6 posts tagged “philosophy”
I haven't been sleeping well in days. I'm not sure what it is. At first it started off as my usual, wanting to stay up because it's my busy season right now and I'm running out of time with everything. I've also been having multiple nightmares a night, this past week. It's gotten to the point where my body feels so uncomfortable that even if I could sleep, everything hurts. Everything hurts and my skin is shriveling; I'm chewing on the insides of my mouth, my hands shake, I lose water retention and my pores look like gravestones. After a certain point, I become irritable, start to hallucinate and get paranoid usually about spirits in particular. On top of it all I'm gaining weight because the tiredness makes me hungry and I can't figure out if this is insomnia. I refuse to self-diagnose myself. I figure that most people with no medical background who perform self-diagnoses are either hypochondriacs, tools or attention seekers. What never fails to bug me is when someone says that they've just had a nervous breakdown. You criiiieed, asshole it's not a nervous breakdown, you don't even know where your nerves end and begin! What do middle-class young people have to be so depressed about? Not knowing what to study in college, oh my god you got through high school and you couldn't figure out what to do with your life? Get the fuck out seriously.
My definition of a breakdown is when a little piece of your sanity literally dies and never comes back. Last year I came close but as far as I'm concerned, I regained my sanity, full throttle. Now I'm back, tougher than ever. I have a ballpark estimate on the range of emotions the human mind can take. I have gone to my deepest depths of hell and back and I know that I've yet to reach the furthest ends of my personal insanity. I know that in a few ways I'm stronger than a lot of people around me. I've a lot of friends who have been or still are on Xanax, Valium, Prozac or Sertraline because they went to see shrinks for a 'diagnosis'. Even Damien who's not on any of that stuff, works graveyard shifts at a pharmaceutical company that makes a whole range of anti-depressants. He comes home, coming down off Mertazapine and sleeps for a good 10 hours, if he's lucky. Depending on what he's working on he'll sleep four hours a day for a week. Think of all the children they put on these things. Watch 'Charlie Bartlett', for crying out loud. Why does anyone even allow any teenager to read Elizabeth Wurtzel's whiny crap? What use is feeling suicidal apart from a slight hint that perhaps natural selection still lives after all?
I'm not saying that depression is a myth but I believe that real depression is due to hormonal imbalances or severe trauma. Some people go through life without a scratch, wake up in the morning with anxiety attacks, stay home all day, only to not get jobs, smoke pot and wonder why everything's not okay so they go to a shrink, determined that they have issues. You're having anxiety attacks because you've been sitting at home too long playing World of Warcraft when you should be outside exerting that energy on a real job, some exercise, getting laid. You want to be an elf, that's the psychological glitch in the Matrix right there, oy vey. I just get this feeling that the same people are so protected nowaydas that they don't know the true depths of anguish, of the darkest, most black side of the world. They think that any abnormalities in their perception of reality deems them credible to take the drugs not to get better, but as evidence of their issues.
It made me so angry the other day when someone told me they had a breakdown over some yuppie problem. Then I saw a documentary on Cambodia and how their corrupt government got their own people drunk, corrupted them and took away their land. They bulldozed their shanty houses while they were still asleep in them. Women who have worked hard all their lives were crying because they couldn't find their children's gold jewellery under the rubble. Without warning or protection, bulldozers and countrymen came to ravage their lives - their hard earned sweat, blood and tears. These are things I know nothing about. There is no way in hell that I could ever say that I was 'depressed'. Sure I'll need someone to confide in but I don't need to go to a doctor who's getting paid by the hour to ask me how I feel about my repressed sexual feelings towards my mother. -_-"
What about philosophy and education? A fresh perspective. If you can, do watch Abbas Kiarostami's 'The Taste of Cherry'. This clip basically gives the whole movie away, but it's wonderful.
Once again, the world has undermined the power of intelligence and replaced it with a fix that you can pay for. Because if you're paying money for it, it must be doing something. I can hardly think of a person I know who no matter what their tribulations in life, can not count their blessings and deem themselves too unlucky to live. So before you say you're having a breakdown or you're depressed, stand on your own two feet and count your blessings. If you're legless, count your blessings on your hands. If you're a quadrapeligic, isn't it the coolest thing that you're still able to operate a computer? Hell yeah. There are many ailments of the human mind and one of them is ignorance. One should try to illuminate the dark to avoid disrespecting their undeserving bodies with poisonous placebos.
