Why I have I posted so many poems lately? Someone (ahem, Lizzie) woke whatever poetic instincts I have. So, deal with it. That’s all I have to say on the matter. Deal with it. And I repeated that for emphasis since I have nothing more witty and amusing to say. Deal with that. I’m not lol.
In addition, here is the non-bloggish link to The Lives We Lead. I made a slight change to it, for what its worth.
It’s time for bed.
This is actually a song I wrote a while back. It’s here and called a poem because I dont have a ‘lyrics’ section. That, and its the only poem-ish type thing that ends on a up note. So its worth keeping here, if for no other reason.
Beside the sea he stands
Remembering what could have been
Bitter tears into the sand
He falls onto the land
Remembering her was sweet
Life now oh so bleak
Time begins to pass him by
Wish he’d just escape this lie
Read on...
Life flows its way from day to day
And I wait for it, for it to stay
It’s a sweet song, this life, others say
But I, I hear a crescendo of pain.
This day, each day, bites so deep
This soul, my soul, I fight to keep
I look for love that never ends
Oh, when will it be sent?
My heart, it breaks from day to day
I wonder if love can ever be gained
And I long - oh, I crave, I wait
But I, I fear the crescendo of pain.
If there is no other way to live this life other than fully, why do I find doing such a thing so difficult? I wonder if I am doubting whether existence is life or death. If it is death, then it should be experienced thusly - cold and unmoving, unwaveringly sluggish. If life is death, then every event should be treated as with the significance a corpse gives a smile. People, events, time, time, and “life” (for that is what such a life would be) should treated with a similar cruel coldness.
But if that is not true, then why live that way, torturing myself with a lie?
They’re not, in truth, new poems. I’d written a while ago, and forgotten to put them in a more permanent place. But they are located in that safe place now. All cheer and celebrate, the two lost poems are now safe. Perhaps I should consider that a poem and make it safe? (If I had an editor, this is where he’d make some pithy comment.)
It occurred to me, today, what exactly I’ve found problematic in the statement “everyone’s a minister”. This was said a considerable amount in my college classroom. Someone would say something about “going into the ministry” and the inevitable response was, “but everyone’s a Minster.” That’s cute. It really is. But what does that mean?
It was the response to a statement which indicated that ministry was an act made by singular individuals; it was intended to indicate that the work of ministry was one made by each and every Christian, and should not be considered a singular thing. This is an admirable thought, but for the fact that it ignores the nature of the issue: ministry is not an isolated act (what do you do? I am a minister; or, what do your people do? They are ministers). Rather, it is a state of existence.
Ministry, purely as an act, is impossible because people are not things to be acted upon, ie changed by human ability. Can you change a person? Make them different than what they are? You cannot; at best, you can influence them and, at worst, manipulate them.
A pieces of wood can be changed, through human will, into a house. But a person cannot be changed in that manner. Therefore, ministry, as a state of existence, is necessary. In other words, people cannot merely do ministry; they must be ministry. Ministry must be a thing of nature, the natural interaction between personalities. Ministry such as that influences and changes not because it must, but because that’s its nature. As a result, such a minister is not manipulative. He is merely interacting with people on the basis of who he is.
So, are all people ministers? No - if ministry is a state of existence, there are some people who are not ministers, no matter what acts they may do. Can all people be ministers? Probably. But few, I think, will - because of the consequences of such a decision.
Ever met someone who said of themself, “I am a person who thinks in the box?” I haven’t.
So, if we are all thinking outside of the proverbial box, does that mean that we’re all thinking within a different box? And if that’s the case, does anyone think outside of that box? And if one person does it, does that mean that we all are doing it?
It’s all so crazy and circular that I think my head is going to explode!
Weirdness for the next several moments. -- 12:03AM
Ok, I’m done. Why the change? Just look around. You’ll see. Its 248% better.
UPDATE: For good measure, I put up the link to the story The Eighth Day.
UPDATE2: Arg! Apparently, something went wrong and wacky with the colors when I was designing this thing - now (due to image compression) everything’s all kinds of off. I will fix that. Perhaps not tonight, but I will did fix it...
I didn’t fix it. I’m learning a valuable lesson about working on webpage graphics by recycling graphics. I kept making jpgs and gifs, using them in a design, then just using print screen to copy that design to photoshop. The image kept degrading, but for some reason I didn’t catch it. The reason is bing bing bing Internet Explorer, which only at times wants to render all the colors right. I’ll work on this more tomorrow.
This is, again, another direct transcription from my journal, posted for no reason other than I feel like it. It’s a decent thought that isn’t developed enough for anyone but me.
An inanimate object can be manipulated i.e, remade, formed, and changed by a person, for it possesses no native personality. A person, however, is different. A person’s personality cannot be changed by another. Neither can another person change another’s will or discover truth for them. A person who would do this would have to perform an act tantamount to possession - the subjegation of one’s person’s personality to another’s. And even this is an act of will, and therefore not an act entirely caused by the subjegation.Socrates is right; we can be, at best, midwives to the truth. We can help to birth it - anything more attempted would be evil.
My degree’s flaw is that it sees people as objects to be manipulated and the truth as something we are capable of causing them to realize. But we can, at best, birth what was created in there by another.
