My Model of Truth

My model of the truth veers so far from what other people are accustomed to understanding as the truth that I always find myself alone. The typical response to strangeness is mockery. What people don’t realize is that my worldview totally swallows all other worldviews like a whale. People don’t realize that what they mock is actually the description of the invisible clock which runs the universe. Yet my actual life consists of nothing but isolation at this point.

The truth is my “clock” is incomplete. Until it’s complete, I won’t be able to devise a strategy by which I might live with this consciousness in the world of ordinary people. So long as a few screws are loose or some gears need replacing, the idea of salesmanship and diplomacy must always come second. Nonetheless, as the vision becomes more and more complete, I face the need to make my way of looking at things approachable to other people. Unfortunately, I don’t know where to begin on this matter.

The first and biggest issue is to find the right people. In my life, however, there are no such people. All marketing revolves around target demographics. I have yet to get a clear picture who my target demographic is. Indeed, I have the same problem as Friedrich Nietzsche, whose book Thus Spoke Zarathustra has provided the subtitle for my blog: For All and None. While that may be entertaining as a thought, I’m encountering it as a very serious practical problem, as did Nietzsche, who died alone and in madness.

The second and equally serious issue is, having found the so-called “right people”, how I present my arguments, my perspective, my art, etc. Therefore this diagram describes my situation:

                       Right People
                              ^
Right Presentation <-+-> Wrong Presentation
                              v
                      Wrong People

Since I have no “right people” – i.e. people both whom I trust and who are in a position to provide some kind of help to me, be it financial or in collaboration, and I don’t have the right presentation, I am flying extraordinarily solo right now. I’m not sure anyone who reads this blog could possibly conclude that I know everything about how to present my ideas and intentions. I have so many ideas that I am simply well aware of the fact that I can’t communicate them here. I wish the blog were a clearer type of forum in which I weren’t just spraying things out into the ether, because it’s very difficult to figure out who is reading and what their conditions and backgrounds are.

The only way my life can move forward with regard to selling my perspective to others is to present my ideas to the right people and in the right way. You can imagine how hard it is to face the problem of not even knowing who the right people to present one’s ideas to are, let alone finding the best way of making such a presentation.

If you’re wondering how I ever got into this mess, I guess I can share Joseph Campbell’s closing paragraph to what is generally considered his best book, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I bit onto this paragraph, hook, line, and sinker when I was nineteen, and only five months later had my transformative mystical vision which felt to me like a “proof” of the value of Joseph Campbell’s worldview and philosophy.

Here’s the quote:

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”

What’s weird is that I took all of this responsibility entirely onto myself. In the middle ages, many stories talk about how the knight errant, the knight in shining armor, as it were, needs only the faintest breath of confirmation from his feminine counterpart, some maiden somewhere which allows him to fight all his battles, knowing it was for her honor that he fought. The maiden, generally speaking, was the knight’s real source of strength. This pattern has functioned basically true to form, in my case. It wasn’t just Joseph Campbell’s strong, masculine presence which gave me confidence to keep going, but also encounters and conversations with certain real-life women, who played variously different roles, but who nonetheless inspired me to continue despite very very little support from other places.

So that’s the basic philosophy which brought me to my current situation. On the one hand, all of the stories imply that the journey is just as difficult as I’m finding it to be, and therefore I conform in a mythic way to how the stories are told. But on the other hand, it’s a long slog, piling uncertainty upon uncertainty until it becomes hard to see anything but uncertainty. The belly of the whale, as it were.

I’m So Exquisite!

Note: I decided to publish though I doubted.

I’m pretty sure this is not going to be published. My head swarms with sharks and piranha, which I take to be self-defeating depressive tendencies. I had written a note to myself: when my heart’s not in it, it shows.

My heart’s not in much else, mind you, which is why I continue here. I think this article will be once again about institutions. It seems like my best angle from an ordinary standpoint would be to take advantage of some institution or other. How did I get so distrustful of them? Does my distrust cause a feedback loop where I refrain from engaging and it further amplifies my distrust? In other words, is there something about my distrust of institutions which is false?

Two questions related to this: what then is the truth, and what is the source of my misperception?

I’m searching my heart for the answers to these questions. I detect a deep-seated belief that such institutions wouldn’t want me. I’m just going straight to the point here instead of trying to dodge it. Perhaps I project something onto institutions when I suspect them only of phony operations. I guess my acute loneliness is once again causing me to question my perceptions of things.

