A One Room Window

I am very insecure. I’m constantly in need of someone who will reassure me of my own intelligence. When I write something, I have to read it in front of people so I can tell by their initial, visceral reactions if it’s good or not. I don’t do this for purposes of revision and critique but because I need to be told that what I’ve written is funny, or smart, or witty, or good, or whatever. It’s an obsession, one that nourishes my psyche, and one without which I would cease to function normally.

But that last assessment brings into question the normality of my state of being if I’m in a perpetual cycle where my psychology is dependent on other people qualifying my work as good. I tell myself, out of habit and from some vague defense, that I’m simply unsure of the qualifications I give my own work; as the author, it’s difficult, so I tell myself, to judge with any measure the potency of my products. This, of course, is absolute bullshit. I know something is good right away and that’s the reason I read it aloud. I feed off of acceptance and compliments that I know I’ll receive. I turn that into the energy that keeps me going, keeps my mind in a sound condition.

But again, one must then question my soundness of mind if it’s wholly dependent on the positive judgments of others. I’m partially correct, though, when I say that I’m not qualified to measure my own work, but only in the sense that I’m not a good enough judge to say, with distinction, what a piece is worth. I can give a better than general estimation of the merits of a piece, but I can’t necessarily differentiate between great and excellent. I can most of the time, but not in every case, whereas I’m able to differentiate between great and average every time. Like any skill, it’s a work in progress.


I think sometimes that it’s natural to feed off of the support of others, to find nourishment and inspiration in their kind words, but I imagine that to say as much about my psychological insecurities is to spin them in a positive way, which is probably more than I ought to do. I suppose, though, that a realistic assessment of anyone’s psyche will produce an embarrassing framework, so maybe we all find nourishment in a different event, an event that we normally wouldn’t glorify. And perhaps my insecurities are no different than those belonging to friends and strangers alike. That isn’t to say we should accept them, but that, despite what I’m constantly longing to be told, I’m just like everyone else, at least in the sense that I’m psychologically inferior to whatever golden standard we might objectify.

But that’s what makes us human, I guess, that in a broad sense we’re less than perfect, and more particularly, we’re never fully aware of our own psychology, a psychology that is always unstable and weak. We may show strength at times, and even possess the stamina necessary to undergo traumatizing events without slipping into a psychological nightmare, but at some point, we’ll discover a weakness, a glaring one that seems to outweigh, or at least out-produce, the strengths. And in this, we are all brothers.


But maybe that’s another way of comforting myself, by saying that my mental infirmity is no more apparent than anyone else’s. By claiming brotherhood in some possibly fictitious community, maybe I feel better about being psychologically dependent on others (and, in my superficial mind, weak because of this).

I wonder, though, if this argumentation, this deliberate attack on my disposition, is detrimental to my overall well-being. Perhaps our irrationality is the one thing our rationality should keep away from, for maybe it’s the contradictions inside us that make life meaningful – and livable. If we’re entirely rational, life is robotic and without the guilty pleasures of knowledgeable sin, where you knowingly do something you think is wrong, if only because it feels good. But if we live life entirely irrational, we wouldn’t have the ability to recognize the distinctive pleasures each event gives in life: every pleasurable event feels the same. We’d also, I imagine, spiral into a web of chaos that no amount of external intervention could abate.


Maybe I can explain this through example: In my logic class, which is purely concerned with rational ideas, we were learning how to identify relationships in a symbolic language we were using called predicate logic. We were translating English sentences concerning loving into this language, and a guy made a mistake in how he formed a sentence. He said Lxy (x loves y) instead of Lyx (y loves x), which he thought were the same. To this thought our professor replied “It is the tragedy of the human condition that loving is neither a reciprocal nor symmetric relationship.”

Here we were, some forty of us, sitting in a class applying the rational parts of our minds to a task requiring absolute precision and abstract detachment, and we were presented with a thought that was grounded in the irrationality of human psychology and relationships. To fully appreciate the entirety of our professor’s statement, we had to take equal parts rational and irrational and see every side. On one hand, it’s logically true, in the universe of discourse we were dealing with, that loving was not symmetric, that just because x loves y, y doesn’t necessarily love x. And on the other hand, it’s a wholly realistic concept that required, additionally, our irrational selves to identify the irony and find pleasure in such a statement. It reminded me that at any given moment, we may have to call upon both halves of our minds, though they stand in contradiction, in order to understand the world and those around us.

So it’s probably the case that my insecurities are less than desirable and that a more ruthlessly efficient life might be lived outside of them, but I think I’ll stick with them, knowing that the kind of meandering, awkward, and at times depressing journey I wish to take is right at my fingertips.

Read more...

A Two-Way Street: Some Philosophy for Philippi

Life is hard.

This is a fact, a certainty, and an absolute. How we define “life,” though, is nothing short of a mystery. But that’s not my focus. My focus is on life, however you wish to define it, being hard. It’s a roller coaster, with lots of ups and downs. Its successes and failures ebb and flow stylistically like waves on a shore, but thematically they are predictable in an entirely different sense.

The tide coming and going is predictable to the extent that moon patterns are predictable (which they are, strongly), but life's successes and failures are much less identifiable. They would be more applicable, in terms of predictability, to skin pigmentation in newborn children.