For the last week, I’ve not posted as frequently as usual. There are reasons for this. My posts on this blog are generally adjusted writings from my journals - rough thoughts which tend to be smoothed out (slightly) through the transition from pulp to electron.
Lately, however, my journal thoughts have turned toward things which are either a) too personal or b) too irrelevant to be worth posting. Do you really want to hear my argument concerning Kierkegaard’s perspective on existence? I doubt it. There might be three people in the world who’d be interested in that, and they’ve probably already finished that particular argument, having exploded and become beings of pure mental energy.
Point being, it’s difficult for me to translate some of my personal thoughts into thoughts which are relevant to whoever might be reading this page. My journals generally develop a thought only as far as necessary for me, thus not overly helpful (or understandable) to others.
But for what it’s worth, I’m going to show you why. This is how I write in my journal (exact quote, here):
the reality is that K’s thoughts on truth (“truth is subjective”), if he indeed doesn’t deny the correspondence between thought and reality is not radical; Christ was saying more or less the same though he spoke of the Pharisees. Both the subjective and objective truth are necessary.Isn’t existence subject to system? God’s system? But isn’t God existent? Does that mean paradoxically that both are subject to each other?
Can we know truth? This bears several questions - truth as a complete whole? Elements of absolute truth? An absolute truth or the absolute truth? And to know in what way - intellectually? Spiritually? Morally?
Perhaps it is such vaguary that irritates me about such a discussion. It’s more or less doomed to failure from the start.
Why such a post? Dunno. From time to time, it feels good to let people into my mind - letting people know not only what I think, but how I think it.
The lives we lead -
Fallen Trees.
Fodder for the griding things:
Life, pulp, mounded sheaves.
Fire and ash -
Filling the very air we need.
Edit: the “forever” non-bloggish link to this story is here
Snow drifted into the world, dusting in pristine white. Rooftops throughout the neighborhood had a new look: tar and pitch covered in white, at least for a time. Vehicles parked outdoors shared this quality – the streets, too, and the dead ground. A foot of snow refreshed the area, removing the memory of the long autumn past. It was not a dark storm. There was a gap in the clouds above. The sun would from time to time find its way through, causing people in the neighborhood to squint out their windows and comment on the brightness – sun on snow, brightness reflecting brighter.
Snow fell, no respecter of person or possession. But one yard proved an exception. In that yard stood a typical house, the kind of house seen in any middle-class neighborhood. It stood two stories tall; judging from the three windows on the second story, it had three bedrooms. The windows were surrounded by dark blue shutters. They were false shutters, of course, the kind provided purely for their decorative value.
The house itself was neither obviously new nor obviously old. There were signs of decay, to be sure: a gutter hanging slightly away from the fascia; a shutter tipped a bit to the side; discoloring of the off-white siding; or the minute crack in the living room window. But these were small enough to be missed at first glance. But since the house had all the style of a new construction, these were noticeable enough to give the house a sense of discontinuity.
Ever know someone and have hope for them? Ever see the foundations of that hope begin to crumble? Ever wonder if their is ever hope for any one of us?
From time to time, I’ll meet a Christian who I have hopes for. This happens rarely, but when it does I find myself greatly uplifted. A certain breed of people exists within the church whose cynicism hides a heart which cares, desperately, for the things of God. Their cynicism is born from the knowledge of what the church should be and how much they care.
Unfortunately, few of these people - the ones who have the chance to change things - do anything of meaning. Rather than change the church by first changing themselves, they lapse into criticism and darkness. They begin to confuse being True with being “real” - a term I really hate. What are you being real with? What is reality? Is
“being real” cursing because you feel like it? That’s called being true to your sinful nature. Acknowledging a struggle is not the same as living it. We should be true to the one we know, not “real” with a self that will only destroy us in the end.
I’m not sure why I’m posting this, or whether it makes sense to anyone other than myself. It just hurts me to see so many people and friends I’ve hoped for fall to the wayside and, in spite of their perception, fall further from God and call it “being real”. God save me from ever, ever, becoming like this, because they know God as little as they church they hurt for.
I can only pray that God calls my friends back to knowledge of him.
I’m taking a short recess from the thoughts I’ve been putting out the last several days. Not a short recess from this blog, but from the thoughts which have been eating away at me. Sometimes you need to let your mind rest in order to understand what’s really going on.
Tomorrow (well, today, technically), I’m finishing up a story. It’ll be the first one I’ve finished in several months. I’ve been writing quite a bit, but I often get fed-up before I finish anything. I probably have three or four stories incomplete stories on my hard drive, and another three or four in my head. I just haven’t the patience to get them out.
Anyway, a friend and I were discussing how much we enjoyed writing short stories, and how neither one of us ever got around to it. So we decided to pick a topic every month and write a short story about it. And since we know the other person will be doing it, it’s encouragement to get it done.
I hope to have that story up in the next couple of days.
Considering my post on Describing Existence, I realize my poor job in describing the reason why the leap between merely describing who I am and stating “I am” is necessary.