There are two general sorts of institutions I consider. Getting a regular job is not even one of them. The first kind is the spiritual retreat center, which sort of makes sense for someone like me, a loner, and introvert, someone not “fit” for dealings with the mundane day-to-day phoniness of modern life. I haven’t really given such centers my best efforts. The second is the dreaded academy, which also seems like a natural fit, if I could only overcome the monstrous barriers set before me, which include financial questions and prerequisites, since all of the programs I might appreciate require more credits than I currently have.

There is a streak of rebellion in me which says I don’t want to attend classes I’m uninterested in, in order to get the credentials to attend classes I might be more interested in. It may be some kind of “childish thing” I need to “put away”. Yet I also think that the modern academy simply absorbs cash from a system in which it has acquired monopoly rights over certain desirable statuses – the college degrees. On the one hand, my rebellion may have a tinge of childishness to it, and on the other, it may be right to rebel against corruption. However, of course, if I rebel too much, and I find nothing else fruitful from my life, then I’m not even affecting the system I’m so scared of in any way. The universe doesn’t care about me – to think it does is what they call an infantile fantasy.

At the same time, I ought to care about the universe, and I struggle to do so. Perhaps I secretly hide how much I really do care about the universe. Can any of my high and mighty complexes be reduced to simple old-fashioned fear? If so, how much time will it take for me to overcome said fear?

There is simply no one to talk to in this world. All make too many assumptions, and no one is truly present.

That’s my sentiment, anyway. Certainly it is rather offensive by the very sound of it. Yet it will probably remain forever true. Part of my disappointment comes from holding on to the idea that there might be people who are actually good at listening. Indeed it suggests yet another infantile complex that I wish someone were capable of encountering me genuinely, that is, without pretense. What is a person to do when he has reached the ends of human understanding? When the person himself is not understood by anyone? Yet I can only believe my sentiment to be indicative (of such an infantile complex) insofar as I have not in fact met everyone and therefore my conclusion is far too quick.

But I have met a lot of people, some of them even well-reknowned, at least in the circles they come from. I don’t think my complaint is entirely rooted in some infantile complex. I just wish it were possible to converse on important matters with someone, and I haven’t found them. The next logical step is to decide where I am most likely to encounter such glorious people. I have no idea where, and all of my efforts thus far have failed.

Not to say I haven’t picked up a few friends along the way. Nor is it unlikely that for someone in as lonely and uncertain a position as I the need for intimate friendship is so great that I fail to notice how few people others have to talk to as well. Nonetheless, because it is so difficult I am prone to assigning it “meaning”, to imagining some divine power which understands more than I do about what exactly is going on here.

On the other hand, I’ve recently been thinking about how close my personality is to those of what we have come to know nowadays as the “dangerous” sort – those mass murderers and social misfits who cannot contain the nightmare which is their waking lives, and they either shoot up the place, or they start a religious cult with a few followers in a remote section of the woods, and it goes sour for all of them eventually. I have a kinship with both of these types. Therefore, the “meaning” of my isolation and loneliness is to shore up my defenses. To build the dams more solid and the castle walls sturdier so that they don’t break. The meaning is that my long period of loneliness allows me to absorb all of the negative psychic energy which made these other people turn into psycho killers and cult leaders and followers. This would provide an acceptable meaning context for my difficult condition, to know that its purpose is to make me into a good person, instead of the broken maniac I would be had I not been forced to endure these painful moments.

So I still have ways of finding meaning for my condition. And I still have no one to talk to. Well, isn’t that the darndest thing you ever heard? Thank you, blog, for being a venue in which I can express myself.

I would like in a later post to discuss these retreat centers I am thinking about. I would probably be a great mystic guru, but I definitely have no infrastructure supporting such a thought. In fact, the readers of this blog are the closest thing I have to that kind of infrastructure, but don’t worry, it doesn’t amount to much, although I would like to thank the one or two people who do in fact seem to be reading this blog, according to site stats. Isn’t it exquisite?

Assessing Sychronicity

I’ve been trying to decide what I think of Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity, which are coincidences which are thought to be meaningful. There is a hesitation a modern atheist would have about declaring anything to be meaningful. It smells of “God”, as it were. The atheistic view is to believe that all attributions of meaning come from people, and this is basically a sound view in my opinion too. But I should say that this implies that from the moment of the creation of the universe to the moment when any particular individual perceives reality, there is no meaning. Then, when a person perceives the universe, meaning exists.

