Writing got rid of all the emotive signs that speech always had--facial expressions, gestures, voice tone, musicality, and emphasis. Thus did a new form of emotionless and speakerless "speech" arise unencumbered by sound and that largely conveyed only feeling-neutral ideas, descriptions, generalizations, and statements of fact. The time of communicating had ended and the age of barren information had begun. But then emojis came along and saved us all!
The challenge is always knowing someone is like you enough to empathize with them but at the same time knowing they are different enough from you to not be judged.
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In a time of widespread pretense, complicit silence, timid tongue-biting, and mindless "going along with the crowd", just speaking your mind honestly and without regret becomes a daily act of revolution. If people remember anything, they will remember that! You don't even have to TRY to be controversial. Just say what everyone else is thinking.
“[The present moment] is a singularity that births all existence into form. It seeds our mind with fleeting consensus images that we then blow up into the voluminous bulk of projected past and future. These projections are like a cognitive ‘big bang’ unfolding in our mind. They stretch out the intangibility of the singularity into the substantiality of events in time. But unlike the theoretical Big Bang of current physics, the cognitive ‘big bang’ isn’t an isolated occurrence in a far distant past. It happens now; now; now. It only ever happens now.”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief
A good writer or poet is someone who spends so little time speaking to anyone that they save up all sorts of great things to say which they then write down. The problem with that is they can go on and on saying things with no immediate feedback and sometimes lose track of saying anything humanly relevant. One can only be reminded of one's humanity by being around other humans. Even the most ethereal of spirits must make occasional forays into the realm of the flesh.
If an alien race wants to come to our planet to learn what it means to be uniquely human, forget about observing us. Just sit down and listen to all the music we've created, from primitive drum beats to gregorian chants to symphonies to folk, jazz, soul, gospel, and rock n roll. It is thru music that humanity has always expressed itself most deeply and directly. It is here that you will most fully understand us.
Not enough good can be said about traveling. The gaining of a new perspective. The adventure of the unknown and surprising. But still there's something about coming home that is also wonderful. Home is where you are attached to the earth and grounded. Where you can just be your weird and unseen self again, without worry or effort. It is always the last house before the infinite.
The problem of human meaning could only ever have arisen for a species spared the daily grueling task of having to get food to survive. Civilization is the big machine that lets humans live their lives without having to do this, manufacturing spare time for us in abundance. Markets and well-lighted grocery stores and now even Amazon providing anything we could possibly desire. Long hours with nothing to do but socialize and think upon our seemingly useless condition. Hence philosophy and religion were born as pursuits to fill in this vast gap of not having to survive anymore. And also the use of wealth to maximize recreational time even more for the more ambitious among us. The cost of all this idleness has not however been without its devastating effects--wars, sectarian conflicts, obesity, debaucherous pleasure-seeking, soulless ideologies, and of course ever-contentious politics, which seems to fill the time of many of us to this very day.
The arrogant audacity of we tiny creatures stuck to the side of a mudball in space thinking what we see and know about reality is anything more than a mere brief perspective, a slice or snapshot of something far older and vaster than us. We have no experience of the absolute, being totally fettered by the specificity of our finite bodies and the era we are fated to live in. That's why Reality largely makes itself present to us as a "lack" or an emptiness--as something that we are NOT and yet that haunts our entire lives. Man is by birth the essential cosmic orphan.
It is no coincidence that only a few years after we learn to read do we begin experiencing the world as narrated by this running voice in our head we call "thinking." It's like we are reading it instead of really seeing it. Before that, in the halcyon days of our childhood, life happened to us viscerally and imagistically like art, without the editorializing commentary of this cultural cerebral rambler. When everything was really deeply happening to us, whether it made any sense or not. By the time we reach adolescence we are all walking around in insulating thought bubbles.
As we get older, we come to appreciate the need for living full days. A little exercise out in nature. A little food or drink you really like. Some music that stirs your soul. A little socializing. A little reading of some new idea. And maybe a TV show or a meme that makes you laugh. Life should become more well-rounded and orb-like as we age, preparing us for our final embarkment into the great encircling Beyond.
Dec 28, 2025 01:43 AM
(This post was last modified: Dec 28, 2025 08:12 PM by Magical Realist.)
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