First, here's a video. I took the images and assembled them on Tiw's Day but then finally made some decent music today:
I had lots of good thoughts today, and, what's better, I jotted them down lest I forget.
One came when I was taking a walk. The sun was shining and the snow on the streets was becoming muddy puddles with a hint of sand. I wanted to get out and enjoy it - must have been about mid-afternoon - so I took a quick 5-minute walk. Off to the side of the road, I found some footsteps from days before; turns out, they were mine. I even checked the sole patterns (you should always be able to recognize your soul, regardless of the shoes). And I got the silly idea to walk in them - walking in my own footsteps. I realized that it's a pretty good metaphor for what I'm doing up here. I've been absorbing all kinds of information, from academic to mundane to folk wisdom, so this is my chance to sort through all it. I came up with another maxim:
Everything you take in you'll have to process (sooner or later).Two things: it's a good reason to limit how much we take in; it's a reminder that you can't just rush from activity to activity, from distraction to distraction, without some time to process. Else you'll be making decisions based on a tired, distracted mind.
So there I was, walking in my own footsteps, thinking about music. In a similar way, I have absorbed all sorts of music, but now is my opportunity to weave it together into a cohesive whole. And to do that, I should write the same thing over and over, while continually evolving it. I'll keep exploring new musical landscapes, but I am at a point where I have built up somewhat of a style, so I should explore this before moving on. But: Style is the absence of imagination. So by having a style, I'm giving up a little on imagination. That should be fine because genius is only 1% imagination, and I've already got plenty to work with for a while. Just like with music, I'm hoping to develop more of a cohesive self. Post-modernism may say our self is fractured, but that's only if we don't spend the time to make ourselves whole. [Not that we'll every really achieve it; it's a nice dream.]
Speaking of dreams, I had a strange dream last night where I got speared right through the gut. I was with my friends Corbett and Grace, and we were sitting around waiting for it to happen, like I was being executed or something. And then it happened, came and went; I don't even know who (or what) did it. And then we talked about how I was going to die and all that - no one seemed that concerned, not even me. In fact, maybe it was a dream test of my attachment to life, fear of death. It seemed like any other thing in the dream, nothing to fear, totally natural. At some point, though, I started to think that this didn't necessarily mean death; I mean, I just got a spear all the way through the middle, not much bleeding. I realized when I woke up that there was probably pretty bad internal bleeding. The weapon itself was probably actually a little bigger than a spear, maybe like a sharpened fence post or an atlatl.
In a way, a lot of ways, I'm somewhat of a monk up here - a hermit monk. Except that, whereas monks know exactly what rules they are to live by, I'm still writing mine. I'm content to have this flexibility, but it's still a lot of responsibility - responsibility, but not really more or less than what all conscious beings face. My mom gave me Walden, but I've also been reading "Les Jeux Sont Faits" by Sartre. (To be fair, I'm still in the introduction of the latter.) Walden, so far, is a bunch of self-righteous preaching; I'd expect more from a 19th-century New Englander. I'm holding out hope. It turns out, he also began his experiment at 30 - or just after. The Sartre, so far, has given me much more to think about. In the introduction, the editor emphasizes Sartre's strict atheism, which I've come to appreciate as a useful tool for thought experiments. I used to have such discussions with my old roommate who was a fundamentalist atheist. I know that sounds funny, but it's true. I don't quite understand how anyone can be so sure one way or the other; if there's one thing that we're all sure of, it's that we don't know the whole story. And anyone who thinks they do isn't necessarily wrong, but they're not seeing the *whole* picture. Anything that you can imagine, the Universe is larger and less knowable.
This is a long post; it might be a good idea to get more coffee.
I've also been trying to incorporate a new thought habit into my life: when I see people, I want to see them as the complex mystery of history and interrelationships and not as a 2-dimensional automaton. I think after years of being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of humanity that's out there, I have stopped looking beneath the surface of strangers I meet. It's too overwhelming to imagine the backstory to everyone, so I just don't. But every individual is a symbol of years of parenting, education, and societal effort; everyone is important to someone; everyone will find themselves at a funeral of a loved one, and everyone will find themselves at their own. Typically, I get more excited about ideas than people, but this is really just a new idea, a new framework, a new lens with which to see. I need some practice, but this time at the cottage gives me the time to solidify the framework before returning to the churning mass of people in Chicago.
I didn't quite finish on Sartre, but this is a good introduction. Throw in the word "responsibility" and "condemned to be free" and you're almost there.
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