The weakness for anyone who claims that the universe possesses meaning apart from people’s assessments of it is that people’s decisions as to what is meaningful and what isn’t can be hugely subjective. To be able to attribute meaning to the existence of the universe itself, we must at least examine the habits of people, examine the things they traditionally attribute meaning to, and unfortunately, most of these things are connected with personal gain and advantage.

In order to say objectively that the universe has meaning, we’d have to filter out all of the meanings we ascribe to it which are related to what’s good for us as individuals, families, tribes, and even as a whole species. I think this is almost impossible to do. If I’m applying for a job, and I get the job, and I think, “Well, it must be meaningful that I got the job,” then I’m applying meaning to what happens to me which is good for me.

Most people really only care about what’s good for them. But I would say that this essentially disqualifies them from being able to analyze the phenomenon of synchronicity. But whose method and habit of assigning meaning is indeed immune to self-interest? All definitions of Good seems to pertain to human advantage, whether it be on the individual level, or on the level of the family, the tribe, the nation, or the species as a whole. The astronomical search for life on other planets is still searching for life, if only in its most primitive bacterial forms. But what is life? It is we. Life is only of interest to us insofar as it proves that the universe has a habit of producing us. Therefore, even when our definition of the Good crosses the boundaries of species and includes all of life, it is still “Us versus Them”, where we are biological life and they are dead inorganic matter.

The idea of meaning as it pertains to synchronicity (a.k.a. “meaningful coincidences”) is connected to the idea of the Good, and the idea of the Good is always connected to the things which benefit the observer. I can’t find any instance of something being declared good which is not declared good because it benefits the observer. Where, then, could synchronicity exist if there were no observers, or if the observers had no need of selfish gain? The Good and Selfish Gain are so thoroughly intertwined that the idea of synchronicity existing entirely outside our subjective opinions of it is very hard for me to swallow.

Synchronicity is, therefore, a psychological crutch to be used by people who can’t withstand the meaninglessness of the universe per se (which includes everyone I know, by the way). When we define the Good, we separate ourselves from the world. We always gain in Goodness and the world is therefore depleted of precisely the same goodness.

We return once again to the problem of Don Quixote, who could not live without meaning, so he put on medieval armor and rode around in search of great adventures. To everyone else, it was his imagination but to him it was an enchanted world. Our tremendous knowledge of the world unfortunately prevents us from finding believable meaning in it. The “Good” is nowhere to be found. But we’re not so far from Don Quixote in that it seems to be in our nature to require that the universe be meaningful.

In early childhood, meaning comes naturally, but then something happens which makes us require meaning instead of just having it. I’m rather certain it has something to do with the discipline required to change our raw natural behavior into that which is required by civilization for civilization’s existence and wellbeing. But a growing awareness and too much knowledge serve to deplete the illusion, which was that the sacrifices we make for civilization will be compensated by the great things civilization has to offer.

I find myself in the situation where I appreciate some of the things civilization has to offer, but I’m not as excited by them as I would like to be, as would be necessary for me to serve it unquestioningly. It is the great problem of modernity – where can real meaning be found? – nor can I look out into the universe, either before or after civilization, and see what could give me reason to live apart from civilization. The deeper I see into things, the less meaningful they become.

Because of this tremendous problem, I can’t hold it against people who find meaning in the world, who see “meaningful coincidences” all over the place. I myself spend much effort investigating just such things.

One thing I derive much direction, and indirectly therefore, meaning, from is my dreams. Dreams are personal events, lifelike, and they pull in with them the rich world of primordial meaning. They are possibly the last resort for an existentialist who finds meaning nowhere else. But is their meaning exclusively personal? Or can one person’s dream clarify truths for his entire society? That’s a decision each person has to make who makes a study of this topic.

I would be glad to derive a feeling of significance from knowing that my dreams were of a collective nature, that I am dreaming something on behalf of many people in this vast society of ours. It would redeem my incredibly puny waking existence, but at the same time, I’m not really in a position to know if my dreams affect more than just myself. A conservative guess would be that my dreams are indicators of how my life alone is structured, of the course my life alone will take, etc.

