I can’t exactly provide the comfort of telling you here at the beginning that by the end of this article, things will make sense. I am writing to try to make sense of it, but it seems rather sketchy so far.
There is a mind connected to the fingers that do the typing here and that mind is a non-physical information system that has developed in and around a physio-chemical structure that is probably based in a brain which is now—in a legally-provable way—nearly half-a-century old and has been inputting indiscriminate bits of information for quite a long time and trying to make all the various and sundry bits fit into some kind of cohesive pattern.
One life, one mind, a million memories. And “life”, “mind” and “memory” are nearly indefinable. All the same, here I am, trying to make sense of it all.
Charleton Heston died yesterday. He played the character of Moses in an old epic movie “The Ten Commandments.” When I was a kid, the misconceptions went something like this: “Did you see “The Bible”? Charleton Heston is God!”
“Yeah, I saw that movie, but the book was better.”
“Books are boring. Books are what you have before they make a movie. A book is like a ‘who cares’ version of a movie. Once you have a movie, nobody needs some dumb book anymore.”
“Uh…”
“Did you see the part where he makes that big sea part? The good people walked through the bottom of the ocean and then when the bad guys tried to follow them, God made the ocean close back up and it drownded all the bad guys. That was COOL.”
“Yeah: the Red Sea.”
“Whatever…Hey, that wasn’t in the movie! ‘Red Sea’? That wasn’t in the movie. What are you? Some kind of heathen who tries to put stuff into movies that wasn’t there?”
“Well, no. I read the Bible. It says it was the Red Sea.”
“Reading is for dorks. It wasn’t in the movie. If it was true, Charleton Heston would have said it, after all, He’s God.”
“Um, MOSES.”
I don’t remember the conversations progressing much past that point. I remember shouting and little sparkly stars swimming around my field of vision, trips to the nurse’s and principal’s offices, quiet hours in detention and being asked whether I’ll think twice next time about starting fights.
I do seem to remember beginning to hate movies at that time. There are lots of nice movies and lots of very intelligent, talented people who work on movies. There are lots of truly wonderful things that are done in the cinematic art-form. And there are millions of people for whom a well-produced motion picture becomes a definitive historical document. I could love the version of “Cinderella” that I read in the book that helped me learn how to read and to learn that reading could be meaningful to me, but once Walt Fricken Disney made Cinderella into a blockbuster animated feature, my memories of a written story and my feelings about it became worthless as social currency. Cinderella stopped being a story that could be expressed in a child’s imagination after it was made into a Disney movie. Disney didn’t just steal a classic fable. Disney made off with a billion children’s right to imagine.
Who was it that directed “The Ten Commandments”? I don’t even care enough to search Wikipedia for it. Whoever it was, they took something that many people thought was the Ultimate Truth of The Universe and disconnected it from its existence as an element of thought to create one polished picture of something that may or may not have happened in actual history.
Starring Charleton Heston as Moses, who was later mistakenly thought of as God but was only an actor portraying a man and was the same actor who later in his career was a spokesman for the National Rifle Association, a group whose lobbying efforts continue to supply automatic weapons to inner-city gang-bangers who think killing is COOL.
Because Moses/God says so.
I normally like to speak well of people after they die. Once someone is dead, they can’t do any more damage. Oh wait…yes they can: the indirect damage done by the followers of the dead person. Even if a leader leads very nicely, the followers can always mess it up. Just look at MLK as opposed to the Black Panthers or the kind of guy Jesus was as opposed to the sort of people who do all sorts of evil stuff in the name of…something that wasn’t even the guy’s name fer crissakes! If the mailman had come to Jesus’ door saying “Special delivery for a Mr. Christ”, that letter would have ended up back at the post office because Iesa bin Yusuf never knew that later generations would change his name to Jesus F. Christ.
What if—just a suggestion, mind you—a person wanted to believe in something TRUE, but all the truth had been buried by ignorance and everyone claimed that the only choices were to believe an ignorant lie or be labeled a heretic?