From time to time I do get friends coming to me for advice and I get philosophical, like I sometimes do. How quickly they repair without any drugs, only with a fresh change of perspective. Psychology, especially in America, has gotten to this point where it's like a connect-the-symptoms-then-shoot-to-diagnose game. People think I'm full of shit when I talk about horoscopes based on personalities. What do you think is going to happen when you diagnose someone who's convinced that they're ill with a disorder? It should be criminal that psychology is more popular in university as a degree because psychology involves mental health that you can diagnose with the help of your local pharmacy. It's a wound you can apply with medicine like an antibiotic when it's really not the same. It makes me so angry that philosophy, the unbiased education of the human soul is considered outdated. Especially if it is a gift of life that comes for free.
I was with my friend, Chris, when he was pining over this girl he wasn't sure he could have whilst I myself, was enduring my own romantic foibles. It's been about two years since then and now that he's going to marry her, he's been telling me stories of tragedy: an American man was to propose to his 4"7' Filipino wife on a proposal rock when a large wave crashed onto them and pulled her out to sea and till now, she has yet to be found; the death of his uncle's six-month old baby. I don't encourage his pessimism but knowing how much Chris loves his fiancee, I don't blame him for putting himself through these shock stories. The way I see it, he's preparing himself for the biggest love of his life. His fiancee had ovarian cancer some months ago, I would have my world flipped upside down too. I myself, get really ripped apart by stories, films, where one out of the couple dies. Hearts are more fragile than lives. Never mind our mortality, it's the long-listed hopes, dreams and ideas we get in our heads. Love comes with the immediate fantasies of futures with our loved ones, having to get reprinted in our minds is enough to make us go insane. Broken hearts can make broken minds, which can sometimes seem a fate crueler than death. Correct me if I'm wrong. Getting torn apart like that reminds me of the Greek story of the origins of man and love:
When god just made man, he made him as a ball; with two faces, four arms and four legs. To run faster, he would have to roll and tumble up and down hills with his four arms and four legs. He was powerful and the gods were fearful as these humans were indestructable and were scathing mountains to get to Olympus. Zeus, unwilling to smite his creations altogether, threw down one of Hephaestus's bolts and struck man in two. All of a sudden, man became weak and disoriented, with no drive but to latch onto the next half-human in order to be a whole. Holding onto the other so ferociously that when one would die (possibly out of starvation from clinging so tight), the half-human would fight with other half-human couples just to be whole again. Seeing that these new creations were suffering, Zeus took pity on them and gave them genitalia. It was then that man and woman were created. Since then, men and women have been brought onto the earth to find one another, to make themselves whole again. Because together, they are impenetrable, joyous and could take down, even the heavens.
When I first read this story, I thought it was the funniest thing. Picture us, balls of four arms and four legs sticking out, tumbling up and down hills to go faster. But the story had a point about love - a good union is powerful and to be without it, challenges your survival. Hearts are fragile things, more than lives. Lives go on and even with broken hearts, walking day to day would be like walking with broken glass heaving in your chest. It's not easy. The worst part is that it's not even chemical or hormonal, it's metaphysical like time and space. There is no doctor, no cure and not even time can sometimes mend a broken heart. In your lifetime, you can learn to heal better or love more cautiously but it is inevitable.
Personally, I hold no grudges against death but broken hearts make me frown. To be redundant, being broken hearted is so frustrating. Like all metaphysical things, the only thing they ever deliver onto you is something to think about and that just isn't enough. You don't need food for thought when you would rather be holding someone you love in your arms. There is no cure for a broken heart, only to keep breathing. A broken heart will either have you crying or imprisoned in your body; lips sealed, hands tied, feet tucked safely beneath you in hopes of preventing further damage. It's like wearing an invisible straight jacket. Broken hearts are capable of an infinite of madness, much like a heart full of love. It can deliver the same kind of erraticism, only distorted. Maybe that's part of the thrill of love? That you can take it on as far as you wish but prepare to take on those alternate consequences. We will all lose each other someday. Until then, we make the best out of our mortality. Heartbreak can come at any turn. It doesn't necessarily have to be today. Love in the best way you can (kinda like what Chris is doing now) for we are all meant for it. We're all just halves trying to make a whole. Either way, I think it would be too difficult to run faster if you're having a threesome. Hahaha! Spoil.