I don’t even have that many dreams, at least not of the kind which I remember. I have a few, and I do try to mine them for meaning and direction. The big one for the past many years has been of course the woman who said she had my “baby”. Maybe she still does. I have translated the dream to the real world message that she is the muse which will bring my video game into existence.

Now that muse has not given me too much concretely. I’m not much closer, other than a good deal of time spent studying. But it does serve as a distraction from the emptiness my life would be otherwise.

A lot of my dreams are quite powerful – from a narrative point of view – but less so from a point of view which helps me to understand what I am supposed to do with my life.

If I postulate that they contain is a secret formula, a hidden wisdom, then I am going into the area of synchronicity, that is, believing something to be meaningful. To believe it’s meaningful is to compensate the agony of experiencing it. But I am also of the type who subjects his thoughts to rigorous analysis, and therefore I can’t definitively declare any of the paths I follow to be meaningful. Generally is it the person who is in acute agony who sees the most meaningful coincidences occurring in her life. Nor does it even matter if the course of my life is meaningful or not – it only matters insofar as it affects either my own attitude or others’ attitudes.

Perhaps the ideal state of mind, therefore, is to somehow go beyond meaning, to go beyond being dependent on whether one’s actions or one’s life has any meaning. To be immune to the Good. I have not yet achieved this state of mind, but I can see its virtues – totally immunity to meaning, total insensitivity to meaning. To return, actually to the child’s state.

The Death That Is Our Mental Health System

Perhaps my desire to blog comes in streaks. What’s on my mind today is a paradox. My natural compulsion is to go deeper, but it seems that deeper is in effect farther from where anybody else is. Therefore life is very confusing. All ordinary notions of how one achieves a good life with connections to other people are abandoned by me. I pursue the path because I sense very strongly that I am right to follow it. Is the sense wrong, or is it simply part of my journey to venture into complete spritual isolation in order to capture a rare quest item, i.e. a state of mind which can only be gotten through determined isolation?

Well, that’s the paradox, that I don’t know how my life as is (except for this blog post) could lead to a better situation, unless that better situation is the result of inner exploration. If it’s true that I find within myself some treasure not to be found outside, then it makes sense, and in that case, I must simply endure, stop resisting even, since resistance is a distraction from the main point.

Stop resisting my inner muse. I’ve resisted all outer authorities rather well. But my inner authority is one I also want to resist. Yet unlike outer authorities, I can’t genuinely say my inner one is wrong, just that it leads me to places I can’t understand how one escapes from. If my inner authority led me to a pit of snakes, well, I’m probably going to die. Strangely enough, listening to my inner voice tells me that I’m just as much afraid of mockery from outside as I could ever be from dying by snake bite. To follow an inner voice to one’s death – I’m analyzing the worst case scenario here – I was quite traumatized by earlier experiences with so-called mental health professionals. I followed an inner voice. The external result was so-called doctors’ labeling me mentally ill.

Yet I still fear mockery when I’ve already been mocked completely, as there is no greater mockery of someone who follows their inner voice than to label them non compis mentis, to literally remove their free will on account of your low opinion of their ability to use it.

What happened at that time? What did I gain and what did I lose by having my free will taken away? I must still understand what happened, because it clearly still bothers me.

One rather difficult thing for me is that I felt I was running an experiment, to see what happens when my inner muse is followed, but that I was not able to see the experiment to the end. I think part of me wanted to die, and it was prevented from doing so. Instead I took upon myself the death that is our mental health system. And I still bear that death.

This returns to the idea that my video game in some way has from time to time been supposed to address that issue, to be autobiographical with regard to my experience with the mental health system.

The main accomplishment of this post is that I got a new phrase: the death that is our mental health system. It has a powerful ring to it, and I must meditate on it.

I don’t know what to call this one

It’s time for another blog post. As usual, the great ideas I wanted to write about have escaped me. So do I continue, or stop?

I will continue, under the assumption that the ideas will come back to me when I really need them. This is a good occasion, therefore, to mention the anxiety I feel, writing so few posts and, by the way, doing very little else. I continue to study computer programming, so that’s a plus. The odd thing about my anxiety is that at core I don’t feel it’s wrong to do nothing. It’s only a vague feeling that it will be shunned by others which causes the anxiety.

Yes, I’m aware of my situation, where I rely completely on an increasingly senile old man for food and a place to stay and on social security disability for all my spare cash. I’m not trying to be a so-called “freeloader” – but I am succeeding nonetheless. This would seem to be a reason to be anxious, but again, I feel no compulsion to try to change things. Thus I even feel anxious about not feeling anxious.

