Call Me Sysiphus Love

So I'm still moving all over the Net and trying to find a nest; I currently have about forty bafillion other journals, so I'll use this as a repository to list them, since this is the most substantial one and the place where people generally find me.

My 'normal' blog (no posts yet, I'm still rearranging it, that process can take months) 

www.sysiphuslove.com


My 'Sybil' blog (it's complicated): 

losingsusan.wordpress.com



love
kimmo

Well, you know what they say...when you find something cool, INVOLVE THE INTERNET.

This is Seeqpod, a very nice online playlist of music and music videos: I've been loving on this for about a week now. Anything you want to hear, they probably have at least a little of it.
Hope everyone is well. ;) I'll give a better update soon, tonight maybe.

love
kimmo

After months of no progress at all, I have gotten a ton of stuff done the last couple days.

I've decided to scrap the Wordpress-hosted blog (yet again...) and move everything home. I wanted to host the blog on my own computer, as well as everything else: I didn't want to pay for a hosting plan that I was unlikely to take full advantage of. I'm under no illusions here. ;)

Anyway, to accomplish this I set the back bedroom computer up with an Apache webserver, then installed MySQL, Perl and PHP on it. This was a major clusterfuck for me, as I've never taken an IT course and didn't have the first fucking clue when I sat down to it.

(This is the beautiful thing about life with the Internet...you don't have to take a class in something to learn it. It does take a whole lot longer, and stuff is a lot more likely to get broken or messed up....but if you have some time and don't mind backtracking, it's possible to learn some expensive stuff.
It's my favorite thing about modern life...the old restrictions and gatekeepers of information are being thrown out the window, one by one.)

So, I finally got it up and working.
It was a supremely beautiful and sublime joy to load the website and see my happy little Wordpress login, which told me that after a day of flubbery the MySQL server was talking to the PHP properly. I did a little dance for that one.

The site is reachable from the net at hauntedmachine.com, although the only thing there now is a placeholder -- I plan on using this setup to design and finish the site, and then after it's finished, I'll start worrying about hosting plans and moving it around. I am very pleased with this setup, and inordinately pleased with myself right now. That was frigging hard.

Once I got into it, I was also thrilled to see that there is a LOT TO DO in a project like that. I could work on this project for years and still have new shit to do every day. Fucking hot.

I hope this post finds everyone feeling well and good; I think I've moved on from my zen guru phase now, so no more of that for now.
Speaking of which actually...I read Carl Jung's Man and his Symbols, and that book is now my Bible.
I don't think I've ever read a book that so succinctly summed up my unformed convictions about human consciousness and behavior. Remember the Bee Girl in that old Blind Melon video?
Yeah, that was me reading that book.
Carl Jung was the other bee people.

love
kimmo

Sometimes I have the feeling that as I've grown older, I've forgotten more than I've learned. I hate this feeling, and because I hate it it tempts me to claim otherwise to myself: that in fact I'm somehow 'wiser' now, and that my youth was my time of stupidity.

I'm not so sure, really.
I can feel my brain turning...stiff. Don't get me wrong, it makes life much easier: I 'know' what to expect, I 'know' what the future holds, I 'know' how to deal with life on its own terms. All these things I 'know'.
Am I right, then, or was Socrates?

There is a pressure toward becoming static that increases all the time. It makes me slow and stubborn, reluctant to acknowledge the pig ears of intellectual laziness I craft into silk purses of logic.
(Is this a midlife crisis? I'm just thirty for shit's sake, although I guess that's midlife. It's older than I was ever supposed to get, I know that much.)

I never feel as though I'm moving 'toward', but always and inexorably 'away from'. Even in the moment, in the warm embrace of the now, I'm too busy fighting off the cold clasp of the was. I build everything from the dead molecules of yesterday, and then wonder aloud why it won't move.

Egh.

love
kimmo

I've never found it easy to believe objective ideas of God. I really don't believe that an objective God exists, as in an entity that is existing somewhere eternally, with an identity.
What in all the nature of reality exists forever? What manner of life would animate such a God? From whence would it come, and what need would God have of the form of a man? What need has God for teeth?

It doesn't make sense. At the bottom it forces removal from the physical world because it has no parallel in it: as we see nothing of Earth that we believe true of God, getting it ass backwards all the while, we therefore declare earth and God to be opposed eternally, the material and the spiritual, the carnal and the divine, the YHWH and the Shaitan. We create a war of a uniformity, as seems to be our way with everything.

