Philosophical Boons of Thinking for Yourself

Submitted this for a scholarship essay, deadline snuck up on me, so its kind of thrown together.

It was a Catholic upbringing in the face of a barrage of cross-cultural noise, unfounded curiosity, and dire dissatisfaction. I first thought of myself as godless in my youth, 8 years old perhaps, and was stuffed through Catechism and eventually Confirmation by parents who apparently didn’t know better or thought I owed some blood to their tradition. They weren’t devout to their spirituality in any way, but thought exposure to it would be healthy for my morality. I always doubted, but found myself unable to publicly denounce what I increasingly considered bullshit without some awkward conversation with family. I kept it to myself.

My atheism is much more informed now, a hunch expanded by voracious reading in all arenas: science, history, psychology, philosophy. I can express the nuances and have tried to develop an understanding of all the tendrils and requirements relying on nothing requires.

There are benefits, believers and apologists tell me, to believing in the Judeo-Christian tradition or any other supernatural architecture of reality. Comfort with cosmological “truth”, the ability to sleep at night, a tidy and explicit moral compass. I must argue that atheism, the belief that no supernatural intelligence governs our universe, has benefits outweighing each of these.

Atheism has granted me tremendous freedom. Subscribing to it early in my youth helped to remove the illusion that the authorities in my life represented my needs. I am of the conviction that the seed of many of our social ills is that we believe our security and authority is a requirement. Authoritative teachers are installed to maintain order in the minds and actions of children who thrive on chaos. The police state exists to maintain the status quo and repress change. Religion exists so that someone else’s concept of right can be enforced even in your heart. Understanding that there is no cosmic authority, and not just for my convenience but as a matter of fact, I must shoulder the onus of determining my own order. It is up to me to decide what is right and wrong, and it is up to me to investigate, think, learn, discuss and experience in order to shore up or reconstruct this philosophy. A mind can only go so far on intuition and spoon-feeding, and I think the result is a society in which individuals only feel they’ve done wrong when they’ve tripped the alarm.




Atheism has alleviated the terror over every mistake I made along the path to self-discovery. I have, like everyone, made mistakes. I often carried a certain book too far down a path before realizing I had misinterpreted it. I often caved to some base instinct. However, living outside of the concepts of sin and eternal damnation allow one to change. I don’t live in fear that I’ll be struck down by some impossible lightning bolt, but rather I can thoughtfully conceptualize the inevitable future inherent in my actions. The freethinker’s philosophy, when bound to truth and rationality, changes as the facts come in. Realizations are allowed to swell into revolutions and are not immediately thrown out because they don’t fit under the capital letters of Commandments or Christ. We all have an innate sense of morality; it is thinking that this comes from outside of ourselves that leads to “immorality”. Restated: we all already know the difference between right and wrong, it is the assumption that they are arbitrarily right and wrong that leads to problems. For example, when a child sees a parent acting in what may be called universal immorality (something that offends virtually everyone), that example becomes a seed for later action because the child is indoctrinated that the Rules are handed down from Authority.


I’ve graduated college once now. Out in this posturing assemblage they call the real-world; trying to make a few dollars and find some solace. If I believed that all that was required of me to have a “successful” life was to follow ten rules, accept some mysterious savior into my life, and breed then I’d be part way there already. An infinitum of rest in the clouds awaits. Upon review, however, I find that this mindset is harmful. We have a civilization that believes the total sum of their significance relies on what happens to their “soul” after they die, fortunately many of the rules that get you into heaven also have a positive or irrelevant affect on the world we live in. But the thought that your presence here is not of significance, that you are not a fundamental (if tiny) particle in the teeming masses is not only careless but indignant. It matters what you do with your life. It matters because every action you are responsible for has externalized consequences. You live in this world, damn it, and having your head in the clouds (literally) fucks everyone else over. Atheism has allowed me to accept that nothing will happen to me when I die. This is my last and only chance, and I had better make it count.


All told, atheism or more simply an unwillingness to accept the belief systems handed to me, has allowed me to transcend the inhibitions and hang-ups that may have plagued my parents or people like them. This is not to downplay their humanity, I love them dearly; but I've found that by questioning assumptions I've gained the freedom to accept the truth when I find it.