I've been watching too many episodes of 'Six Feet Under'. I'm more that than a 'Sex and The City' girl (boy, do I need to get off my high horse). Death has always had a large effect on me. I was one of those four year-olds who burst into tears one day after happening upon a spontaneous actualisation of the meaning of death. Whilst reading a Beano comic book, of all things. I went into hysterics, bawling and pleading with my mother not to die or not to let anyone die. I don't think she took my toddler philosophising seriously but it still makes a funny story. 17 years later and I'm still having hysterics over pointless deliberations.
I first experienced death at 10 and till now, death still makes me feel the same way. Contrarily, I've liked boys since I was 5 and I'm about ready to throw in the towel. *laughs* Death does something to me. I'm not afraid of dying in the least, I don't care what happens but I do think it odd that the phenomenon of death moves me more than love. I'm an 'at-the-end-of-the-day' person and death is the seal, the ultimatum; the celebration and devastation that is never just about one person dying, but about an entire crippling universe. When someone goes, a piece of your world gets torn down. Heartbreak is when all the love you ever had, that you didn't know you even had for that one person gets turned inside out, bared raw and extrapolated till you can't extrapolate any more (which gets so messy). Death can make love generous. Love can be selfish because with monogamy - two people can make such a crowd. When someone dies, it's like an emergency or an ambulance. Everyone makes way for each other's differences, especially in grieving. You can scream and cry; get angry, get support, avoid support, be quiet, be loud, be out of line. Everyone's allowed to be their rawest selves and if love wasn't so different, I wouldn't think romance to be so artificial. One slip up in love and you're liable to be a psycho-bitch. What the hell is that? So fake one. -_- Why are we excused to express ourselves with death but with love, it has to be some finite, specific way? No one's crazy when they're confronted with death, they have to deal with how the universe works; the world doesn't have as much of a support system for when you've broken your heart, or at least not one that extends past your best friends. Why? Because a break up is not the end of the world and life goes on? Love is far more fragile than life. Have you ever tried killing yourself? It's hard. Yet you can screw up a relationship completely just by saying the wrong thing. Fragile.
At least with death, you know it's done. Flogging a dead horse makes more than just an analogy of pointlessness. When someone dies, you'll wish and give anything to see that person one last time, even if it's just once. At the end of a relationship, of love, you can still get to the point where the idea of having to see that person again or wanting to see them just shreds you up inside. The possibilities of meeting become so grievous, it's almost wasteful. In death, you can't do much but be grateful. Am I wrong in relating love to death yet? How intricate, the design of love and artful, the product of a bored God. In the end, both entities demand change and sacrifice yet carry different consequences. With love, the 'end' is still mutable. You could still get back together: have tea together, go for a platonic hike up a mountain then never again speak to one another. So many ridiculous possibilities that you don't get with death, what a mess. Love can throw you into furious tangents or "lift (you) up where (you) belong". Yet the two complement each other well, sometimes. Love is not always known until it is lost. Death is the receipt of your existence. Love, however, sometimes has to be weighed and measured for authenticity or else you start wondering if it ever happened at all... because sometimes, those cheques bounce.
Sometime earlier this year, I chanced to meet Gene, a 62 year old man, on the New Jersey Transit. I told him that I looked forward to dying someday as a rite of passage. As though death could hardly be different than the day I first got my period. I hope so. I think it would be like a jab. It won't hurt much. You might even forget you ever got it and accidentally get a second dosage because you forgot about your first. Gene scolded me for being young and talking about death. Said the 62 year old man who also said that by the time I get to his age, I'd have to punch myself in the head just to get out of bed. Yeah I'd like to die some day while I still have the strength to feed and wash myself, thank you.
I'll never guarantee I'll understand love but by comparison, death does seem a lot simpler. At least it's a commitment. Or maybe love's just what you do until you die, then hopefully everyone you know will pick up where you left off. It could may well be as simple as that. Damnit, I hate when these contemplations get complicated. No one's going to read this. It's like a call sheet (inside joke).
