Sand Speck Desires Logness

I plan to go back to church today, although my beliefs and unbelief are not settled yet.

If you read this, unknown reader, you would have probably noticed that there is a huge time span between my last post and now. The reason being sometime ago, I gave up on the possibility of finding an explanation that would provide purpose and meaning to life. I said that 'I've embraced absurdity' - what I define as the perpetual failure of the human desire for a grand unifying narrative that reconciles purpose and virtue to a higher ideal.

I only plan to go to church because I miss praying.

The pursuit of an ideal was so important to me; I thought that if I could find that ideal I could dedicate my entire self to it and be formed into that ideal. Losing that hope of ever finding that ideal made me really messed up.

I also got rejected for a short story anthology, that didn't make me happy.

I also got set up for something that's sort of like an arranged marriage, but isn't really, by my relatives. I don't think it's going ahead, though at the time it was really awful.

I've lost direction. There isn't a direction for better virtue, better purpose.

Atheism doesn't appeal to me because popular atheists don't quite carry their principles to its full conclusions; to embrace nihilism. Without a higher purpose, all virtue is meaningless.

'Survival of the species' is a bad principle because unless the species is directed towards a better state, there is no good to survival. We could be living in a supernormal environment, evolution developing to no particular direction at all.

I got so upset thinking about this, I desired some form of self-harm. I ended up smoking a few cigarettes, how cutting edge.

I ended up mulling around in nihilism a fair bit, before just sort of deciding to...carry on I guess. What's the will to live except a kind of numbness about the reality of the human condition and a kind of embracing of polite civility?

Some things:

- because I love my father, I plan to go back to church, because he prayed that I should find a Christian man as a husband

- Isaac lit a candle of doubt for me, and I appreciate that gesture


--
If I have no faith, I cannot pursue philosophy. I would be a beast.

1. I pooped three times today. I'm not a scat fetishist, but there is a distinctive pleasure from pooping that is related to cleanliness. It is as if you have gotten rid of something very large and filthy inside of you. Once in the morning, once in the afternoon at a workshop (in the bathrooms of course) and once at home in the evening. After the last round of pooping I lay on my bed and thought of my intestines. And then I thought of what a curious and strange creature I am, this organism that consumes other organisms and transforms the organisms into poop in my body. It made me wonder about how I came about. It made me think of where I am going to. How did the human being emerge? This organism consuming, organism processing object?

2. I listened to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and I thought it pretty good, if dated, I clapped several times in the car. It was heavy traffic to and fro.

- Dostoevsky is a dualist, what would later be categorized by Nietzsche as Apollonian and Dionysian. (The contrast between the Apollonian force of Prospero and the Dionysian world of Caliban is one of the appeals of The Tempest to me. Going through the play again, it seems to me that The Tempest is best appreciated as a philosophical text, particularly on the philosophy of the artist and relation to aesthetics; and that it is best read after familiarity with other Shakespeare plays) Superman vs. Joker.

- I've been thinking about Russian literature and art lately and I can't help but wonder if the Russian need to cling to the era of the greats is what is stifling it. Maybe it's due to the lack of translation in anything else, but as much as I dislike Pussy Riot, they really are the only true inheritors of the great Russian artists (it's their artists' statements that place them in that category). Well, I'm not sufficiently well-versed in Russian art and literature.

3. I watched birds fly in the evening and wondered if there was a mathematical order to the pattern of their evening flight. Their paths are so geometric. Then, my mind still on Mathematics, I glanced at a solitary palm tree -- just one, surrounded by human construction and concrete and bitumen and commercial buildings. I immediately imagined the angles and geomatry of the spaces between the leaves, and wondered if there was a mathematical formulation for their width based on the mathematical formulation of the intensity of the wind that blew it. And I marvelled at how complex Creation was. Beside the tree there was a crane, because the new LRT stations to Subang were under construction, and I remarked at how simplistic the human formulations were. In the play Arcadia the character Thomasina wonders why geometry only seems to prescribe the shapes of manufacture. The answer is pretty simple: a rose, like the fronds of a palm tree, are a combination of the full expression of complex geometry and our cranes and concrete pillars are childish, imbecilic forms of it.

4. If I'm very free and money or audience were not a concern I'd probably go on Khan Academy to work out Mathematics, but since there is no immediate purpose of it to my survival as a human being, I might not.

5. I had a good workshop session at Taylors' College Subang. But I don't envy workshop coaches, who have to teach a whole day.

Also, while this isn't a writing blog, I don't have places to put these. I had two interesting dreams worthy of being expanded into full fictional worlds.

1. A golden-haired princess runs away from her parents and jumps unto a boat. The 'scene' changes to a blonde woman in a bar who speaks in a loud, crass voice. It seems that the princess 'left home' the moment she jumped unto the boat, and instead of ever being found again she has been away, far away from home, life after life after life. She goes through time like a golden bolt that traverses through layers of time, and parallel with her is a person who is also travelling this way -- a tempter, of sorts -- marked with a bolt of silver.

