Nostalgia for a lost world

Nostalgia for Metaphysics

Maybe in the end we all have a nostalgic sense of loss for a metaphysical age that we cannot return to. Sadly. We know that we live by fictions and that anything – even the supposed Sciences – are all based on contemporary forms of knowledge and error, and knowing this we rewrite the cosmos in the flavors of our own contemporary mind-set. That this too will seem quaint a hundred or a few hundred years from now will be no less interesting than our look back upon the age from Parmenides to Kant and his progeny. We are the inheritors of outmoded forms of mental aberrations. We know this in our age and yet we, too, are caught in the mesh of believing we know something the ancients did not know which is of course just another metaphor for our own stupidity and errors.

Humans cannot even know who and what they are, and I doubt they ever will. We may become extinct in a hundred or a thousand years still questioning this thing we are along with the universe in which we reside and still not have the answers we seek.

We live in an answerless universe that beckons to us in its insurmountable strangeness, goads us to continue asking questions for answers that will always reflect more about our own errors than on the universe as it is in itself. Does it all matter? Probably not, but we continue to ask questions because we cannot do otherwise. This is our inherited desire and nemesis. We are bound to the physical and mental desires of our flesh and animal being, our deterministic ground if you will. Some seek to exit ‘desire’ altogether. They may someday succeed, but that is another tale and another kind of being – part of the posthuman future to which we are only dreamers in a mad thought.

My Schizo World…

The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang is, without doubt, an excellent journey into the personal experience and unraveling from within of this world. Having been diagnosed as Schizophrenic after Viet Nam I’ve learned to live with my condition and even pushed it to its limits all of my life, delving into the great writers and artists who’ve been in it and with the use of entheogens (psychedelics) for most of my adult life to explore this merger of consciousness with Being.

No one will ever understand it, some suffer it, others learn to flow with it. Most medical professionals have no clue what their dealing with, not being able to experience it themselves they observe and obsess over it from the outside which is like studying a roach on the wall. No. We are not crazy, we are different, but we have a place in the world.

Ancients had systems that allowed for it: the shamans in the worlds of flight; the Voduns in the realm of dance and spirit-possession. In our age, those formed by this condition find their own way or with other explorers in discovering a way to survive in a world of Normals.
I’ve often thought that we are the next thing, the posthuman creatures who have and are evolving beyond the human normal codes into avenues of existence few can know or understand. Of course, this is just speculation and probably wrong but it comoforts me anyway.

How Do we know love?

A friend said in a post recently:

“We always think we see things as they are. The most highly developed among us can sometimes see how things became what they are. Almost nobody alive can imagine what things will become. And yet these ongoing processes are what really “is”, not the individuated, atomized things in themselves that the moment we call “now” gives up to our senses to perceive and come to terms with.

Given this paradigm how do we say, “I love you”? How do we know love?”

I replied: I think all we come to know is the mirror of our desires. Sadly this is the world of appearances that mirror neither our desires nor our antipathies. We never see “things as they are” only their surface tensions as they fly away from us. Love? How can we love anything beyond the fleeting apprehensions of something we’ll never know or understand?

As for knowing love itself, what is this “love”? We can trace its etymology which is a boring quest, and we can appear to know something we cannot know because what most of us seem to know of love is this emotion or its intellectualization. And neither of these is “love” but its objectification. So what is love but an abstraction we seem to append to life’s experience which can never be shared. We can read a Proust or any number of writers or poets on love. Even Shakespeare. But is our writing of love “love”? I dare say not. No. We cannot know love for it is something too intimate to be known. It is something we do and feel. The rest is the abstractions of the philosophers. And we all know what those abstractions lead too…

On My Atheism

I know my atheism stems from my childhood growing up in the Bible belt where a perverse form of evangelical Christianity still holds sway. I can’t belabor this enough. People have to understand where my hatred of religious consciousness arose. I was once steeped in this mythology and its paranoia of life, hooked as it is under an apocalyptic worldview of the Endtimes mythology of John’s Apocalypse and such readings.

Once I gained my freedom from this through a long decade’s struggle which many people will never understand, I became a proselytizer of atheism and secular enlightenment.

I’ve since struggled even against this into the depths of the absolute pessimism and nihilism that goes with it. My madness and fear of retribution and hell was real at one time so that my exit and escape from the clutches of this perverse religion was a moral choice that left its scars on me for decades. As many suggest, an atheist molds another form of faith without faith, a crime against a view of terror and horror – against a God that they know does not exist but that did exist in their psyches through indoctrination and cultural praxis.

So, the escape from this is and was psychological and physical. I’ve never returned willingly to the country of my childhood. So unlike Cioran who thought of childhood and the landscapes of the peasantry where he grew up in Romania as Paradise, I remember my childhood as a place of Hell. Literally and mentally.

That I come from a broken family. That I was broken, lost, and bound within a dark world of fear and trepidation is just part of this sick world I came from. One that took me long to escape. Of course, the truth is one never truly escapes this dark world until death. One suffers it.

When I see people attack atheists, I see people who never came under the pressure of either Catholic or Protestant extremists. I’ll not include other religions because they did not influence me, and I do not know them. They do not know because they did not experience it. Experience and knowledge are two separate things that will never meet except in abstractions that mean nothing and never will.