When I was little I used to worry about whether things were right or wrong all the time . One raya (Eid), I ratted on my cousins who were several years my senior, for gambling upstairs out of moral concern. They were so angry but I really did worry then about them. I didn't understand why gambling was wrong, I didn't understand why smoking cigarettes was wrong but I knew everything had their consequences and I didn't wish for theirs to be bad. I would take my mother's Salems which I found in her bathroom and throw them out the window, onto the roof, into the bin or flush them down the toilet (until I realised they wouldn't submerge in water). I was 4 to 9 when I did these things; when I counseled my uncle for smoking because it gave you AIDS, when I would dream of my parents dying of alcoholism or smoking for having dinner with their friends. My mind was filled with sins, worries, all of which now, I see, even I succumb to them.
In high school, I told my parents every bad thing I did. I was so honest about things. My brother hated me for it but I was honest to my parents about everything I could be so that in the instance that I had to lie, I would get away with it better. I was a good kid in high school. I rebelled but I never smoked, I hardly drank, I never got drunk. Now my friends on set ask me to do things like checking the authenticity of their drug props on set because they think I know these things. I do, but in truth, I don't live up to their expectations. In a lot of cases, I don't think the real me lives up to quite a few people's expectations of me but that applies to everyone. I don't always know how I know what I do, maybe I'm just a nerd. I let my eyes wander and my mind, travel. As I grew older and experienced more as people do, the guilt faded, as did fear. Other than bad deeds, the other thing that I feared was ghosts. When we were little, my cousins and I would get into circles, cup our hands like good little Muslims and pray when we heard the dogs howling outside the house. When the dogs went silent, there was a sense of achievement and a connectivity with God. Sort of like Captain Planet and how when our powers were combined, we could call on him to save the world. You can tell I've outgrown cartoons since then. Now I have bigger things to fear than ghosts and God in my life now plays a different role.
I've been on a cigarette binge for the past week. Prior to that, I went nearly a month without smoking. There was a time before I started smoking. I would be worried sick if the boy I liked smoked, then I started to love when my boyfriend smelled of smoke. Gradually I first took up smoking because I had my heart broken and I didn't know how to make the pain go away. It was at that point where I started to run out of cures, retire from vis medicatrix naturae to additives and I no longer moralise things such as these. Now, cigarettes are company when I want no one around. I smoke out of heartbreak or when I feel completely at peace, sometimes as a social lubricant. I can smoke more and not feel sick; inhale the ends hard and not have headspins. Ironically the man, the smoker who I used to always be around hardly smokes anymore. Every day I find less reasons to be afraid of my fears, more reasons to force myself to function. If anything, I'm terrified of not achieving anything. Not failing, of missing the boat. That one day I'm going to die and forgot I had all this time to do shit. I've retired from my need to be 'intelligent' or surround myself with 'intelligence'. I had intelligence, tried wisdom, now I'm going with clever because with clever, you get things done. They're like phases. Words don't cut it as much as hands do. I'm adamant now on measuring myself by my actions so that when everyone's done talking about their lives, I would have hopefully lived mine. You're not an existentialist because you say you are. You're not smart because people think you are. It's simple physics. Energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be transfered. If you don't transfer it onto something concrete, you never move. If your energy goes into mere words, you'd better hope they at least move neurons.
I think it's a shame when people think that the world is full of ugly things and ugly people who are all out to hurt you. They're too afraid of looking into the Pandora's Box to find hope too. Maybe that's why I love controversy and think that humanity makes the best entertainment. Shakespeare was right when he said "all the world's a stage". You can judge and moralise, worry about getting it wrong or right but these are things that are just a part of every day life. Sometimes you just need to move. Maybe it doesn't sound like much to you but when you're contemplating the controversial for the conservative, these are things which one would consider. I'm going back to a core - I am my own actions, flawed or no. I'll do as I see fit because I believe in humanity, I will defy these ugly beliefs incurred by conservatives, that human beings are instinctively cruel when it is evil that inspires good, that completes the satisfaction of good deeds. We need more faith that people are capable of good before evil, and learn that all things are a process to a goal which we will never meet in life. But take responsibility in knowing that all our actions have reactions, and not to destroy other people's journeys as they have theirs too. Choose the energy out of yourself which you wish to transfer onto the world. No one is watching you, people can only guide you so much and it's in these actions, these hands, where life begins and castles start getting made.
