This is from my current journal entry; I had intended a mere record of my thoughts and actions as of late, but my mind wandered further and this came out. This is actually a pretty good example of what goes in my head when I go for walks. I do not claim this to be original, true, right, good, or factual--indeed, I hope to be corrected or debated on where I'm "wrong"--but merely some musings.
Another late-ish night when I rebel against the coming day's slavery. Yesterday, getting into the car to head to yet another of such toils, I asked "When will this nightmare end?" They say I should be thankful to have any semblance of income, shelter, family, friends, etc. . . . materialism! The very Urge of me is disgusted. But too much complaining. It seems I am to be purged of all my notions, of the world, politics, people, and such. Shall I have been right about anything (major and important)? The more I learn about my rebellious nature, the more it seems in the employ of the status quo, not of sloughing off the bad, but of resisting the corrosions of influence. Yet how gullible I can be! How both? Yet another instance of my bilateral self? So there is much I have held that I am gravely doubting, and much that has repelled me that I am vertiginously considering. What of my original self will remain into the other end? What should remain? The oldest and best part of me, perhaps, but is it a thing to be built upon, or must the dirt be brushed away, the rock pounded off, and the slag be melted away? Shall I be naked or rightly attired?
This is further compounded by the difficulty of action. It is not the flesh found lacking, for both will and inaction are present in the spirit. The ship's sails are open, but hardly any gust to make it go. Yet, is that analogy correct? For am I right to compound will and desire? Can I will to write a book but have no desire for the writing? Our language certainly allows for the reverse, to have the desire but lack the will. Perhaps the problem lies in a compounding of action and object, of doing and achievement, journey and goal: that is, of writing a book, and the book having been written. The spirit places the end, the desired, ahead of our motion towards it, and so belief overtakes (becomes?) perception, seeming clouds reality, and we congratulate ourselves on dreaming a good dream and accomplishing a job well done, partially because we dared to conceive it, partially because we "know" it won't/can't be done; "why begin till we know that we can win, and if we cannot win, why bother to begin?" In a time when the lowest common denominator is too frequently raised to laudations, when people rest too easily, too quickly, on a complacent acceptance of the things seemingly unable to be changed, merely wanting a better life and wanting to be a better person already therein make one a better person. Thus the desire has become the goal itself, the abstract made concrete, and a certain kind of will emerges, a desperate optimism: we want to be on the other shore, so we imagine we're on that shore, and our virtual-reality addled minds fill in the blanks and we dwell in two places at once, the achieved and the wish-to-be-achieved, by means of an optative link, a Paradox Machine. Indeed, the linear time of our lives is folded upon itself and (perceived) future and (ongoing) present mash together; only such a will power can make our selves from two different times coexist.
But time will not have it, and so we will become fools and float in a gas until we are belched out and dissipated in the air. Linear time is the rock upon which our lives must be placed and walk. We only move along by successive achievements; desire is but energy. Perhaps it must be that we need to find joy (fulfillment?) in writing, in the doing, but only celebrate a book, an achievement, for celebrations are temporary, of a fixed time, but fulfillment goes on. As they say, it's the journey, not the destination. As Oscar Wilde said: 'There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."
