, stating that he lacks “morals” due to his status in society. Woyzeck defends himself, claiming that as a man without money or education, he simply does what’s “natural”. When viewed from this perspective, the Enlightenment ideals espoused by the Officer and Doctor come across as abusive, while Woyzeck is actually the only sane and moral person in the movie. The small scale of the movie contributes to the anti-enlightenment narrative, as it isn’t flashy or self-congratulatory like we’ve come to expect with these kinds of films.

Meanwhile, The Ninth Configuration couldn’t be more different. I could tell you what it’s about, but then I’d be lying. I just know it takes place in a castle acting as a psychiatric ward for Vietnam vets, Stacy Keach is in it, and there’s a bar fight. The movie is totally disorienting. At times it’s a psychological drama, other times it’s a comedy, and at one point it becomes an 80s action flick. The tone is all over the place. Perhaps that’s by design but I’m not totally convinced. Either way, this disorder contributes to the overall mystique of the film.

It should also be noted that The Ninth Configuration apparently exists in The Exorcist expanded universe. Not that it has anything to do with those films, except that one of the characters is in the first one.

To be honest, if I watched these movies in isolation, I wouldn’t be a fan of either. But they work very well in tandem. The military aspect of both films seems trivial, but when we consider the discipline and order that the military provides, it contrasts with the chaos associated with insanity. Additionally both films expose the problem of insanity in different ways. One is very plain and straightforward. The other is a complete fucking mess. Woyzeck proposes that insanity is brought forth by the imposition of morals, logic, possession, and science. Ninth Configuration says that it’s the absence of such ideals…or more precisely, the absence of God… is it’s true driving force. Woyzeck is nihilistic. Ninth Configuration is hopeful. Yet both might agree that insanity arises out of the eternal battle between chaos and order.