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"Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood"

So, I'm often distracted by grand ideas (in length and requisite effort if not potential quality)such that one overlaps the other and every few weeks I find myself planning some protracted novel. Perhaps this is my inability to create neat little capsules of fiction. Below is the a three or four page excerpt of something that I'm currently kicking around . . I think this might end up being a ten page chapter that works as a stand-alone.


Bob and I had driven all day through the water. Passed with the secure herd of a few other tail-lights and destinations, down into scummy, ankle-high brine. Watched the others, no license plates or convenient signs to warn us, pull off onto higher-ground or make U-turns with spraying rooster tails. Bob and I moved like the water; naturally, bound by the same hills. When twilight became actual darkness, we were alone with the whooshing beneath us and the disorientation of our headlights beaming out over the reflection.
I sort of dozed. Considered the claims that if we persevered there was a place we could catch a plane. Bob, moaning in a way I'd learned was the wrath of delirium tremens, stopped the car and swung the door open. He stood in the metallic ding of the running car for a moment, waiting, and finally hurled the last few slugs of dried bagel in his stomach. The water at his feet gushed forward from the momentum of our car, and little whirlpools of salt-water and his vomit spun around his pantlegs.
Somewhere around halfway, we saw the neon smudge of civilization ahead and sighed. The white rip of knuckles on Bob's left hand relaxed and moved to rub his forehead. The place was called Ciro's, written in lit, cursive red. It was a diner, familiar-looking, perched some thirty feet above the road. He wheeled the car into the sloping parking lot without conversation.
There was one customer sitting at the grubby counter, pensively shoveling apple pie into his mouth with one hand and stuttering a drum solo with the fingers of the other. A ruddy waitress, uniformed in a puke green number with black trim, said something to him that thinly veiled her disgust. She turned to us, practically a girl, and asked in her twang if she could “ha'p” us.
We took seats at the counter, at Bob's gesture, and exchanged experienced hellos to the other patron. Me banging the dandruff out of my hat on the flat of my hand. Amber brought us coffee and a nearly invisible cook in the place's nethers waved a spatula at us. It smelled like the docks.
“How much further is the water?” Bob asked, to everyone.
“Fuck if I know,” our neighbor said “I been here almost a month now waiting for goddamn Shevitz to pick my ass up”
“Who's Shevitz?” I asked. Jesus Christ.

“Shevitz is the fucking Jew that stranded me out here in the goddamn ocean without a truck.” He replied, reaching for a cigarette, his grip fierce on the soft-pack.
“Hardly answered the man's question, did'ja Tom?” Amber said, moving to fill our coffee cups, now emptied by one swallow.
“
If you want to know how far the water goes to the south, truth is, I don't really know. It's been here, right in front of the diner, for a coup'a years now. But things changed . . . .”

“Does it get deeper?”

“Not too sure, this time of year. Depends on a lot of things. Only one way to find out . . .”

Bob and I ordered Bacon-Lettuce-Tomato sandwiches with french-fries, though I didn't know how we were going to pay for it. The cook in the back, just white eyes buried in a brown face, looked delighted.

“I tell you what,” said Tom “I'd be half-inclined go with you. But I don't know as I give a shit anymore.” He was smoking now, his second course in a cycle that must have gone on all day.

“We've got to get to Marston.” I said, first declarative out of my mouth in hours. I felt the twist of drying saliva in my throat, pulled my dingy hood up onto my head. “Trying to catch a plane.”

The cook in back laughed, and stopped himself on the heel of his palm. His eyes apologized.

“Don't know if that's going to happen . . not with what I've heard comin' outta Marston.” Amber said.

“Well, we've gotta try.” I say, “No other real options, the way Bob and I see it.”

