Everything… even just for being said only once, sounds cliche. Me and the words and world I’m seeing right now just scrape and chafe. Nothing fits into the little boxes you learn about in school. The planet isn’t folding itself up into what you read about in books.
But it’s like it never did. It never was. And all the things we know about the world are just what we prescribed for it. We thought we saw something, and it reminded us of some latin-derived idea… so we call the thing a name, and pretend like we discovered something new. When really, all we did was name it, and then drag it into our world… and we act like that’s normal. Like it’s natural. Like, us dragging shit into our world is ok.
It’s not. I feel like everything I know is meaningless. All our gestures, all our work… it’s just ones and zeros. It’s just a system of dots with no inherent meaning. No inherent anything. There’s no sense in anything we do. It’s all filtered through our senses, and translated into Something. When, it was fine just where it was before. The whole world. The manufacturing of sweet-tarts. Easter. Atkins. Mp3s. Angst. None of it has a point. There’s only this road, or this god that we dangle in front of ourselves so that we can forget that there are no goals ever.
There’s only this game we’ve been choosing to play. This game that people win and lose at all the time. This game where the rules are written by whoever has the most force, or whoever has the biggest number in some computer database. People waste their whole lives getting absorbed in this game. Because none of us have created anything else to be yet… None of us can conceive of any other way to exist.
It just feels so empty.
autarchex | 02-May-04 at 8:04 pm | Permalink
Sometimes I sit outside under the stars and get lost in thinking about that shit, and how absolutely fake everything we know is, and how it is really quite hilarious in a sick sort of way that we attach so much importance to these things, the stock market, classes, arguments with parents, whether other countries have WMD or not and whether to attack them or not and whether we should be wearing miniskirts and clown noses while doing it or not. Hilarious, because none of it matters. One, it is all a construct we created - it wasn’t there before we came along. Two, as anyone that gazes into the night sky for long enough can attest: our whole fucking planet of monkeys that are stuck on themselves is utterly and completely insignificant. This whole solar system could be obliterated in an instant, and the most that would happen to the rest of the universe is a slight and naturally correcting gravitational hiccup in the local stellar neighborhood.
I wonder at all the sci-fi movies that show aliens intercepting our transmissions and learning from them. It’s ludicrous, really - everything we do is encoded in an entirely arbitrary system of binary code. Without knowing the code, you cannot distinguish between a program that does your taxes, a dissertation on molecular physics, or a digitization of the Mona Lisa - bits are bits. We have a hard enough time separating these, and interpreting garbled transmissions from all over Earth. Imagine the task of doing this without any knowledge of our language, our customs, or even how many fingers we have, or whether we can see, and in what colors? Do we communicate via sound? Ultrasound? Can we see radio waves? Someone on the outside would not know so much of what our signalling systems take for granted. They wouldn’t know that we tend to bundle bits in groups of 8 or 32. They wouldn’t know that we denote a negative number using two’s complement MSB notation. They wouldn’t know that we do computation in base 2 but think and converse in base 10.
The entire structure we have built our technological civilization upon is artificial and arbitrary.
What really scares me is the alarming trend toward archiving important documents digitally rather than in paper form. What happens if we lose the codes? We know the late 20th and early 21st centuries as a golden age; future generations might know it as the great dark age which recorded no history of itself.
Hmm. This comment has deviated quite a bit from your post, and I’m not entirely sure I was on-topic to begin with. I just wanted to type out a rant.
starladear6 | 03-May-04 at 1:07 am | Permalink
:)
Thanks. No, I think you understood completely what was exploding out of me.
Sometimes I wish I was still a little christian girl still… and had everything laid out in front of me… and that I’d never ever read anything written by Focault ever.
autarchex | 03-May-04 at 4:38 am | Permalink
I *was* planning on reading some Focault, but maybe I won’t now …
lacunaend | 03-May-04 at 11:53 am | Permalink
wow..
schafer | 05-May-04 at 2:11 am | Permalink
I realize that this is an entirely unsolicited response, but I think what you said is really interesting. It got me thinking. I know I have struggled through a lot of things, and I’m not sure I have ever figured out how to fill up the emptiness, maybe I’ve just covered it up. After writing what the rest of this message I realized that it doesn’t specifically address your concerns on the larger scale, but more of the living of life at home.
The one thing that our society never ceases to exploit is this feeling of emptiness you discussed. Whether its organized religion, “luxury” cars, or mega malls, our society is ready to sell you a bottled solution to your problems. Television is filled with images intended to make us feel bad about ourselves and purchase products that will make us feel “better.” In the recent years it has even become easy to replace real experiences with extremely controlled experiences (Disneyland) or worse yet
”reality” TV. And if you aren’t ready to substitute your real life for a television life yet, you can flip to “You Got to See this TV” and Dateline and to learn the latest reasons why you should fear and avoid new experiences (that don’t involve a couch) and the world around you. If you go outside you will be shot or robbed. If you go into the wood you will probably be attacked by an animal… if you ride a bike you will probably suffer a horrible accident. The world around us should be celebrated not feared.
I think that organized religion has put arbitrary boundaries between groups of good people. It has given people a crutch to lean on. We are taught to worship a god and forget about everything else. Religion has lost sight of the underlying teachings, living a good life. Rather than teaching service and selflessness, many religions focus on joining the club, singing some songs, and going to heaven. Should people of all races and religions chase after a promise of a heaven or an afterlife, or simply live a better life for the sake of there brethren.
To me a good life is not having the possession we are taught to want and need, not going to church on Sunday, or being a virgin until you are married, but to serve and to work to improve the community and world around us. Many professions can serve this function in some capacity… teaching, medicine, environmental work, agriculture… etc. The underlying feature of a good life is the pursuit of service rather than finance.
kazujin | 16-May-04 at 3:08 pm | Permalink
I liked that God dangling with no goals part.
I think the sad truth of things lies in simplicity.
Most people don’t like to focus on things more than a few seconds because they might accidently see their reflection.
Maybe written into almost everyone’s subconcious mind,
is to choose the path that doesn’t focus on who they are.
Then again, some people do focus on themselves and we just call them arogant. However arogant is spelled, it doesn’t matter!
Palm trees and pina coladas!