I’m a little angry. I don’t like being angry, but I don’t know how else to cope with something that makes so little sense. If I could make it make sense, I’d have some other choice—something other than anger.
Destructive emotions are what take over when we get to the end of sense. They’re the scum that rises to the top of the subconscious stockpot. A good cook would skim all of it off and throw it away so it wouldn’t interfere with the enjoyment of the good soup underneath.
To that ignorant brat-kid playground bully who probably grew up to be an ignorant adult bully in some slightly-larger playground, I would like to deliver this message today: Your God died. Naa, na-naa, na- naa, NAAAAAH!
That was mean. I am being mean. I’m mean when I’m sad and angry without being able to really understand why I’m sad and angry. The pain of sadness and anger might even keep me from looking beneath my own surface to find out where these feelings are coming from. People like me are the ones who start wars because they’re sad and angry and they don’t know what to do with those feelings except to lash out against others.
Or, maybe they write. Or sing or play instruments. Or make sculptures. The making of art is often the result of channeling the energy of possibly-destructive emotions into constructive pastimes.
I can’t swear that this will ever make any sense, but it’s better than physically going on a rampage. I can’t guarantee that my writing will make sense, but it’s the one viable alternative I can find instead of screaming “Geeeeeee-Hawd!” at the top of my lungs.
I could start a war or I could join one of the wars already in progress…or I could write stuff that barely makes sense. For the record, I would like it if someone would read my writing and find something helpful in it for making sense of the barely-sensible stuff that fills the average human information system. I would like to write TO someone or FOR someone, but even without that, the simple act of committing words to paper or screen is helpful to me.
Words are logical. Feelings aren’t. Actions might be either logical or not. My writing is the alchemy of taking anything I find inside myself and transmuting it into something useful. Let’s see a movie do that. Let’s see any passive entertainment do something that actually brings some peace to a disturbed soul. Emotions are feelings and feelings are energy and energy is a force of nature and forces of nature need something to do. That’s the one sensible thing I can say: Feelings are emotional energy and the definition of energy is “potential to do work”. Energy has to do something and will do something and your choice—when it’s your energy—is to direct it to do something good (or at least not too harmful) or pretend that you can ignore it and let it do its work without your awareness and direction.
But—for the sake of making a strong point—I am pretending today that I am actually writing something useful and logical to the ignorant little bastard who used to insist that Charleton Heston is God-whose-word-is-inviolate.
Am I making you mad yet? What are you going to do about it? Hit me? Go ahead and try. I work at the store where you’ll have to go to buy a new monitor for your computer after you smash the old one in a fit of idiotic rage. And I get commissions for my sales. Go ahead and take a swing at me. You won’t hurt me. In fact, I’ll laugh about it all the way to the bank.
And in the best case, you’ll realize that you were just being silly because you will come to recognize that you swung your fist because you had emotional energy that needed to do something and you proved my point, even if I told lies to make my point, fighting lies with lies in the manner of a person who fights fire with fire and just waiting for the moment when someone says “Hey, this is getting to be a pretty big fire! Maybe we should get out of here!”
But it’s just a pretense. That kid probably never learned to read and he wouldn’t be here now. You can’t teach those who refuse to learn. In the later years of life, you finally realize that you are your own teacher, guiding your mind to the places where there is something to learn.
And those places are everywhere if you approach life with open eyes and ears, an open mind and an open heart. It is participation in your own life that makes you able to learn. Reading and writing are participatory sports.
Don’t wait too long to notice that you’ve been going through life as a spectator.
Twelve hundred and forty-one words later, Bob realizes he hasn’t even begun to write about the subject indicated in the working title.