I think the God I believe in is utterly without identity, and rather is pure potential, or else the action that makes material of the potential, or possibly both. It is benevolent by both intent and accident: cruel by necessity and circumstance. It just is...it is the zero point, the tip of the needle that stitches the world, and as it is absolute abstract it can and does take any and every form. It can be seen not through demonstration but only through pattern.

more later:
love
kimmo

Fat black crows are patrolling my windows, gliding back and forth like eagles beyond the too-wide expanses of glass. They've been doing it for three weeks now, ever since it got warm...there's probably a nest here somewhere. It's just as well, it adds a bit of suspense, never knowing when one of those cat-sized birds might drone through the early light and startle the shit out of me.

The sky is golden, it is salmon and cyan and shell pink, all the sky colors in the Crayola box. The fat black bird glides by, sudden as a bad thought, shadow gone like a hallucination just as the startle fires. Nevermore, and fancy that, that my lost Lenore might find his way at this late hour to a low-rent apartment complex somewhere in northwest Illinois. Very funny, har de fucking har, if you will.

I've been away a while, really from any journal work at all. It has been a strange, strange spring, and summer promises worse...I'm actually very excited though. I have a feeling this will be a good summer.

love
kimmo

At the risk of jinxing the shit out of everything, I'm happy to say that I think I've finally begun a story with legs on it.

I've been trying to write something substantial for a long time now, and actively trying for almost a full year. Mike is I think growing impatient with me, as I haven't been working in some time -- since leaving Hot Topic really. College is still very doable -- I had a good GPA, and being on the PTK list will help when I go back -- but I was holding off on it, trying to get this philosophical mess out of the way.
Really, how stupid is that? Can I really afford to go dicking around for a year, nearly two, over this stuff? No, I can't, I never could afford it. I still can't, and I honestly don't know if I'm doing something that will be meaningful in the future or if I'm just cheerfully shitting about while my life goes to hell.

It's a risk; Mike has helped me take this risk at personal cost to himself and without any criticism about it. I am very lucky to have him. Hopefully, the credit he has extended me will pay off with a little bit of interest...but that's counting chickens out of eggs, there's still a lot to do.

Anyway, the story has just topped 2k words, and I got through the opening scene without completely and utterly fucking anything up. It has legs, I think I can roll this a little ways. I'm pretty excited about it. ;)

much love
das kimmo

You know why those online quizzes and personality tests are such bunko?
By and large, the vast majority of us don't know what we're 'like'. We don't know why we do the things we do, we don't know in many cases how we really feel about a given issue, even a fundamental one like sex. We just don't know.
So, we have made up an 'ideal' version of ourselves, or a perceived expectation from others...and a 'perceptual' version, which is kind of an ass-backwards first-person attempt to build a narrative out of our own lives, and determine what it is that the starring character is like (and how he/she should behave in the future).

What are you 'like'. Hell, why else take a personality test but that we don't know who we are, and continue to percieve some mystery to the seemingly well-known threads of the pattern...which of course there is...to a more fundamental basis than most of us would ever dare to acknowledge.

We can't tell ourselves who we are. Everything in the mirror is backwards, and closer than it appears...there is much about us that we can't admit to honestly without having it exposed to us first.
Our friends won't tell us who we are. We overlook faults in our friends and we lie to spare their feelings.
Our enemies, however.
Hold the opinions of your admirers at bay, hold the opinions of your enemies close. Your enemies will tell the quickest truth to you, sharpened to a point though it may be...given an honest chance the accusations of others can illuminate nasty problems that may have gone overlooked.
The difficulty of course is in allowing the enemy his proper chance, you know? His fair say?

You know that argument you have in your head, after the real one? You know the one: the argument in your head where you say all the witty things you didn't think to then? The one where you catalog your grievances to use next time?
The other guy never gets a fair voice, does he?
Does he say anything at all?
Or does he just stand there, passive and mute, as you unleash accusations upon him? Does he repeat the same hurtful barbs again and again, like a broken robot, a record with a damaging scratch?
Or does he have his fair say?

love
kimmo

The answers given to rhetorical questions, which are universal abstracts and entirely unknowable -- i.e. 'If the dead could speak, what would they say?' -- reveals much more about the subject than the object.
The subjective view, faced with a universal abstract, must concoct an object to deliver the answer to the question. In plain terms, if you're asked this question, you have to manufacture in your mind a rhetorical 'dead person' who then speaks. That dead person, like all projections and assumptions, never existed; it has to be created for the purpose of answering your question, and therefore the answer it gives must proceed from you as well.
You are given away, in your innermost being, by the imaginary things that come out of the imaginary mouths of the population of the mind.