2. I am working in an office, and it is full of my colleagues, and I need to complete things quick and get moving because it is becoming late, and there are unpleasant things that will happen if we are late, and alone. We successfully leave anyway, in a levitating car. And we head to Tokyo. I am now in the sky, looking down on cities and landmarks where we can go to and land below us. I am somewhat aware that we are in a kind of video game. We select locations and hope to land in Tokyo. We select the wrong locations. Sometimes there are locations where there is nothing except a dark forest, and a large construction, like the Heineken brand on a billboard and some empty bottles. I reason to myself: product placement in video games, these are places we can visit. But there is nothing else but the product placement here, and we smash things around.

Then we levitate again, to select a place to go to. We select something that looks like the Tokyo Tower, in hopes of reaching Tokyo. And we then go to a city that looks very beautiful: a large river of water pink because of the shining light, with a gold sky. There is a large archway. We travel towards the city, towards the large archway, and suddenly it dawns on me that this is not Tokyo and that despite trying to reach the Tokyo Towers we are not there yet. Past the archway I could see the dome shaped top of a large mosque. We were in a different place, a different country, like Brunei. We turn around and leave. There are soldiers appearing, suddenly, in camo uniforms, and I think about how typical it is that video games keep representing Islamic countries as countries of military conflict -- and as we leave to search for Tokyo again, I wake up.

Could be good to merge the story with my space pirates one -- intergalatic manual labour? maids?

I generally don't concern myself with political philosophy, but during the past few days something occurred that made me shift into socialism (a Starbucks-drinking, Moleskine-using, Humanities-spouting socialist -- so cliche). A former worker at my father's company, who left them two years ago to start work in agriculture but who failed and ended up in working in construction, got into an accident. Grinder machine accident, head injury. Currently in coma at hospital.

Dad and his boss are pretty saddened by this. Their sadness was infectious. I posted a few emotional status updates on Facebook, ranting about worker rights and the fate of the poor.

Bugis's -- that's his name -- current state wouldn't have felt so terrible if alternate possibilities do not keep emerging in the minds of those around him and who have heard of his accident.

A run-down of the events in Bugis's life:
- he was invited to work with the company, he was a resident of the rural town of Simunjan, he used to work in the Peninsular in some form of manual labour
- he did well in the company, and was about to progress, getting a pretty good salary and a home
- he left because he wanted to return to the rural countryside, to return to that pace of life
- he wanted to start agricultural work -- fish ponds, collecting rubber, and at that time, the price was high
- things didn't turn out right -- his estimation of rural agriculture was wrong - he had to find work again
- in construction, where he was paid a miserable RM 50 per day, without EPF or Socso
- and met with an accident with the grinding machine and had a head injury

1. In the first alternate world, Bugis made the right decisions in his life. He never left employment in Kuching, and continued to work as a technician. He would be able to afford a lower middle class life, though hectic.

2. In the second alternate world, Bugis's decision to return to the countryside was not a financial mistake. Life of sustenance farming in the countryside did not translate to poverty.

3. In the third alternate world, Bugis's getting employed in construction does not translate to a potentially debilitating head injury. There would be adequate safety measures, and there would be health benefits.

4. In another world, the current world, someone can lay back, accept these as the passing of life and matters, and simply say: "Such is life".

The fourth is an evil choice. Another world is possible.

--

I liked Parti Sosialis Malaysia's page, and later the fairly inactive Tenaganita. And I also got angry with religious organizations. "When you are reminded that the poor, the suffering and the unempowered in the world are individuals with names, that is when you get angry and frustrated at the bourgeoisie values of religious communities," I'd written on Facebook.

I confess: I was angry that I had given a lot of money to my church. That sounds like a very evil thing, though I've been wondering if my giving money to the church has gone into an institution that perpetuates wrongdoing and harm in society rather than it's supposed regeneration. (I still haven't fallen into heresy enough to be shocked at the reality of my anger.) I guess I've been making excuses. Why am I not angry enough at the expensive meals I've been eating at little restaurants?

At a certain point, I almost made a promise to live a life of poverty, to dedicate the leftovers of removal from luxury to organizations working with the poor. How good will I be with this, though? A few days after the shock at Bugis, I went window shopping again.

One can rant at the world, but the most powerful revolution is the personal one. God give me the strength to commit a personal one.

 Me:
I think they'll need his art there -- he gave us plenty of reasons to love our country once more, and to see the beautiful things in it in spite of our unhappiness.

Person:
I think you've hit the nail on the head. Even though he's a foreigner he managed to make art that really engages local people.

Me:
partly because I care to some extent about fine art (not that others don't, everyone does on their own instinctive way) I find that what makes Zacharevic distinctive from other graffiti artists is how his sense of aesthetics is linked to a kind of humanism. It comes across as a little folksy and sentimental, but in the world of fine art I think a little sentiment is good -- too much stuff is conceptual and disturbing. 

Compared to the big name like Banksy, whose squeaking animal installation was very conceptual, and Utah Ether, which is more about the mystery of crowds.

Person:
Another thing that's really different about his murals compared to other graffiti or most paintings for that matter is that the subjects don't exist in a vacuum. When I said "engages" I meant that in a very literal way - you look at stuff like the kids on a bike in Penang - it's really irresistible for people to put themselves into the picture and pretend they're playing with the kids in various ways. Or like how a local graffitist tried to make the penyamun Lego a bit more acceptable to the authorities (and dramatic) by adding a Lego policeman behind.

Me:
that's a brilliant observation. You're right