No Direction

Writing without a subject is difficult, almost like trying to walk somewhere with no directions on how to get there. Almost. I'm writing because I am feeling very anxious. I am living in a situation where, no matter what problems arise, I am the first candidate for blame. It's been like this for a very long time, to the point where I can't remember not feeling antagonized in some way, for something I literally didn't -do-. Paranoia? Doubtful. I blame myself for a lot of things, and my self-directed blame is usually the least deserved and the most unnecessarily drawn out. I am living in a situation where I have no future. I have all the freedom in the world (or about as much as one can get with no wheels and no cash) and there is nowhere to go. I am living in this situation, day by day, sending out little messages in bottles in the form of job applications to the business district of a tiny town that doesn't have any space for newcomers. I am constantly told “nothing is wrong with you, you're fine.” I am a nervous wreck by nature. I couldn't calm down if someone told me nothing would be wrong for the rest of my life. I regularly endure bouts of depression which are becoming more and more suicidal in their nature. I am almost completely incapable of focusing on anything long enough to complete it, and my obsessions lead to nothing, nowhere, as my center of attention drifts aimlessly through electrified fields of tension. It's just how it is. Nothing wrong. 

So I'm stuck in this cycle, and my efforts to escape have proven totally fruitless. Still stuck in a bedroom, dodging blame for whatever goes wrong in this house. At least I have a bed now. It's been a long time since I've slept on a bed for a long period of time. A real bed, with a memory foam mattress. Not a wafer-thin futon, not an air mattress in the living room of yet another apartment I can't afford to live in, losing friends in the process of my material transfer of disappointment. It's probably been about 5 years. The emptiness of this way of life is gut-wrenching, hollow little vessels floating on a calm sea, sometimes bumping into eachother, sometimes isolated indefinitely. The loneliness of the internet-based life for me is beyond dull, beyond tedious. I can only sit still and glare at the joyous lives I see from this static hell, fulfilling dreams I can only barely begin to muster. Their lives must be so fun and free, it must be a real pleasure to not languish in torturous imprinted self-bondage and apathy. Discomfort is the only emotion I feel. A constant, jarring mosquito-like buzz suspended in a vacuum of dead air.

I can barely write anymore. Not that I was ever a pro. My mind is reaching its nadir of novelty in my increasing inability to relate to others. The last time I opened myself up to anyone, the last time I thought I could heal someone, like a leprous physician, my trustee took it upon herself to threaten me with her own life. Several times. This right now is painful grinding. Statuesque, grim entities of dominance push me out of sleep to continue the hamster wheel of my struggling against the inevitable, looming collapse of my faith in its entirety. Gargoyles watch outside my door, the path to where sustenance lies is guarded well with bows set to fire arrows of shame. Unwelcome, I am an unwilling prisoner of my own construct. Deep, unforgiving shame for the negation of an act. An unfulfilled promise, a negotiation the terms of which I cannot meet, at the cost of my survival, at the cost of my last refuge as an excommunicated priest of all-encompassing nothingness. It goes on. No direction. These angels took everything I loved, stabbed me and left me to die.  

Spectral Chronostasis

In the feedback loop (in the sense that my body is a symptom of the universe, the universe looking at itself) what is the content forming the self-generating patterns in it? As in, if you have a video camera pointed at a tv with the camera's output, there's no indication of a loop at all until there is something else within the camera's view (say, pulling back the camera from the screen until you can see the outer frame of the screen, the television itself). We could compare the feedback loop without content to the nothingness of the vacuum, but what is the analog in our experience of the content forming the patterns seen in the loop? The loop does not "exist" without this content, one could say that it is symbols which occupy the mental space forming the content of the loop, the reflexive thought-objects within the gap between the observer and the observed forming beautiful self-generating fractal patterns (in synchronicity, the time delay of the sync events as the generation of "depth" in the fractal, reflecting the initial form, nested within the formula itself)

I spoke of the wheel

"... We need to confront the basic enigma of Buddhism, its blind spot: how did the fall into samsara, the Wheel of Life, occur? This enigma is the exact opposite of the main Buddhist concern: how can we break out of the Wheel of Life and attain nirvana? The nature and origin of the impetus by means of which desire (deception) emerged out of the Void is the big unknown in the heart of the Buddhist edifice: it points towards an act that “breaks the symmetry” within nirvana itself and thus makes something appear out of nothing (as in quantum physics with its notion of symmetry‐breaking). The Freudian answer is the drive: what Freud calls the “drive” is not, as it may appear, the Buddhist Wheel of Life, the craving that enslaves us to the world of illusions. The drive, on the contrary, goes on even when the subject has “traversed the fantasy” and broken out of its illusory craving for the (lost) object of desire. And therein lies the difference between Buddhism and psychoanalysis, reduced to its formal minimum: for Buddhism, after Enlightenment (or “traversing the fantasy”), the Wheel no longer turns, the subject de‐subjectivizes itself and finds peace; for psychoanalysis, on the other hand, the wheel continues to turn, and this continued turning‐of‐the‐wheel is the drive (as Lacan put it in the last pages of Seminar XI: after the subject traverses the fantasy, desire is transformed into drive). What psychoanalysis adds to Buddhism is thus in fact a new version of Galileo’s eppur si muove: imagine a Lacanian being tortured by a New Age Western Buddhist into admitting that inner peace can be achieved; after the forced concession, as he leaves the room, he quietly mumbles: “But nonetheless, it continues to move!”- Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing

And yet, it moves.