Essentially, description is not enough. I could describe something as having a rough, brown exterior with numerous handlike extrusions, and outgrowths (during certain seasons) which have a green, smooth, paperlike look about them. You’d know that I was describing a tree; but you’d also know that the description doesn’t describe all trees, because there’s an inexorable quality to the word, “tree”. At some point, description fails, and we must come up with a term which expresses the thing we are trying to describe.
In our case, we are trying to describe the nature of our existence. And therefore, “I am” (ie, “I exist”) is the only fitting term.
Note, I do not intend this to be authoritative in any manner. It’s merely my attempt to work out the thought that’s been in my head. I suspect it will be clarified and changed and more fully realized in the future. It is also somewhat connected to the post I made on The Impossibility of Discovering Self.
So, how can we define ourselves when “ourselves” defies full knowledge? The only way to do so would be to speak of yourself in terms of all that you are – but we cannot know that. So what then?
There are terms, however, that describe the indescribable. For example, the word “infinite” conveys an idea which is both conceivable and inconceivable – the idea, say, that numbers do not end. We can conceive of the idea but could never conceive of the reality.
We must discover what we are trying to say when we describe ourselves. We say things such as, “I’m a happy person” or “I’m a father” or “I’m a cook” as descriptions of something which is greater than the description – the state of the way we are. Each statement is a statement about how we exist. They are methods of describing the nature and reality of our existence. In effect, they’re our personal numbers.
How can we verbalize the infinite aspect of these personal numbers? We could continue to name all the aspects of ourselves until we died from exhaustion: perhaps, then, we’d begin to understand what it means to have no conceivable end, or to understand that our existence is more than the sum total of our parts.
Because each description of us is a statement about the nature of our existence, the only possible way to fully describe ourselves is to merely state our existence. In other words, the only statement which fully can describe personal existence is, “I am”. Such a phrase is conceivable and inconceivable, full and empty. It is full because it is true, but empty because we cannot contain who we are.
We are not “I am” in the sense that God is “I AM”. In other words, our reflection on ourselves is inconceivable to ourselves. Understanding and fullness is dependant on another individual greater than self – that is to say, God. But our personality is greater than any descriptor. God has created us to be something more than we appear to be, that we might share in his glory.
There is a difference between a personal definition of existence being “I am” and God’s self definition of existence being “I AM”. The human definition affects nothing but self, nothing but now, giving meaning to the human self. But God’s definition is one that goes beyond self to affect all things at all times. In essence, humans – in their constant state of change - can only say (with certainty) “I am now” while God says, “I AM always I AM past I AM future I AM all I AM WHO I AM”. The power and reality of such a statement is shattering to me.
So, we can only describe ourselves in terms of our existence at this moment, for we can know nothing more. We have not the power to fully conceive of ourselves, nor the power to see ourselves from an eternal perspective. But the paradoxical statement “I am” is the closest we can come to describing what the nature of our existence is.
When perception becomes reality, when the two have become one and the same, a person has truly achieved something.
Edit: Of course, the only one for whom perception and reality are the same is God: he cannot, even unintentionally, develop a perception which is apart from what is real and true. Deception cannot deceive him, even of the self-induced variety.
If that were so, he’d not be much of a God.
I’ve been out of town for the last couple of days, visiting some friends - so I will finish the thought I started in my last post... just not until tomorrow. If I tried to write at this moment, I’d probably turn whatever I was trying to write into a discussion on the merits of glow in the dark mosquitos. Think about it - on the positive side, you’d know where they were at night. On the negative side, you’d know where they were at night.
See? I just did!
I need to sleep.
In church the other day, I ran into a woman I hadn’t seen in a while. While talking to her, she asked me a question I hadn’t considered for a good long time. “So, have you found yourself yet?” (I remember mentioning that topic in conversation to her at one point)
I realized something at that point, something I had unconsciously concluded but not yet known. So I responded, “I will never find myself.”
Driving home, my mind spun, trying to understand what I meant (isn’t that interesting? I often have that problem). And realized what I was talking about.
The question of “self” is a question of identity. Who am I? What am I? What is my purpose? In other words, “What is it that makes me, me?”
How does one even begin to describe one’s self? Generally, our identities are formed around the things that we do. I am a carpenter. I am a Christian. I am a man. All of these things are, indeed, me - I think it’s a load of crap when people say that they are not. They are descriptors, the only method we have of communicating our existence and identity to others.
Realistically, though, those descriptors are not enough (“those” people are somewhat right). No matter what the list we come up with to describe ourselves, the list can never be long enough - because we are more than the sum total of our parts. Whatever we may be, there is still more to us.
That is why we can never “find” ourselves. There is more to us than we are able to conceive of. It’s like trying to conceive of and describe the Sears Tower, while never being able to leave the tower or even look outside. The Sears Tower is larger than description. You’d run around commenting on the floors, the furniture, and the decorations - and they’d be all true descriptions. But they would not cover the whole.
I can never discover myself: “myself” is too large for me to conceive of. I can never know the whole of who I am, any more than any scientist will know the whole of what the universe is. This is part of humanity’s limitations. “Know thyself”, in its fullest sense, is an impossibility.
I’ll continue this thought in a future post - perhaps tomorrow.