John Lennon’s famous quote says “life is what happens while you’re making other plans.” I don’t really want this to be true in my case. I’d like to have a plan and for that to be my life. My video game is what I always go back to, but the way I proceed is achingly slow. That’s my anxiety, not understanding how I can expect to reach a destination at the speed I travel, more so than any of the concrete questions of food and shelter.

Thus I am living with huge uncertainty, and little more of a plan than “do nothing”. My video game research – is it nothing or something? On the one hand, I’ve produced almost nothing concrete, just two or three incomplete programs. On the other, it continues to provide me something to do. I take it seriously even though I’ve done little. It is a vision which is pushing me into a specific realm of our vast world. I think it may well be this specificity which is lacking in my life. A life of simply knowing everything and doing nothing is not a complete life, therefore, perhaps, the vision decided that a video game was something to do.

What I like about video games is the variety and flexibility of the medium. What I don’t like about them is how sophisticated the technology they rely on is. I suppose also that it’s not just the techonology, but the attitude which our culture seems to have about technology, a downright apocalyptic attitude, you might say. Technology is inevitable, so why complain about it?

If there is a legitimate reason to complain about it, it’s that we have lost our souls to it. But that only matters if we know what a soul is to begin with. What is a soul? That’s a hard question. Typically the modern argument would be that there is no concrete physical evidence for our having souls, therefore we have no souls. Because they have no physical existence, they are of no value and there is therefore no reason to worry about losing them.

Not having souls is related to the Jungian question, what is it like to live without a myth. But that boils down to the more familiar question, what is the meaning of life? With this question, there are typically jokes because the jokers bypass the idea that the answer actually matters. How does it affect a person to have no meaning of life?

In this regard, the phrase “ignorance is bliss” is very important. Having no meaning of life is really only important to people who have some awareness of the lack of meaning. Animals and young children don’t ask. They don’t experience the devastating psychological effects of their lives being devoid of meaning, even if their lives are in fact devoid of meaning.

So it’s really the human psyche, or soul, which is most affected by the idea that life might be meaningless. In particular, life energy is drained, motivation collapses. Why does motivation collapse if a person is plagued by the idea that their life is meaningless? Because the tasks for which motivation is required are not natural – they are motivated by meaning and myth.

In my case, I very often have no reason to do anything. While I would like to assure that I can continue to eat and have a warm place to stay, even these ideas quickly become distant to me as reasons to do things.

So what am I getting at?

For me, making a video game is the process of putting out everything else from my mind. Of all the things I am aware of, I must separate those which have to do with making a game from those which don’t.

Why can’t I just dive in and ignore everything I’m leaving behind? It would make sense, and presumably that’s how everyone else does it. Because I’m not obsessed by simply making a game – it’s some divine holy vision which drives me. I must unite the two worlds, of life outside and of life inside of video games. Taking this into account, perhaps it’s no wonder I’m so slow.

Each aspect of a game has roots in a different art form. Literature, music, graphics, animation, traditional tabletop games, traditional puzzles, and perhaps others. I’m trying to understand each of these unto itself. Each represents a different archetype. Computers add, of course, lightning speed of calculation, so that calculations which used to be laborious are instantaneous. This is what overwhelms me, the speed and accuracy of computers’ calculations.

I guess I’m experiencing the idea of homo digitalis, that with computers we are a whole different species. Traditional anthropology likes nice categories. If we know all the species, we can feel safe. But what if homo digitalis is truly different from the previous species? What if our souls have not been stolen after all?

I constantly come back to my vision because it is the only thing which provides me with motivation, although I would love to have something else give me motivation at this point, because I spend most of my time alone studying, studying, and no one besides me is really interested in it. It’s hard to endure, therefore I often postulate that I benefit from the process, that my soul is teaching me discipline, that my soul knows what it is doing.

Education and the Meaning of Life

The advantage of formal education is the efficiency of instilling difficult ideas into people. Say you must sail from shore to a specific desert island, but it is too far off the horizon to see. Formal education, in theory can take you quickly to that island. The advantage is that with limited resources, you may not have known about the island or been able to reach it without running out of food or time. Formal education is a submisssion to a way of behaving which is meant to speed up the journey to the distant island.