Tom nods his head, but won't deign to probe our intent. We may be fugitives or refugees, he didn't care. He pulled at his beard a little bit.
“Worth a try, out on the coast you never know.” Tom said. He had settled a bit. I wanted to credit the cigarette; but he looked at me.
Bob was flush, his forehead now tight wrinkles of anticipation. He took a tone livelier then he'd had in days. It had been a rough morning, followed by a trying day, and finally it seemed we might get some rest. He started to tell Tom and Amber the shit we'd slogged through that day, stopped short when he realized they knew the travails better than he and then winced and shielded his eyes from the fluorescent lights with his left hand.
“You alright?” Tom asked. The way a trucker asks another; I saw him saying the same thing to strung-out truckers in slimey South Dakota shower stalls.
“mkay. Just a little woozy. You,” He looked at Amber, cupping his left eye now like it had caught shrapnel. “Wouldn't happen to have any booze, would you?”
“Sorry,” she poured herself coffee, “Tom drank just about all of it in the first week. You need a drink that bad?”
“Yes.” I said, he'd be embarassed to say it himself.
Bob was now rolling his forehead on the cold metal trim around the counter. A dull moan and the word “ . . .libris”. Amber came around to our side of the counter, pulled up a chair to include the three of us, and pulled some items from her apron.

“You want to smoke some of this? Its not booze, but it might keep out the shakes.”

We did. And she broke up a cigarette and mixed a few pinches of brownish marijuana in. The cook gave a little exclamatory. The sizzle of bacon mingling with the pot and the dead fish smell of the sea.

“Frankly, since Tom. You boys are two of the only people we've seen . How many guys came in here the other night Tom?” She began, as though we'd provoked her.

“”s about a week ago Amber, or more. There was three of 'em. Sons of bitches threw us a goddamn pity parade.” Tom had now removed his trucker hat and swiveled his chair around to point his crotch at Amber's head.

Bob moved to scrape a chair across the dirty floor, Amber had stopped mopping more than an arm's reach from the counter. And the cook, a Peruvian I think, walked out with an identical plate in each hand and set them near us. He pulled a chair around to get a seat inside the circle and Amber lit her pregnant joint as the power winked out and wound back up. Bob eyed the sandwich; later he would tell me that he saw maggots writhing inside of it and didn't know if they were real or he was dead. He waited for me to take a bite and dry-heaved once sharply.
Respite often leads perspective by the ear; and as I ate the day's first meal the impetus for all this dragging ourselves along water and Bob's puking his brains out coalesced in my stomach. A warm ball of purpose.

“C'mon Bob, you've got to eat this man. You need something on your stomach.”
“He going to be alright?” Tom asked me, finding something in himself stirring after a long stretch of the same.
“I'll be fine,” Tom said. “It comes in waves, and builds until I can't handle it anymore. I'm going to lay on the floor.” He exhaled and raised the joint for anyone to grab, purposely avoiding eye contact that might terrify him. When he landed on the ground, not delicately but with an “umph”, the sweat ran from his head onto the tile and left a smudge with the texture of his hair.
“What's it like?” Amber asked. “Describe it.”
“He's really better at that sort of thing,” Bob looked at me with one eye, and then back toward the floor. “But it's . .uhh . . the worst hangover of all time. And you see things that make your skin crawl.”

“What are you seeing right now?” Amber asked, the tail end of a hit.
“I'm seein' . . .I'm surrounded by pigeons, and they're mouthing my childhood nickname.”
“Jesus Christ.” Said the Peruvian.
“I'm seeing a . . Tom's battered ex-wife leaning over his shoulder, wafting in his cigarette smoke . .” Bob has his head in his hands, covering his eyes. Tom looks wary, snuffs out the cigarette. But he doesn't say a word.

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Books I Read This Year

Books I've read since the jump (just over 6 months now):

The Ecology of Commerce by Paul Hawken:
Seemingly valid approaches, however impossible in implementation, to the concurrent problems of class warfare, corporate greed and environmental exploitation. I tend to be an advocate of big picture approaches, and here Hawken examines the very root of our daily lives. Reading this book, I came to understand that there is a fundamental flaw to the manner in which we conduct business, and to continually ignore it is to hasten our own collapse.


The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
For me, provided tremendous insight on perhaps the most influential figure in black culture. I had been woefully ignorant of his accomplishments, history and lifestyle and found him to be nothing short of inspirational. A true rebel who found out through daunting trials that the revolution starts within. X went from being, essentially, a street thug (albeit a particularly calculating and skilled one) to being perhaps the most disciplined, hardest-working firebrand of America’s past century. One of very few martyrs in our recent history.


The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil:
A great deal of hubris and self-aggrandizement from an individual just shy of deserving it. Illuminated the facts I needed to argue for something I’ve felt for a long time; that we will inevitably merge with our technology. Were you aware that currently there is a complex, evolutionary algorithm at work somewhere in NYC that is monitoring millions of dollars in investments with an amazing track record? This book is full of ponderous updates on the progress of artificial intelligence.



