Month: June 2010

numinous.

I have a tendency to sound sententious. Forgive me.

My generation, and all those proceeding mine, have me embarrassed. I have been born into a time and place where people are no longer hungry to survive, nor are they hungry to thrive. The great majority of my peers are no longer hungry. What scintilla of hunger remains is reserved for idleness. They are pathetic, passive, consumers, hungry for leisure and ease.

Daily I delve into a commotion circulating society, void of zest, void of passion, void of purpose.

Advertising, academics , entertainment, all woo the willful intellect into a lullaby, a deep slumbering recant.

Our lives are not our own. We have lost ourselves, our traditions, our roots, our history and heritage, to the media, to the experts. We are no longer fit to brave life’s excursions without a guiding figure. Uncharted territories exist in a space beyond us and our imagination. We are not fit for such adventure. So we suspend the will to live, forfeit the alms for something greater. Where bridges would be, we spend our lives building walls and cling to our emaciated dreams.

There is no personal history, no family, no origin. We are nationals, Americans, raised by television, the Internet, our schools, our jobs. Starved of new light, our conscience shirks in the penumbra. We are drones.

How do you wake up a nation cultivating and perpetuating its own poison? How do you lay claim to an intellect defined: circumscribed and standardized. What is will? what is freedom? Notions lost to the strong and gifted, a chance missed by all but a few.

In a word, Emerson said ‘A man is what he thinks about all day long.’

Given this description, what state do we find ourselves?

I talk to young minds who have never developed the ability to question. They never ask whether they are on the right path, whether their beliefs are toxic delusions, whether their behaviors and habits will reap negative consequences, or consequences at all.

What becomes of a man who does the minimum in school to get by, who watches TV in his free time, who absorbs societies prescriptions for his health, wealth, future, happiness? Four hours of TV a day? Six hours of TV? Never mind the trash, the propaganda, celebrated on television as glorified miscreants who are impoverished in spirit. Hours of mindless internet surfing? Playing mindless video-games that envelope the consciousness, sucking its attention into a digital world of no consequence?

What will become of our future leaders? Who will follow them? The zombie fascination is a prescient of our future condition.

TV, Mass media, even the beloved science community, has led us to believe a lie. Everywhere we move but rarely do we progress. We adorn our external lives with material fixtures that fade with the fads. Never to do we exercise reflection to look within, to ratiocinate about the barren pallid walls of our world, home to the human spirit, private to us. Instead we chain ourselves to the flux of the masses, the appeal and approval, and overlook the function, the utility of our laboring aims.

Time has become an inconvenience, not because we have so little time, but because we have too much.

I despise the corpulence, the venery, the stolid and dull, all foibles born out of the American malaise.

We need to grow radical. We need to act now, but within. Our fight should exist internally and should be waged endlessly in the name of freedom and imagination, of humanity.

desultory.

Today I traveled around Nashville in search of…

We found a bookstore. The first shop we arrived at was closed, leaving our 35 cent meter fee as a public gift.

WE then traveled to greenhills… I would have preferred a more personal and rooted book perusing, but we had to settle on corporate hours for an open shop. The mall provided us with such an outlet.

I headed directly to the Philosophy section, which was fittingly ensconced alongside book aisles home to spirituality and personal growth.

My eyes paced quickly among the rows of eastern and western thought, and immediately found the classics. Epictetus: Essays and dialogs. I peeled it open, skimmed the intro, inspected the table of contents, and sampled a few excerpts before slipping it under my arm to attend my other curiosities. Next: Linguistics for beginners. The book contained large, bold font, and paragraphs that floated among sporadically positioned sketches with crude and childish design. It was a practical attempt to lead the reader into the realm of linguistics without overwhelming their cognitions.

I moved onto the Thoreau and his journals. I always love reading journals. I need to journal more. I feel that my writing becomes less and less imaginative the less I expunge on my thoughts. Pent up thoughts blister and swell until they bleed a consciousness asphyxiated and infected, devoid of richness and life. My thoughts unhinge onto the paper and saunter about, without direction.

I need purpose and direction. I keep a small paper journal where I capture fleeting momentary thoughts. I desperately need to devise a creed of character. A creed that embodied the internal life I wish I lead.

My purpose is to single in on the attributes, virtues, or qualities I wish to possess. From here I am granted a destination to acquaint and adjust new methods and processes for attainment.

My language. I long to develop a byzantine language that is not only rhetorically pleasing, but flowery and fruitful. I want to communicate desires- hopes, dreams, wishes, questions- with fluidity, power and poignancy, riding a delicate balance of feeling and reason.

More than anything, I want to convey something worth saying. I don’t want to regurgitate. I don’t want to reiterate the same message, the timeless truths. I want to explore the bounds of thought, the limits of our caged wonder, the frontiers of imagination, of reason, of emotion.

Sheeple we are, you and I. Sheeple we’ll stay, until we die.

Can’t we escape? Are we trapped? By our own minds. If we are boundless in vision and imagination, why not industry and discipline? Can we not fathom the work ethic of slaves? Let us become slaves to truth, slaves to curiosity, slaves to causes, to things worthwhile!

Is philosophy enough to thrive? Surely there are greater callings to truth. Will surviving suffice?

Doubt and cynicism. Skepticism and restraint. Fear and misery. These need to be chained and starved. Out of mind, out of touch, out of reach.

Not writing has become a terrible routine of mine. I don’t like it at all.

I’ve been getting back into shape. When I started going back to the gym I weighed roughly 173lbs with clothes on. My last weigh in I was 180lbs with clothes on. Good progress.

I’ve got myself on a pretty solid routine. Work, gym, dinner, and read. I’m eating healthy, maintaining a steady intake of portioned meals consisting of whole foods. My gym workouts are intense and focused.

Updating.

I haven’t journaled in quite some time… far longer than leaves me comfortable. The past month has provided an immense amount of revelations and insights and developments. I wish I could sit here for the next twelve hours and expound on them all, but that wouldn’t do them all justice. Nor would I be able to recall with the same clarity and impact that these thoughts have had on me. That’s not a reason not to try however.

I just got out of work and I’m on my way to the gym in a few minutes…so unfortunately I don’t have the time to write all them all out now, but this evening I’ll give myself a few hours to get as much out as possible.

Just an update for my own records:
I’m living Nashville this summer… in a beautiful neighborhood located a few blocks from campus. The house is a divided into two with two bedrooms on one side and three on the other. They essentially are identical, save a loft addition added as a third room upstairs on my side. I’m living with two of my fraternity brothers. On the other side my younger sister is living with a girl friend of ours.

I’m working a paid internship at the law firm Bradley, Arant, Boult, Cummings LLP, the largest firm in Nashville and one of the most prominent firms in the south east region. The day to day work at the firm is monotonous and mind numbing. There are 5 interns in all. Two high school students that were hired as apart of a affirmative action program through the Nashville bar association that gives promising young black students an opportunity to see the inter workings of law through internships at law firms and courthouses. The other two students are recent graduates from UNC and Duke and both will be attending law school at UNC Law and Emory Law, respectively.

Aight… Gym time. Will write more on more interesting developments as well as recent philosophical meditations this evening.