Is it not when we give up completely that we find a sign of redemption? It's when I finally admit to myself that I have no idea where to start with something that I have an insight on how resisting the notion that I don't know is actually beginning a process of "knowing", a deeper analysis of this process reveals how failure in our lives acts as a success in some other sense, in that accepting this failure immediately opens up a path that was not seen before in the single-minded struggle to achieve a temporary success. The "light at the end of the tunnel" is not something that appears when one wants it to (especially not then), it appears when we have given up, when we have admitted defeat. That is kind of the way the world works, isn't it? Isn't it? Layers of illusion like an onion leading to nothing behind it all. The harder you look at something as being "there", such as a particular meaning or model for something, the more it dissipates, eludes categorization.

So, beyond my pseudo-intellectual babble, I am in the midst of exploring meaninglessness, meaning, I am coming to terms with the fact that, on my own, I am not some creative generator, 'I' am not 'creating' 'reality' as it is but sequencing illusions in such a way as to transform the nothingness of matter into a symbolic node of advanced patterning, the empty whirlpool of my identity formed by swirling waters of data . In the act of shutting oneself off from interactions with others, one finds that their "self" was in those others, that without a consistent feedback on one's self-produced content (which is actually more of a "remix" of what they've heard other people say) the delocated nothingness of reality becomes all too apparent and we are sent into psychosis. The illusion is necessary and I imagine that the point is not to shed it, but to grasp its ungraspability as our perspectives are inextricably enmeshed in its circuitry.

The Feedback Loop - To be shed/denied completely, or to be realized as essential to experience itself?


"To put it in terms of the Higgs field in quantum physics, “nothingness” (the void, being deprived of all substance) and the lowest level of energy paradoxically no longer coincide; at the lowest level of tension, or in the void, the dissolution of all order, it is “cheaper” (it costs the system less energy) to persist in “something” than to dwell in “nothing.” It is this distance that sustains the death drive (namely, the drive as such, since “every drive is virtually a death drive”).78 Far from being the same as the nirvana principle (the striving towards the dissolution of all tension, the longing for a return to original nothingness), the death drive is the tension which persists and insists beyond and against the nirvana principle." - Zizek

Introduction: Nothing In Particular

I keep thinking about the idea that anxiety is not actually from a restriction of freedom but from too much of it. I don't know how well that sits with me but from my experience it is always when things are too open-ended that I become very anxious, sort of idling by not really focusing on much of anything, not getting anything "done". I feel like the idea of getting something "done" is interesting, it implies a construct of beginning and end, when we know neither our beginning nor our end, only this middle part that isn't even here, more an empty space between the nothings before birth and after death. Death sandwich.

So it is that I am struggling to even find any sort of motivation at all, most of my writing has been these banal introspective things that very few can relate to and that don't actually go anywhere. But that has been my mind as of late, nothing concludes in anything useful, nothing objective can be gained from anything I've written, nothing pragmatic at least. As much as I enjoy getting this out on paper, I have lost my audience before even beginning by not giving anyone anything to relate to because everything at the moment is this big confusing mess and I don't know what's what.

Such seems to be the problem (or my problem) with metaphysics: the open-endedness in a world where there is seemingly great division, there are things closed off, I mean, if there are actually things at all. I have spent a lot of time meditating and what I am not after is the blank pseudo-bliss of the inactive mind but the restless volleying back and forth of a dialectical spiral. Since there is no "being" in the world but only becoming, as the retainers of static form are our symbols and our means of navigating and categorizing them I find much less "productivity" in the world of flesh than in the world of thought, much less traction. Although I have to admit there is something extremely refreshing about doing something new every day, creatively upending the tedious ritual of our Gestalts substituted as real. However, what are these Gestalts if not the substance of reality itself, if the "Other" is nowhere to be found, if there is no solid core of any atom?
This is where I am at now, at this point of denying any existence of Other and realizing everything as the Self unbound by the image of Self. But the world I'm seeing as the extension of my being is a pretty awful place. So I am imagining this bounding, this closing off of the Self-Image from the Self is something that is done to maintain distance from the horrible freedom of seeing things as they truly are. So, what am I to do as an individual?

My activities in the lifestyle of a hermit have revealed to me that to know what I think, I need to know what others think, in terms of a dialogue. Given this freedom to be alone and do as I please and think as I please, I've found that having my ideas just circulating endlessly in my mind is not only tedious but is slowly eroding my sanity. Because of how little I interact with others, I am seemingly only able to speak in an entirely subjective manner, giving the reader very little to "reach out and touch" or connect with. Hopefully in realizing that my frame of mind relating to how I am seeing the world, in an all-too-subjective way, is not satisfactory to how I wish to interact with the world, this will change something and I will write about something that might be interesting to others. As for now, I continue the endless conversation with myself that only I will be able to enjoy or gain anything from.

Such a strange position. Trapped in my own self-referential loop, release time TBA.

I feel uncomfortable talking about things that other people are supposed to relate to or gain something from. I feel that too often in the past I have offered others poison apples not even knowing they were poison to begin with. Maybe they weren't poison but just dead ends (which can be as effective as poison for those of us who are on a fast train to an unknown destination). That is what I'm afraid of, saying something about life and how I think it "really" is and then later looking back and saying "I can't believe I ever felt that way and that I ever told anyone. I'm embarrassed." That happens quite a lot. So I tend to avoid writing about how I think things are. I feel it is best to avoid hokey, easily-dissectable spiritualism and to replace it with an expert use of metaphor, as all of my favorite writers have managed to do. I, on the other hand, am not nearly as capable. I was not granted that gift, I try to do everything directly, I never learned subversion and it is difficult to think of expressing myself any other way, even though our experience of reality is not "direct" and is always being navigated and interacted with through analogies and metaphors. Analogies and metaphors that have more substance than "the Real Thing", most likely, in the sense that symbols are what interact with eachother, not pieces of matter or "solid things".

I hope that's a good introduction because I have no idea where this is really going to go. All I know is I have ideas and I would love feedback on them rather than just letting them stew about in my brain.