Also I'm still alive, just working on other things at the moment. ;)

love
kimmo

I am beginning to think that the root of the problem of the self -- the problem of the Maya, of the illusionary and unfulfilling nature of life for some of us -- is the issue of false knowledge. It's the problem of 'I KNOW'.
The illusion is the false knowledge. That's why it's so impenetrable and so present, so everywhere...it is a consequence of the self, of the limited nature of subjective experience.
We, as human beings, have to 'know' in order to move through life. We have to form beliefs about what is. There isn't a way around it.


The Information Problem

We depend upon many sources of information for the knowledge we acquire, and the most fundamental knowledge came from our parents and our friends when we were very young.
They teach us what to think, who to associate with, what to believe about death, what to believe about sex. They teach us what love is and isn't, what the value of life is, what the value of ourselves is.
We accept these beliefs early, and we internalize them. We don't 'know' them in the way we know that gravity pulls things to the ground: the average child raised in a racist household doesn't 'know' that people of color are inferior, but he believes it all the same, when he is young.

In the same way, you 'know' how certain members of society -- authorities, women, Southerners, goths, jocks -- will react in certain conditions. They are opinions, but they're a special kind of opinion that doesn't know itself for what it is: the place where we make a mistake is where we substitute a second-hand opinion for a truth.
If you believe from an early age that the wealthy are necessarily selfish and greedy, isn't that limiting to yourself? Doesn't it discourage you from pursuing money yourself, because of your unspoken and absolute belief in its corrupting influence and 'the type of person' that pursues it, which doesn't fit in with 'who' you 'are'?
Isn't it better to give these opinions only the power due to them, and to determine for oneself, as fairly as possible, what the truth is?

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Problem

Using the example above, what would happen if an individual with this extreme view about wealth were to win the lottery?
Now, for no good reason at all, he has a dilemma. He has self-created the dilemma with his false knowledge about what rich people are 'like'. Now, for no good reason, he may not know how to act.
On one hand he might give the money away rather thoughtlessly, in order to uphold his self-image, and devalue it unnecessarily. What could have done real good for himself or others is aimlessly discarded to demonstrate where money stands in relation to that individual.
On the other hand, he may keep the money and instead use this false knowledge to allow himself to become the exact sort of demeaning, greedy, self-interested ass he always swore rich people were. And why?

The self-fulfilling prophecy is that views both positive and negative can be acted upon, on the basis of false knowledge, and therefore perpetuate an essential untruth because of a failure to self-examine the view. Now the next guy thinks that rich people are assholes, do you see?
I think that this, this net of false knowledge, is the Maya, the illusionary web of crap that holds us all captive to ourselves (and the opinions of others).


The Value Problem

To continue the example...money is just money. Like anything else, it's just a goddamn thing in the world, whose value varies from individual to individual; money itself is a powerful symbol because of the consensual value of it. It is something everyone wants, and therefore something that a lot of people have a lot of opinions about, true and false. Life, sex, food, money...they have consensual value, and therefore great power as cultural symbols. We are taught early and constantly that all these things are important, and disagreeing with that usually indicates a profound break from society.

Society -- our parents, our friends, the media, our religion -- tells us what value to give to things. There are things that society tells you to value -- like health, money, status and sex -- that may cause a tension or conflict within the self if the values conflict.
Sartre, unsurprisingly perhaps, said 'Hell is other people', and in this sense that's very true.

I was once told that 'if you want to control something, you have to understand it...and if you refuse to accept the truth of it, you will never understand it'.
The important thing, then, to avoid the illusionary nature of life and gain a more complete understanding and freedom...is to know the difference between what you know and what you just think.
It's easy enough to think that all religious Southerners are somehow stupid, but if one lives in NYC and has never seen a religious Southerner outside of TV, then what the hell is he opining for, to be blunt about it? He doesn't know, so why claim to?
Well, because it's an us-vs-them thing. It underlines the fact that he, being neither Southern nor religious (presumably), is not stupid.
Great, huh.

