There's no court for our case // I'm a machine without a switch // In pursuit of lucid dreams

I've

been awake

to see the day

devour the night;

I've

seen decay

give way to growth and make the most

of nearly nothing

 

 

  

Don't call me down

But you can meet me where I land

if we're all matter, what's it matter; does it matter if we're matter when we're done?

Hello ducklings -- it is the day of my birth and it has been quite A Thing. Let's move on from that to something I wrote the other day but didn't get around to posting. Clink! Clink.

We had survived to turn on the History Channel

and ask our esteemed panel

"why are we alive?"

And here's how they replied:

"you're what happens when two substances collide --

and by all accounts, you really should have died."

"... The great boon of repression is that is makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty, and terror that if animals perceived it at all they would be paralyzed to act. 

But nature has protected the lower animal by endowing them with instincts. An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction. It is very simple. Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neuro-chemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else. But look at man, the impossible creature! Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She created an animal completely open to experience. Not only in front of his nose, in his umwelt, but in many other umwelten. He can relate not only to animals his own species, but in some ways to all other species. He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in the moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an eternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe, and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden that man bears, the experiential burden. As we saw in the last chapter, man can't even take his own body for granted as can other animals. It is not just hind feet, a tail that he drags, that are just "there," limbs to be used and taken for granted or chewed off when caught in a trap and when they give pain and prevent movement. Man's body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Man's very insides--his self--are foreign to him. He doesn't know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange."

This is a DAMN FINE read so far, though I may have been biased right from the beginning. As soon as I picked it up and read the back I felt like I'd found someone who had managed to put into (very eloquent) terms just... a bunch of crap that had been bouncing around in my head for awhile, but which I had no way of properly framing because sometimes I not the words good. I just... I feel like I get this book on a very visceral level -- in some ways I feel like I've been mentally dissecting culture with this "ego/denial of death" thing for awhile. I mean... I pick stuff apart a lot. I'm probably not someone you want to see a movie with because I'll pull out of suspension of disbelief a lot just to make fun of it -- but I feel like all of that is just my reaction to what I perceive as the writer's/s' intent, or their...assertion of ego via assumptions they make about culture, be they unconscious or intentional -- and those assumptions have felt, to me, as though they all have this reaction to death at the root because they have to, even when it's completely unintentional or has nothing to do with the subject matter in any way. It's just there, and it's so amazing to be able to mentally wave this book around yelling "HEY LOOK THIS GUY GETS IT."
So read this, is what I'm saying. This is honestly something I would jam into any and every human's brain if I could. Let me jam it into yours, dear...roughly three people that read this blog! Yeah, you heard me. Let me jam it in. >O<
fufufu