One of my favorite pasttimes is watching people, figuring them out. I’m not detached: I talk with people in bars (and elsewhere: I’m capable of being very, very social) all the time. Still, a few beers, and I start analyzing. Who is that person? And that person? What do they feel? How do they approach the world? Why?
There is this feeling of love that invades me from time to time (note: I’ve had a couple drinks tonight, so there may be a bit of the “I love you, man” thing going on), when I see how STUPID yet loveable people are. I love them BECAUSE of their flaws, because of the ineffective ways they are trying to solve real problems. Oh, we are all like that sometimes.
Hell, I’m one of the dumb ones. I must be. I’m not perfectly happy, yet I see no reason this should not be one of the states attainable on Earth. That I have not attained it means I am being stupid, and believe me I have ample reasons for believing that.
I said I lose no sleep over 9/11. Well, last night I was awake about every 30 minutes all night long either seeing a Russian conspiracy, or–and this is where the unconscious kicks in–wondering why glass won’t stretch. Why doesn’t glass flex? It is pernicious. We can see through it, but it won’t stretch at all. It just breaks. Such a pity. Someone needs to invent taffy glass.
Be that as it may, it felt like a species of insanity. Now, as Lewis Carroll, I believe in the voice of the Queen had it, I sometimes think two impossible things before breakfast, but even I have to tell the truth sometimes, and say this isn’t right.
I can analyze the symbolic content of this, and likely will, but the point that is running through my mind now is the fragility of experience. We think it is unitary, we think it is solid. We think we are material objects traversing a material land, and that everything is put together just so. We call this condition of thought sanity. Sanity is existing in a time and place according to the ideals of that time and place, being able to explain them, being able to defend them against heterodoxy (interesting that we see the word ortho-doxy, but not homo-doxy; the former formulation makes the repetitive, imitative aspect of it less obvious, presumably), and being quite satisfied that what one knows is what one needs to know, and that what one has not been told to know is either false or not worth knowing.
I have long felt that being open to the idea of being insane CAN be useful, although not necessarily. For me, I want to live in a more or less orderly space, but I also want to venture out from time to time, to see what else there is to see, to find out what else there is to know.
No box with 6 sides can ever close. No world with a finite number of dimensions can be said to exist.
Oh, that, the sound of one hand clapping, and a pint of whiskey might bring you to the edge–but oh it is just over there, not here, on the other side of the dark river–of enlightenment. It’s OK: I’ll be sitting there next to you, still well satisfied it was a good time.
Let’s be dumbasses together. It’s plainly a burgeoning field. You lead, and I’ll fail to follow. We can take turns.