I sure do talk an enormous amount of bollocks.
xxx
Unknown "SSSS""" - 16 years, 10 months ago

In a curious way, this whole entry is inextricably connected to a phenomenon I have thought a lot about lately, i.e. people's compulsions to alter their mental states, poison themselves, get out of their collective skulls, or whatever phraseology you are comfortable with to convey the consumption of a vast array of substances that chemically alter our blood for a time. My theory is that once a creature reaches a certain level of sentience it has occasionally to escape the insufferable, incredible prison-scape of its thoughts. Humans, as far as I am aware, are unique on this planet in their ability to oppose their instinctive drives, a faculty to which we have applied the label "free will". If you need convincing that we do indeed have this faculty, consider that unlike sterile drones in colonies of certain insects, for example, we can choose to abstain from sex, and hence reproduction, hardly a sound biological decision (nor indeed an enjoyable social one in my opinion). We are not hive creatures, and it is for this reason that those of us who opt for chastity are not born sterile, therefore it is not for the good of the selfish gene that we are able to take such a course. We have no genetic investment in society at large, in other words. Rather, it is testament to the aforementioned ability to oppose our baser side. What drives us to act, to live, then? Certainly I would not argue that most of our day-to-day business is motivated by instinct (or social convention, which is founded in such instincts); after all, the very great majority of us do not choose a life without sex (though some of us have such a life thrust upon us for extended periods of time). However, there is an omnipresent entity in our consciousness, skulking dangerously in the nether regions of our every thought and decision, threatening most menacingly and murderously to undo us and all we accomplish - the being called Free Will. This nightmarish creature inhabits our humanity the way meaning inhabits words or music - nothing on their own, but a cat among pigeons when conjoined. It is the elephant in the dialogue between heart and head, body and mind, internal and external, lover and beloved. This spectre's preferred haunts are such mysterious and problematic environments as abstract thought and emotion.
So to return to the opening gambit of this tangential diatribe, the reason people feel the need to, uh, supplement their biochemical make-up is to escape this beast of free will. To extend the metaphor to breaking point, these substances are tranquillizers for this monster, providing valuable, if temporary, refrain from the madness it induces. Because we are able to overcome instinct, our raison d'etre is obscured somewhat. Certainly we could reproduce, but we don't have to. This leaves us in something of a quandary, an existential quagmire. If our purpose is not solely to reproduce, to pass on our genes, and hence is not purely biological, what is it? It seems reasonable to me to suggest that this question has given rise to an immense range of creative answers, perhaps most notably all religion, an argument to which I will return at a later stage. First, though, I have an obsessive-compulsive need to tie up a loose end. It seems to me that another of these self-imposed meanings of life is love, or, as Aristophanes would have it, the search for our other half, our alter-engendered counterpart. I feel compelled at this stage to point out that it is by no means my intention to belittle the potency or importance of love or, indeed, religion. In fact, it is inherent in my view of these things that they are crucial parts of our collective humanity (collective because it is the birth of the concepts rather than the feelings themselves that are reflective of this, evidenced by the fact that those of us who are not in love are still human - the important thing is that we have the capacity to love, to assign to our life a non-biological, human purpose).


This is as far as I went. I'll follow it up at some point. You won't care. :P

xx
Unknown "SSSS""" - 16 years, 10 months ago

I sat at the tram stop today reading Essays In Love by Alain de Botton. He talks about an interesting concept from Plato's Symposium (a concept also alluded to in Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami, which I'm currently reading);

"Aristophanes accounts for this feeling [that we know our beloved before we have in fact become familiar with them] by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost 'other half' to whose body out own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and a female half - and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed."

[for a sense of completion, I'll also include the quote from Murakami's book, although it didn't appear in my diary, from which this is taken, because I hadn't read it at that point]

"'In ancient times, people weren't simply male or female, but one of three types: male/male, male/female or female/female. In other words, each person was made out of the components of two people. Everyone was happy with this arrangement and never really gave it much thought. But then God took a knife and cut everyone in half, right down the middle. So after that the world was divided just into male and female, the upshot being that people spend their time running around trying to locate their missing other half.'"

I don't intend to paraphrase de Botton or Murakami too much, but it is interesting that although logically it is an unlikely notion at best that there is one "other half" walking the Earth on the same self-completion quest as us, when we are in love we seem to have a necessity to make ourselves believe just that. It is as if we are unable to devote ourselves so fully and to make the many necessary concessions to be in a relationship without some justification that is outside our circle of control. In other words, there needs to be some fatalistic element to love because otherwise we are giving up our individuality, solitude and independence solely through our own volition. It seems to me that there is some inherent poetic beauty in the notion that we are alone and have only ourselves in the whole world, so to compromise that by allowing one's life to be shared by another seems sentimental and domestic and somehow self-belittling, hence the need to abandon responsibility for doing so. The examples of this superhuman concept of love are far from confined to Aristophanes's musings, or even to Greek mythology. The idea that "God is love" carries inherent implications that love is a force that has an unreciprocated and unavoidable control over us. This is a sentiment resoundingly echoed in countless pop songs, novels, poems and indeed artistic works in any vein.
Unknown "SSSS""" - 16 years, 10 months, 1 day ago