Whatever it is that you want from this earth, I do hope you get yours. Good morning, good day, good luck.
I hate texting people but now I'm also starting to resent calling people because it's such a rare occurrence for people to answer their cellphones or to not be busy. Perhaps it's combined with the conditioning of people not wanting to take my calls. Not that those people are important to me anymore. Right now, it's funny. It's like I'm in this funky place in life where sincerity is so scarce. I'm laughing again because I'm angry, disappointed and laughing is going to make it go away, if not my concerns over these petty matters will.
It's a dark place to be when you don't believe in love or relationships anymore. Not that I really don't, it's just that I've been conditioned. It's not about finding someone, the right person will come along soon blah blah whatever, it's the emotional/mental blockage that I'm at now that is so interesting because conditioning is evidence of the very real distinction between the conscious and subconscious; that subconsciously I really feel like every guy just wants to get into my pants and kick my dignity to the floor but on the other hand, I know that men are capable of love and sincerity too. Another aspect of this funk I'm going through now is with vomited philosophies and ideas. People need to be larger representatives of their philosophies rather than being geeks who cite Nietzche over coffee and biscotti and then let their words evaporate into thin air. Philosophy is the narrative of life that needs to be acted upon more than spoken. It is inert; it's ideas that so easily build on the ideas that you already have so are they really new? No. Just updated so what's the hype? And we think that we learn so many new things from conversations but they're just updates of things that we previously know and it's directs you to a collective consciousness that's been building up either since two days ago to an infinity before you were even born. So why aren't people more casual about these subject matters instead of trying so hard a la 'Waking Life' or Woody Allen?
I guess I've come to the point where talking about these things doesn't stimulate me as much as it does seeing it manifested in a real person or as suggested ideas through an art form or metaphor instead of whoring yourself out and going "this is what I think - blah". You have to flirt a little with what you know, not just "omg are dreams more real than life or is it all perception?" Elude this adolescent Kafkaesque bullshit. What's the point of studying Camus to death if you're just going to die anyway? Do you see the irony here? Why turn philosophy into a textbook and continue to suck on the teat of publishers without any evidence of being someone who lives these philosophies naturally? Rather than knowing them and living your life citing an idea that you could have developed yourself in time, what about outrightly just being them here and now? That is real, that requires no reincarnation, no dreaming state, it is knowledge in real time which is as altruistic as it gets.
I'm fed up of college kids harping about this crap, beer in hand, oh look what I learned in class; coffee drinking, wireless mooching, oh guess what I heard during an art show. Blah. Blah. Blah. Blah. I'm so jaded. I want to turn the page. I want to talk to someone I want to talk to, on the phone, I don't care if I'm busy, I want someone to interfere with my life and drop everything because they feel I am more important than whatever I'm doing. I want someone to want to span and close the space that separates us. Why do so few people want that? What is this fear over answering the phone or calling people like it lowers you to respond to another human being? There's such a deficiency of truth and breathing emotion in people. It's insecurity. What is the point of collective consciousness when everyone's afraid of not talking out loud because the next person might think that they're crazy? Or maybe they're not aware of the potential of collective consciousness. Fucking zeitgeist, man. We're all made out of the same components, how far apart could we be from the next person? Insecurity stems from the fact that we cannot read each other's minds when somehow we're all roughly capable of having the same ideas as the next person which is why we say "yeah, I know" more than "gee, I never thought of it that way before." Then that's why people lie. We don't want people to read our minds because we have something to hide. We have hidden intentions and we hide ourselves because we lack confidence in bringing our desires to reality so we create fantasy. We hinder our true selves, true desires and bullshit around to get what we want through illicit means. Why? Because it makes things more interesting or is it really just fear that makes us beat around the bush? I throw my hands up in the air to this.
Maybe we should just stop pretending we're all doing something more important and pick up the phone when it's ringing. Span and close that space that separates us.
I've been having a miserable day so to distract myself from losing my mind this is the product of two hours of random thinking:
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Are all anecdotes fictional?
Even if an anecdote is based on a true occurrence, because all anecdotes are condensations of incidents. One can never wholly comprehend the entire event out of details that may have been left out or not, because of considerations which have yet or will never be considered. Also because of the infinite expanse of alternative perceptions, language, details and context will always be be left out when true events become condensed into the spoken word.