On the matter of TV, or any media really, it hasn't done anything to us we didn't make it do. TV does perpetuate false knowledge, but that isn't unilateral....I give a lot of shit to television, but in the long run it may actually help challenge false knowledge, given that people give enough of a shit to find out what's true and what isn't.

In the long and the short of it, conflicting 'facts' are important to sort out, even if it doesn't seem important. Why else was it so important that Jesse Owens, a black man, won four gold medals in front of Adolf Hitler? Because Hitler was working with a fat basket of false knowledge, and the truth speaks for itself.

I think I finally understand a term that Stephen King often used in his Gunslinger novels; 'forgetting your father's face'.

The term was used toward both men and women, and the implication was a loss of nobility or integrity, being less of a man oneself. To act in anger, to lower oneself to doing something known to be wrong, was forgetting the face of one's father.

I think what he might have meant was that by forgetting the face of one's father, you lose perspective; you have unwarranted self-importance, and have forgotten that others were here before you and made your passage easier and more instructive. No matter how high you go, there should always, always be one above you, and one above him.

There is more to it of course; 'forgetting your father's face' is more abstract, and therefore says more, than this. But it's a nice point.

That's pretty cool really.

"I tell it to you plainly, love; it cannot be said for certain who plays the trellis in our little drama and who the vine.
It weren’t only you who’d been at mercy of the other; if the trellis does hang captive in the vine as you say, compromised in integrity...so too do the leaves grow fat and heavy in such elevated sunshine, and once the struts are brought away the whole and the part must fall. That’s the way of it, kiddo. No sense in playing the favored part."

My thoughts are unruly; imaginary hallucinations threaten at the naked edge of logic. Of all the things that come and go, these few unconnected presences never leave me; the ghosts are here, the staring insensate dead, and the noble and singular presence as well, present always.

I am at a crisis point once more, as all my efforts to reach a solace and a middle ground have failed; I fly from pole to pole, unable to harness the horror of this energy and build reason...something coherent!...out of this tangled and perfectly ordered mandala of the inexplicable.

This is what it's like to go crazy; I know why crazy people go on about fucking nonsense now.

I used to hang out with a kid named Jason, during the time I still visited the coffeeshop on a regular basis. Jason was deeply schizophrenic, and refused to take medication: whenever we saw each other I'd get him a mocha and we'd talk. He was amazing, I was both fascinated and humbled by the guy.
"Rumpelstiltskin was just a word," he said to me one day. "...it was just a word she used to turn the straw into gold."

Now, on some level that makes sense: it's just that the ordered end result of the original abstract is all fucked up. It still makes sense and it still takes origin from the same abstract, but the shit at the edges starts to get unusual and 'bizarre'. I thought there was surprising wisdom in what Jason sometimes had to say, although it seemed it was just the koan-like nature of what he said maybe, the white noise of nonsense on which wisdom seems to fall best.
Either way, he awed me.

Now, I think that the process of going mad, of losing touch with reality, is more like a preoccupation with abstracts of less and less cohesion. As chaos in the concepts increases, the sense of order disintegrates, giving way to new vistas of meaning with each new reflection of the abstract; you start to see connections in places you never did before.
The important thing is to keep pruning and judging all connections: blatant craziness like thinking the aliens are talking to you through the TV is the result of failing to cogitate percieved causal relationships. I'm pretty fucking sure I'm going some species of crazy, but I'm trying very hard not to slip and fall.

There is an order to this. I don't know 'what' it is, if it's an abstraction of time or cause and effect or perceptual time or what. But it's been very helpful to me so far in visualizing this concept, so what the hell.

Chaos and order relate to one another in the order of a whirlpool, flowing continually outward.
In the center is the chaos, antithetical to life, destitute of order and form; nothing exists here, but it is the nursery of existence.
Where the progress flows outward, it becomes ordered, and then static, and then grows brittle and falls away to be reclaimed.

Now, this is madness, right? It's nonsense. My problem is that my language is failing me here, I wax as poetic as I can to get words around the abstract and it comes out more straw than gold.

The Wordpress blog is coming along decently, although I'm having some tone trouble with it. Apparently Serious Business and Unnecessary Pretentiousness weren't categorized far enough apart in my head at some point.
I'm sure this comes as a very great shock to anyone reading this thing. ;)

Not much else has been happening, although the bizarre-idea thunderstorm has subsided for now. I can be normal for another month and a half now, maybe I'll make something useful out of it this time.

much love
de keemo

It's like a goddamned optical illusion: I write something down and it seems very important and useful, and then I come back later and it's as if it says 'the sky is blue'.