Waiting For the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee:
Obviously influenced by The Great Wall by Franz Kafka, but chilling nonetheless. There is something inherently surreal about a settlement out on the frontier, waiting to be pounced upon by barbarians, or rather waiting to pounce on noble savages in their midst. This book had some extremely powerful moments; stark, painful, reflection on an Absurdist agony.



Dune by Frank Herbert:
I've already talked about this here



The Silent Cry by Kenzuburo Oe:
Not very good at all. I used to really like Oe.


Collapse by Jared Diamond:
This book provides great context and historical background on why civilizations fail. From Easter Island to the Vikings to modern day China. We live beyond our means, simple as that, and as long as we continue to measure things in purely monetary, short-term units we are destined to fail.


The Dead Father by Donald Barthelme:
Hilarious, beats Samuel Beckett at his own game. The story essentially revolves around the transportation of a quasi-dead, partially mechanical godhead across the countryside. He is at once full of rage and lust and innocence and stupidity. He inspires both awe and pity. Fascinatingly written, but occasionally overwrought in its strangeness.


As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner:
I have had this book since I was 16 and then found it too difficult to follow. Now, reading it, I see why Faulkner is considered such a great writer. Nimble and funny. He is capable of making one feel exactly how he wants in the mere architecture of a scene. And the way Darl describes things can make you weep at the timbre of the words on the page. Near the end is, I venture to say, the single best "action" scene in all literature.


(BTW, this is my 100th post. Go me!)

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"Ars longa, vita brevis"

So this was my final paper for poetry class, an interview with myself:

First question, why bother?
Bother writing, or bother getting up in the morning. I’m not sure the first can be answered without referring to the latter. I can’t say writing poetry was something that I wanted to do up until the last couple years. Even now I tend to cringe saying that word: poetry. I always wrote stories, since I was a little kid, and have always found some sort of pleasure or at least temporary satisfaction in creating characters and situations or adapting the events of my life into something of interest. Poetry really came into its own, in my life, while I was at university studying Civil Engineering. I had written poems previously, as a teenager or whatever, but looking back they are vaguely embarrassing. Things you write at that age, no matter how genuine your intent, sound immature. They sound like they have a philosophical latency that requires another half decade of experience at the very least. At university, I found my time was consumed by mathematics, the application of scientific principles, et cetera. I didn’t have a great deal of free time to construct meaningful fictional stories. Poetry became this sort of release that I could indulge in on the margins of my notes. Five or ten lines, hopefully mirroring some of that efficiency that engineering convinced me was crucial for everything . . . .





So, not being a student of liberal arts until recently, would you consider yourself a sort of “outsider” to the literary world?
Not at all. I suppose my literary education has been a bit unconventional. Public education only really scratches the surface of literary studies. So back in high school, and this continued into my college years, I read everything I could get my hands on. While in class we were spending a half-semester on Beowulf I was reading the Beats, Sartre and Camus, Nietzche, Buddha, Henry Miller, Kafka, Hesse. I didn’t delve into poetry headlong the way I did other works, but I was deeply familiar with Ginsberg and Corso and Kerouac’s poetic works. I also tried to familiarize myself with some of the “classics”, Shakespeare and the like. I think I was very well-read and very deliberate in what I read over those years. I’m still very influenced by the work that I came across in my personal studies.

As far as poetic works, what other individual or movement would you say most influences you?
Poetically, I think I can sort of see of certain influences hold some reign over certain aspects of the poetry I write. For example, though I don’t think that my poetry mirrors Kerouac’s strongly I am an advocate of the sort of spontaneity that he emphasized. I used to try and practice that with fiction as well, but the results were not entirely satisfying. As far as the spiritual or cognitive elements that I am trying to provoke, I must say that I try to do what Kafka did. I think there’s this capacity in surrealism to better explain the real world. Or at least make it substantially more interesting.