Ergo, if anyone would ask me if I prefer to documentary over narrative, I can easily say that there is no difference. After all, equal amounts of effort are put into the making of either. It's just that documentary or anything related to 'truth', education and information weighs heavier significance on our morals. I say morals because there is nothing that we do consciously or subconsciously that has been instigated without a certain measure of our beliefs and what we know. The closest thing we might have to re-representation however, I suppose, is unedited cinema verite.
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Marxism
I am opposed to the purest concept of communism. Indeed, capitalism is a monopolisation by greedy men wearing self-appointed hats, deeming themselves superior to the working and unemployed class. However anyone that can think that the exact opposite of capitalism, that is communism, must be an idiot as extremes benefit no one. Extremes are the either ends of opposites and when we are attempting perfection, note that perfection is a concept, not a single cold hard law. Everything in nature must have equilibrium. Living life under extreme circumstances of either capitalism or communism is benign. It is merely a swap of control and power when it is always that mother and child will learn from one another.
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Love, Death and of course, Religion
I watched "Waking The Dead" today and cried like a bitch. Maybe it's that I'm so affected by mortality that stories about lovers, where one of them dies, almost always get to me. I've always been easily affected by death. Maybe my soul mate is already dead. Or that I haven't met anyone new to love which means he has not come into existence in my life yet. No one can be alive if they have not been born yet.
Is it really that simple? That all you have to do is wait around for the right person, for the next milestone to happen? That sounds like such an uneducated assumption. It is a concept that emphasises the existence of fate and I find that really disturbing. I hate leaving my life to something else. I would hardly call it a higher power. I don't believe in a so-called higher power. I believe in a god in a why-not way. I don't think god is greater than me. If I had the same powers as god and you could tell between him/her and I, who does a better job, then there would be a higher power. I mean, if you think about it when you have athletic competitions they are divided into male, female, age and weight et al why? Because you can't compare and compete everyone in one go when we all have different assets. I don't feel like I need to regard god as a higher power when even if he really did create the world, I obviously cannot compare his power and mine. Am I supposed to be humbled? Instead of just being grateful, need I revere a doctor or lawyer for being able to do what I cannot? Supposedly I will not be given more than I can handle, so what purpose is there to asking for help through prayer? Furthermore I'm an existentialist. What use is there of considering all things but the fact that life is life and it does not need to be mystical to work? I don't require any more purpose to live than my direction in life. I don't need a religious god to steer my life.
The concept of a religious god is inane anyway. Variety in religion is like variety among football teams. It's cultural. It's based on what you were born into, who introduced you to the team/religion, where you were when you first discovered your love for that team/religion. It has little to do with truth or evidence especially since religion is about faith.
When someone tries to sell you any of the three main religions: Christianity, Islam or Judaism they always follow the same cyclical presentation: source. Source, where did the universe come from? Bla bla, facts of life discovered before refined science. They always use hard evidence with such conviction and when you ask them for hard evidence of anything else, you have to fill in the blanks with faith. If you could fill in the blanks with faith, why bother talking about fact in the first place? Why can't the origins of all existence, all our questions about anything and everything be answered with 'faith'? How does the balance between fact and faith bring you closer to the meaning of life? How different is that to the contrast between fact and fiction? Faith is imagination and therefore, consolation.
Even if they get the scientific things right like how fetuses are formed then how does that make the stories of the prophets true? It's like scientific fact is the hook and the rest is a short biography of the past couple of hundred centuries. But then again the church opposed Galileo Galilei's findings on the Earth's rotation, accusing him of heresy, when Albert Einistein considered Galilei the father of modern science. Now what? I can understand the need to feel a connection to a particular religion but how can one do so without considering that every one's choice of religion is pure circumstance, not entirely a decision made out of pure, calculated deliberation. I would at least submit to the idolatry of a placebo before which. I would much rather prepare myself throughout my life for err before aiming as high as attaining divine altruism.
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I hate the end of semester. I can't get myself together or much of a film crew for that matter. I can understand how everyone's so busy and everything here but do the rest have to be so fucking closed off? Bastards. Morons. Furthermore the course here basically requires you to be a one-man studio which is STUPID for film under any circumstance. All I want to do is graduate on time. Jesus fucking Christ is that so much to ask?
Fuck structural education. As if I didn't already have enough to worry about.