The disadvantage is that you must trust your teachers. Without exploring on your own, you will have less ability to decide for yourself how valuable the island you reach is. In our age the value of formal education is questionable. Our society is so young in terms of how technology, environment and society intermingle. Therefore the islands to which we might sail are of still unknown value.

The fact that institutions of “higher” learning are empowered to bestow degrees upon people means nothing in this regard. In fact, it is precisely because their education is of questionable value that colleges must back up what they offer with solid pieces of paper, as incentive for those who simply can’t see the value of attending. An ideal world would be one in which the value of an education was so obvious that no certificates of assurance needed to be issued. My general feeling about this is that a master-apprentice relationship is more likely to meet this high standard than a typical college is, yet I know of no such opportunities for myself.

Another powerful reason for bestowing degrees instead of simply educating people is the devastating fact that talent varies. A less talented person will have a lot of trouble at a given task no matter how good their teachers and education are. Colleges are therefore a way for parents, for example, to spend money to assure that their less talented children have an advantage over equally untalented people who couldn’t afford to go – an absolute necessity clearly, but the exact opposite of actual education.

Institutions are able to marshal resources better than loners like myself. Therefore, research activities which require more than just the salaries of teachers are possible. Again, this is the double role of the college as place where research is advanced, and place where people get educated.

Colleges clump people together and in this way they hope some kind of alchemy occurs amongst the clumped up people. Many people I’ve talked to have advocated precisely this as the best reason to go to college. I’m all for clumping people together, but not if that’s the only thing which occurs at the place. If nothing is being taught, then it’s a social institution but not an educational one.

I mention all these points, but my original idea was the island metaphor, which I think is very apt. The fundamental idea with formal lessons is to focus the mind and move towards a goal perhaps too far away to reach just by guesswork, or at least too far to reach in a reasonable amount of time just by guesswork. But you must know what it is you want to do, and how does one first desire to become educated in a specific direction?

I envy the society in which master-apprentice is the primary method of education, in which random clumping together of people for the purpose of “higher” learning is looked down upon. Why can’t these institutions attract my interest with regard to what they might teach, as opposed to what attractive women or business connections they might provide. I’m a purist by nature, and I suffer for it.

Informal education is where you learn by tumbling out into the real world and seeing what happens. Informal education is the other way to go. It certainly allows for a person to connect individually with his values. There’s no tunnel vision with such education, which may mean that you won’t get very far at first, since you see everything and are not fixed on a specific point. Easily distracted. But what is a person really supposed to want from this world anyway? Why put blinders on if I don’t know what I want to become?

Informal education means genuineness. A society must have people who don’t follow orders. Too much directedness may equal wasted time reaching an island with nothing on it. Getting a degree is the end in itself for some people, the source of meaning, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Then they have nothing to do with their degree, but hey, they probably wouldn’t have had anything to do anyway. My life is about having no faith in institutions and at the same time suffering all the consequences of actually acting out that lack of faith by not utilizing institutions effectively.

But I remain confident that there needs to be some who think entirely for themselves. Consciousness is not to be abandoned, but sought after, elevated. I won’t put on blinders, because if I lost faith at some point, then others after me may lose faith as well. The society cannot last in which nothing is possible for the one who steps out onto the path of adventure. I stepped out onto it, and if I have to hold up the fort, I’ll hold up the fort. If it’s a hopeless situation, then let it not be hopeless because of me. The scales of life’s pressure are counterbalanced by the fact that I simply don’t want life to be as bad as it seems. What I want will define me, not the pressures which crash upon the shore. If the pressures would just explain themselves, then maybe, just maybe, I would succumb to them, but if they don’t possess reason, then it’s only my own weakness I must be afraid of.

Happy. New. Year.

I think I will write a New Year’s Article. I suffer pretty heavily from not being able to do things merely because I consciously believe them to be good. Unfortunately, since most people ignore the unconscious, they can’t explain why I would not be able to do something I set my mind to. Fortunately, the unconscious is strong enough regardless to impose itself on people. But I think the unconscious is with me with regard to the goodness of writing this. If you are reading it, it means that it was.