More interesting in what way?
Well, the movement of surrealism, no matter what anyone else says, originates from the dreamtime. We’ve attached science and psychology and the crafts of various arts to it, but surrealism would be a non-starter, especially for the audience, if we didn’t all have some familiarity with the logic of dreams. What’s interesting about what Kafka did (and this feat was likewise accomplished by Oe and Barthelme), is that he was able to turn the logic of the dream, elements of the dreamtime, and the stunted architecture of dreams into a sort of universal image of our subconscious. He created a sort of mythological environment that played by the rules of dreams and thus indulged in this sort of secret logic that all of us sort of understand. I want to try and create the architecture of the same sort of mythology through the briefest glimpses.

Forget subject matter for a moment, as far as tone. You don’t seem to be afraid to use rhyming or alliteration, what is the motivation there?
I listened to a lot of hip-hop. Listening to hip-hop made me feel like poetry was still vital and was actually important to our culture. Poetry became something other than self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people. The power of hip-hop comes from several aspects, but to answer this question, listening to Aesop Rock or The Roots I came to understand the effectiveness of beauty in sound. Whatever experience one is trying to transmit to the audience, it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a beautiful sound. To some extent the opposite is true. However, I think something that sounds beautiful strung together (and this is related to rhythm and rhyme and alliteration and all these other devices) has a much greater chance of burning a hole in a reader or listener’s mind.


When you say “self-indulgent navel-gazing written by dead people”, what exactly are you talking about?
I don’t mean to speak ill of the accomplishments of the proponents of this tradition. What I mean is that poetry became important to me when I realized that it could do something. That what is often considered the “best” poetry often, upon closer inspection, falls apart when you try to determine why its actually important. For example, Ezra Pound had wonderful thoughts on poetry and probably on life in general (I find his biography fascinating), and yet his poetry fails to either dance or make me want anything or imprint any experience on me. I don't even care to know why it fails in these things, it simply does. Contrarily, I would submit that I love William Blake. So who knows.


What is the importance of image, in poetry; or where do you think it falls in the priorities of a poem?
Image is crucial, in that in our understanding of how memory works and how emotive impulses are aroused, we have a strong bond to the visual. In photography, an art form that may have very well been dismissed early on, the power is in the image the photog obtains from the world around them. A powerful photography puts us in that instant and yet universalizes the instant; appeals to a common, or somewhat common, sensibility. Imagery in poetry can work in the same way, though because its textual it is perhaps more difficult to convey an image. Thus in poetry, the thrust isn't accuracy or framing or lighting the thrust is in the delicacy of the diction. There are particular words that strike a chord, much like the image of a child in Bangladesh with a bloated belly strikes us. And a poet has to focus on the essence of that image, to somehow convey what that image conveys in a line or two.

How can poetry stay relevant in our culture, in spite of technological advances that might push it to the margins?
As far as duking it out for a place against film or whatever, poetry doesn't need to “fight back”. It will remain relevant, and I would think perhaps increasingly more relevant, in impoverished nations. It will remain married to modern music as well. I think poetry is such a broad thing; when we don't try and convince ourselves that artistic culture falls into these neat little buckets it will remain relevant as long as we have something to say.

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" . . .and if I don't respect it enough, fffade away it will"

Someone important to me has made a life-changing decision. Decided to forego potential fortune and legacy and comfort to have communion with her own fatal elements. We all know what we want, we've all known it since our earliest years. We spend our lives trying to convince ourself otherwise.

I spent some time last week with a colusses. A tall Irish surgeon who found the thread in his life and followed it until he finally sat drinking tequila with me and blessing the mountains he finally got to call home. He's saved countless lives in his day, raised a dynamic family who genuinely loves each other, made friends with success. He encourages everything. He encouraged even my timidly laid plan for the next few years with a refill to my Don Julio and a serious request to know what I'm reading in class.

Ideas for stories I have neither time or patience for fill my pockets, and as I wait for files to download or the coffee to brew I pull them out and ponder them. Fish for their remnants in my hastily forgotten dreams. Put opening sentences in my mouth to examine their texture, hold them out again in the light to make sure they're solid enough. I make mental notes of nervous tics and always suggest to my comradrie some alternative ending to this thing we call now.

Once or twice each afternoon a car would drive through the ankle-high water, see the lights of Ciro's, unsubmerged, above them and pull up the incline to take a break. Sometimes these drivers would meeerely get out, visor their eyes to the sun, and look south-west down the road at the water as it stretched out before them. Sometimes they would kill the ignition and walk into the restaurant befuddled.

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