There is one truly eternal question in life: what am I doing right now? It takes a few different forms, but it’s always really the same question of what to do. It might be “what do I want to do?” or “what should I do next?” or “what is the right thing to do?” or…any of many variations on the theme, but it’s always the question that leads you to do whatever you do. It’s The Eternal Question because it underlies all of the other questions that are considered classic eternal philosophical questions. If you had no interest in what to do, you wouldn’t ask questions like “Is there a God/Heaven/Hell/afterlife/absolute good and evil?” or “Is infinity real?” or “what is reality?” You’d never ask those questions—or the many other deep-meaning questions—if you did not first and foremost want to know what to do.
We have cultural mythologies about “being at the crossroads” and “choosing one of two paths” because we want to simplify things for ourselves by saying that it is either this or that. In reality, there are many more than two paths. All the same—because language has limitations of convention and accepted structure—I’ll refer to the “two-path” system even though each of the two has a large number of variations of its own.
Let’s name one path “Logic” and the other “Intuition” or—better yet—one set of paths “logical” and another set “intuitive”. Here we find one of the primary divisions of schools of thought. Some people call themselves “logical” and others specify that they do what they do “intuitively”.
But every capable human mind does both.
Because of the researches of psychology, anatomy, surgery, electrochemical studies and “brain science”, most of us are somewhat aware of a few interesting bits of information about how brains work. We know that—physiologically at least—we have brains that are composed of a right hemisphere and a left hemisphere: “logical” and “intuitive” sides in every healthy brain.
And logic is complex and so is intuition and in every healthy brain there exists a complex set of interactions between at least two highly-complex structures. And some mechanic with a blog and a bad attitude is going to make it all make sense?
Yes I am.
You see, no one actually deals with the complexity. People who work with complex things have a mental grasp of the complexity, but they only actually handle one simple piece of it at a time. Okay, they actually work with TWO pieces at a time, fitting Piece A to Piece B while Pieces C through X-times-infinity and all pre-A pieces lay on the worktable awaiting the assemblage of A to B. Even in the most complex things, it is always about the work at hand, just like it is in plumbing when the Great Cycle of Waters is connected to a faucet with a drain underneath and the gunk that you wash off of your hands flows eventually to the bottom of the ocean where it becomes food for an algae that no one has ever seen up close.
I know that evaporation and aeration and settling and precipitation and capillary action and water seeking its own level and the path of least resistance and the universal force that no one really understands—gravity—are all parts of the system, but in any given moment all I really have to do is make a good fitting.
But even with a run-on sentence, you don’t get the real gyst: I only have to DO one thing at a time, but while I’m doing that one thing, I’m holding all the other information relating to that thing in my mind. The One Thing is informed by the rest of the knowledge.
Here is what conscious/subconscious is actually about: conscious simply means the thought that you are currently having and subconscious is all of the information in your mind other than your current conscious thought. Suppose you had breakfast today. You can—if you choose—remember as many details of your breakfast as you choose to remember, but if you are thinking about something other than this morning’s breakfast, the memory of breakfast is in your subconscious mind.
The subconscious mind of the average person contains more data than most people would ever find any conscious use for, including everything about the way things look, sound, feel, smell and taste and any thoughts or feelings you may have had about every experience you’ve ever had. Even though any individual lifetime has its natural limits, the amount of information we gather is nearly limitless and it is all stored inside us, informing us as to who we are and what we think and how we feel about everything else we experience: complexities built upon complexities and all we really want to know is what to do right now.
The parts of the near-infinite information that you can call to conscious awareness and put into order are called “logical thoughts” and the parts that only seem to fit together randomly are called “intuition.”
But they are all thought/feeling information that gets us through our days, all “stored energy” in need of work to do, all opportunities to direct our energy to do something we want done.
That’s my stockpot for today, April 7, 2008. I feel better now that I’ve stirred it and skimmed the scum off.
It’s SOUP!!!
Funny thing about making band logos in photoshop: I probably spent the better part of two years gathering, saving, fixing, re-saving, cutting, pasting, moving, refining and deciding exactly what this thing should look like. But actually putting all the pieces together took less than 30 minutes.