I have made my life into a bar magnet with two poles. The outer pole is my social life, which is so inactive that I have a lot of problems with it. My latest “scheme” for dealing with this is that I want to start a church. I haven’t succeeded in starting it, but it represents my best idea as to how to find community in a world where I have none. I think it is my humblest effort to solve the problem of isolation I feel in the world around me. It will require at least one other person nearby to take me up on the offer to start the church – or perhaps not. Perhaps I can start it simply by attending it by myself, and then the next time I talk to anybody who asks me how I’m doing (which could take months, but it should happen eventually) I can say I am attending the church I started. This may or may not make them more inclined to attend, but at least I’m trying. Anyway, generally speaking, you need more than one person to start an activity which is meant to provide community when you have none.

That’s my outer pole. I may wish for a better life, or just a more active social life, but I simply don’t have it. It’s painful, yes, but I don’t have any answers. The point was to tell you about my outer pole, and my dreams and aspirations regarding that pole. I’m failing so badly, in a certain sense, that it’s hard to avoid mentioning that I’m failing as well as mentioning my aspirations. But if you know anyone who wants to start a church, don’t hesitate to let me know – I’m desperate here people!

My inner pole remains focused on software art (a.k.a. “video games”), however, the muse is fickle in this domain as well. The muse simply won’t tell me what the game is supposed to be about or how to make it.

The fellow who lets me live at his house just wished me a happy new year. I’m not in the best of spirits. I don’t like to celebrate when it sets me up for disappointment. Perhaps I should take a new tack on this blog wherein I blog even if I’m miserable. I once thought I could become famous for my blog, but now I wonder if I shouldn’t just completely ignore that thought – my blog is depressing enough as it is, and as such not going to become famous anyway. Maybe I should go the “whole hog”, as it were, and just describe myself perfectly as is, even if I know no one will read it on account of its continued heaviness. I shall have to think about this. I told my housemate that the New Year came along, yes, but that I feel like Sisyphus, each year just representing another boulder I am cursed to roll up the hill, to no avail. Yet Sisyphus is also a hero, because he doesn’t give up. I wish for the strength of Sisyphus this year.

Somehow, he keeps going. Does he believe that there is still a chance, however small, that this time he shall succeed? Or is he capable of rolling the boulder knowing full well he won’t succeed? If it is the second case, where does his motivation – to try, and try again – come from? Perhaps it comes from his knowledge that his punishment is the result of disturbing the divine powers. Perhaps it is the conceit that he was able to challenge the Gods, however briefly. Therefore knowing the reason for which your punishment has been handed to you may give you the strength to continue – knowing that you are fighting against the Gods – does that empower a man? Could it motivate him to do the same thing over and over and over again, knowing full well that success will never come?

This gets into Jungian territory, where the Gods and men have dependent relationships upon each other. It’s not just the Gods ruling men, but also the Gods’ dependency on man for certain things. In the case of Sisyphus, the God Jupiter seems to need to flatter his ego by punishing Sisyphus. There seems little reason for punishing him inherently. The man is not performing for the God any useful work. Rather, the God holds a strain of jealousy against the man, which must be appeased in this case by making sure the man can never escape. It’s Jupiter’s ego which must be appeased, and it is appeased by asserting the power to dictate men’s punishments.

So how much does Sisyphus know about what’s going on in God’s mind?

Well, anyway, I must wish for the strength of Sisyphus, to continue despite not knowing if I shall ever succeed.

What else shall be part of this article? I have a lot on my mind, to be sure. Maybe I should commit to writing more, even though they be the worst things you ever read. What this means is that I’m giving up on my blog being something to really promote and advertise. My personal opinions and feelings are often so sour that I really doubt people would want to read any of them. But blogs are a different beast from anything which preceded them. The electronic media have reduced the price of publication to essentially nil, which changes the game as to what can be written and published. I won’t really be able to advertise my blog to people I meet, since I will no longer wish to impose my darkness upon them. And that will raise the issue, who am I blogging for, and why?

One reason to continue, that people who know me and want to check up on how I’m doing will be able to, caveat emptor, buyer beware, they must read knowing that I don’t reserve my feelings – I haven’t found any reason to – I don’t think my blog will be a big success no matter what I do.

Second reason: those who are willing to dig through the dirt may find the treasures buried within. My writing won’t always be bad. I won’t always be depressed.

Alright then. Anything else?

I’ve been focusing on some aspects of computer programming. I’m not sure how to approach writing about them though. Therefore I will say that although the software art muse doesn’t give me details about her end product, she still provides me with pursuits, things to do, skills and ideas to hone and refine.