The way they work is that a person’s genes hold the information necessary for a range of pigmentation. If, for simplicity, we take all skin pigmentation to be on a scale of 1-100, then let’s say all dark is between 80-100 and all light is between 1-20. When a person with a range of 1-20 has children with a person with a range of 20-40, the child will be somewhere in the middle of those ranges. It is random, but it will be towards the median of the two figures. So unless there is a mutation, two people with ranges of 1-20 will never have a child with very dark skin complexion or dark skin complexion at all, really.

This works for my conceptualization of life’s successes and failures. I view 80-100 (outside of the light/dark split and merely based on the numerological aspect) to be a person who works hard, prepares, researches, and educates oneself on an extreme level. 1-20, then, belongs to people who do almost no preparation, put no effort into anything, and do not make any attempt at educating themselves. A higher a person is on the scale, the greater the probability that they will have more success than failure. The ebb and flow of their life will tend to swing differently than someone lower or higher. This is not exact science, obviously, but it is a way of viewing life and the effort one puts into it.

So it is no surprise that someone like myself has successes and is “good” at a variety of “things,” for I put effort into life, or at least more effort than others. So it is no surprise that I’m a decent writer, a good reader, I’m musically talented, and so on, because I’ve put time and energy into those ventures – and it’s paid off.


But life was/is hard. It wasn’t easy, relatively speaking, for me to pick up the guitar and become accomplished. I had to spend hours and hours and hours going over scales and patterns and chords and what not. I didn’t spend a few Sundays plucking the strings; I spent an entire summer, seven days a week, six to eight hours each day playing guitar, or piano, or singing. So it is no surprise that I have the skills in that area that I do, because I put effort into that shit.

It would be easy for me to say at this point that to achieve success is merely the result of hard work. To a large extent, this is true, but there are exceptions and strange things can happen. Just as a mutation can cause drastic results in skin pigmentation, so can mutations cause drastic results in life.


An example of an analogous “mutation” would be a person who is, for some reason or another, naturally disposed to music. For that person, it might only take a single summer to become proficient on an instrument. While I believe there exist people with greater dispositions in certain fields, I do not believe that this disposition can be void, or negative. I think we all are disposed to every field, with varying amounts of disposition, but I think it works on a scale of gradation. There is no zero and only positive integers. So one person could be “highly gifted” musically while another can have almost no talent whatsoever, but they can still develop talent, albeit at varying speeds and, possibly, different ceilings. It might take more than a single summer; hell, it might take four, five, or six summers, but they can still achieve some level of success.

So failure in a particular field is merely the result of a lack of effort. Person A might need twice the amount of effort necessary for Person B to achieve similar results, but they can still achieve those results.

I suppose I should be explicit about “success” and “failure.” I’m using a broad interpretation with little relevant detail applicable to real events. When I say failure in a particular field is merely the result of a lack of effort, ‘failure’ should be interpreted not in terms of material wealth or critical acclaim, but in terms of ability. One might assume that ability, at some point, entails the previous two, but that’s not the case. Some of the greatest musicians never hear their songs on the radio.


In any case, the ebb and flow of one’s successes and failures can be, to a degree, ameliorated by how much work we put in. Even someone with huge stockpiles of natural ability in every conceivable field still needs to invest time and effort, even if the amount is relatively miniscule comparatively. Everyone must work in order to alter the natural ebb and flow of their life’s successes and failures.

It seems intuitive that we should aim for the 80-100 range. I did say that the higher one is on the scale, the greater the probability of successes outweighing failures. But perhaps one finds more meaning in life when they dwell in the lowly depths of the 1-20 range. Perhaps they find something more substantial than anything observable from the upper echelons. Or perhaps they don’t. I tend to think that every range has its own merits, its own knowledge to impart, its own meaning, and that a truly meaningful life might be lived by experiencing them all. Then again, I might be postulating using some pseudo-combination of mathematical precision and thematic chronology that really says nothing about the merits of each range and only attempts to qualify them inside my own head.


In that case, I’m wrong to some and right to others. I’m contributing to someone, somewhere, even if the road that leads me to such a person is circular.


I don’t believe all of what I’ve said here is wholly true, for theories and analogies about life can never be entirely right. Furthermore, theories and analogies about life are never wholly false. They all have something meaningful to say about some aspect of existence.

What I’ve written here is merely an attempt to say something meaningful. I realize that someone with little musical disposition will be hard pressed to equal Mozart or Beethoven in any respect, but I do believe efforts towards that end are not without meaning or substance, and are certainly not wasted. If anything, maybe more meaning is available when one reaches for the stars and fails; maybe we learn more about who we are and what this shit is really all about when we try and don’t succeed. Then again, maybe we just fail, and the only meaning lies in success. But I’m not one to judge, for I’ve found meaning in both. My failures have taught me at least as much as my successes. And perhaps the meaning inherent in success is overshadowed, in my life, by the blissfully arrogant catharsis that sweeps over me in such events. Perhaps whatever education I might have received, were I receptive, is blown away by my egoistical excesses.

And then again, perhaps not. Perhaps the only lessons are the ones found when we fail to fly.

Read more...

The End and the Beginning

"[P]eople of the world - the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again."

"It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children. But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins."

Read more...