I keep waiting to get to the point where I'm actually somewhere that isn't obvious, and it keeps not happening. ;)

p.s., wtf is wrong with me, 'colors' isn't an absolute abstract. :/

If black and white have anything in common it's just a property of reflecting light. Light would be what is in common between white and black. I think.

If spiritual truth, evolutionary logic, whatever the hell it is...if that final, outer force stands outside dichotomy, where dualism is an illusion, wouldn't it be the characteristics in common with opposites that would best lead the way to it?

What does black have in common with white? They appear on the eye, they are colors. But 'colors' is....an absolute abstract.
To say a guy has a coat of many colors is saying much, but not really saying anything. It's almost like a koan in a way.

(shit jesus I think I might be on to something!)

Okay, I'll hang that on the rail then:

• what is in common between opposites is certifably so, it is a fundamental truth.

My first thought is that there is something mathematic about that. I see something mathematic in it, but can't get it, because like I've said before my brain goes fucking blind when math comes into the picture, it's beyond description and my god does it make me mad, I couldn't pass basic eighth grade math and dat's de troof.
But is this verifiable in mathematics? (It doesn't prove anything if it is, it's just an interesting thought.)

Also, the next big problem now is where you divide things in order to achieve opposites to them.

(fuck, stomping upstairs neighbors totally destroyed my concentration so fuck it for now)

I'm still walking around all the time lately with this odd, meaningless sense of anticipation; it's getting to the point now where I'm practically making shit up in my head just to try to find a reason for the phenomenon. It's probably at least part of all this strange stuff I've been talking about lately.

I have a feeling like something extremely influential is about to happen, or is already happening but getting worse (or better). I come to this conclusion mostly through a gut feeling, totally without credential and yet I cannot, try as I might, bitch though I may, I cannot get rid of it. It won't leave me. Ever.
I think about this nameless upheaval in the shower, I think about it while I'm working and writing, I think about it while I'm playing FFXI. I try to puzzle it out.

I thought it might have something to do with Obama's candidacy. In that sense I guess that makes me one of his whacko supporters, but so be it, I'm a quiet variety of whacko. It's hard to get away from it in the news.
I kept waking with the sense of having dreamed about him, night after night, to the point where it was beginning to mess with me pretty solid. I took a break from the news programs, but it didn't help...it wasn't so much focused on him, but tended to become a formless, oddly strategic abstract that it hurt my brain to dream of.
God I know how this sounds. What a fucked up life this is, but if this kind of TMI is worth nothing at least it's honest I guess.

Always larger than life, fine, that's okay: here I am, yon super-duper prophet, forecasting the times to come on my great and holy Livejournal.

I need some sleep. >< I'm still leaving it up though, it's bugging me that much.

There is such a tight balance between self-centeredness and communication, or so it seems to me, although I admit that I have a self-image problem that I'm trying to cope with. It's rough, I've been a weirdo for a really long time now, and these barriers against rejection get so big they turn invisible. I'm trying to see my way around it.

I think I'm starting to see what Liam meant when he accused me of being larger than life.
Mike once used the word 'psychodrama' against me, which sent me into a rage, and so there must be something to it. Otherwise it wouldn't piss me off so much.

I don't like it. I'm changing, but it's a slow go: you know, you get so used to not dealing with things outside yourself, sometimes you can forget how.

love
kimmo

Holy shit this journal turned weird over the last year or so.

I should probably stop. ;)

I'm trying to get happy with a blog on Wordpress, but I haven't satisfied myself enough to actually finish and use one. If I did, it would be much more objective than this one is...this thing is a mess, it's like spaghetti on a wall. That's life I guess, but Wordpress is such Serious Business that I wouldn't dare post stuff like this on it.
Something about that feels insincere to me, so it's probably just as well if I can't get it going. Serious Business and I have never gotten along well anyway, as my bank account will testify.

If I do ever use it I'll put a link here, but something tells me I'll still be using this frigging thing when I'm forty. Thank you Bren, you were the one who sent me the link to this. ;)

love
kimmo

It isn't who you are, but the force you represent that matters.
It's not better to be Order or Chaos, it's best to change according to the situation in order to achieve some balance in the situation...be the force of order in a chaotic situation, be the force of chaos when order grows oppressive.