I like the philosophy…

I have often thought that when people say that they learn from their mistakes, it’s something to make them feel better in that moment. Something to quash the oft deep feelings of regret or shame or just plain humiliation. While I don’t doubt something is learnt from it, I don’t think it’s the grown experience people take it as. It, like many other things in life, have the effect of narrowing the options for next time, reducing potential experience.

Lives are like stories, each answer given closes off many doors, unlocking fewer in comparison. At the start, it’s not much of a problem. After all, as it’s setting up the story, they are doors you’re happy to close, options you do not wish to take. But, as the story progresses, you find yourself encountering the lesser of evil choices and the greatest of the goods. Doors are taken you’d otherwise prefer not to, other doors are closed which would have been great to take.

So, what does this have to do with learning from mistakes? The error, the mistake, is taken as a reason not to do that thing again, when it was only a mistake in that situation, in that time. There are so many variables, so many subtle differences so difficult to see, that the same actions, in the same order, could have the desired result.

I know this sounds like a rationalization, you weren’t wrong, the world conspired against you. Could be, but blaming yourself for the calamitous result is just the same type of assigning the blame, just to yourself rather than to uncontrollable factors. I’d categorize that as the same self-hate at the center of many major religions, giving their victories to the unconquered Sun while claiming all their losses to themselves.

Scientifically speaking, you’d need to repeatedly test the same actions to prove their lack of effect. That said, the act of observation changes the observed.

So, will I try again, another time, another place, another person? Sure. When the time is right, when the person is right. The contest is against my own record, my own failings. Not against the barriers of the world around me.

Hurt, recorded version

A friend had a birthday today. A pretty important one, a mile stone of sorts. And no one showed. Of the expected collection of ten/twelve confident shows, two arrived, me as one of the two. It’s not like he’s disliked, nor was it too much of an imposition; arrive at place, have drinks. No presents, no necessity other than your presence.

The significance for me is that those who didn’t turn up probably did it for one of two reasons. The first is less important and far more conspiratorial, so it shall be omitted from the proceedings. The second is more pertinant; people just couldn’t be bothered. One excuse or another, ahh I won’t be missed or I’ll head there later, but when later comes, they don’t bother.

All together, such a selfish reaction to something which in itself was an offer of good company and a good time. A time was had, and it was good enough… but there was a great lacking. I expect to hear the excuses and the vagueries of reason soon enough. Maybe this will have a result. Karma or the like. What goes around and all that. I doubt it.

Laughter, the best medicine

I see others enjoying their fictions in the light and I find myself thinking ‘why not me’. But, that soon passes. After getting locked into a cage of my own creation, bound by my own insanities, I find myself working myself back to the light. It’s a difficult process, fighting aganist my own demons who would have me returning to that deep dark cave of worthless hope.

I’m too weak to put it all behind me. I’ll always have a place I will go inside, were the cobweb covered hope still lives. It’s just a fantasy, a moment of what-if. No real harm to be had, except if you try and force it into the light.

I’d like to think I was free of it now, allowing myself to continue on, but with the darkness of an uncertain future ahead, that doesn’t give me as much solace. My demons are still with me, vocal as ever, and my angels remain silent.

Planned perfection was oxymoronic to begin with. A plan is just a list of things that don’t happen, while perfection exists as a moment of illusion punctuated on both sides by wondrous what-ifs.

Evaluating Cause & Effect

Time is a wonderful thing. Not in a healer of all wounds sense, but in the sense that it is an unknowable, unseen force, in which we create the daily illusion of our lives.

Time doesn’t heal. Time hardens. Time constricts the possibilities, reduces the maybes, until you are left with the certainty that this is all you’ll ever be. This appears to be okay as long as you have someone, or something, to hold onto. Another body or hope, either would do. Something, anything to stop me from hearing the dull beating of my own heart.

I gave blood today. In and of itself, a good feeling. I get nothing out of it, not even the knowledge of it’s use. While there, I chatted with the nurse about the conditions of giving blood, and mentioned I may be visiting the States in August. I also mentioned this possibility in an e-mail to my sister. And each time, I felt the likelihood slip further and further away.

When all I have left, the thing that remains after so much, so many people, and so much time has been given up, when my writing is all that is left, and when at every test it, or I, have failed, is there the possibility of success somewhere in my future? I find myself so tired at times like this. Wanting to rest my head in the lap of my beloved and feel her fingers in what is left of my hair. But, they that is just a fiction. She doesn’t… know me.

The dye has been cast, the bird has been let go free, the mechanisms are in motion. To where… I don’t know. With no god to beseech to, with no singular truth to rely on. No moment, no gifting, no great equilibrium. We have exactly what we deserve… and that is this… I can only hope that everyone else is having as good a time as I.

Finite contemplation

This is to them that say all will be well,
All the while waiting for the ghost to tell,
That there is a heaven, and below it a hell.
Inventing the fiction, hoping to sell,
To the gullible people, their sadnesses to quell.

This is to they who pretend,
Whose crafted lives are to sorrow suspend.
All they may to work and strive to transcend,
The former friendships they hope to mend,
They are left in the end nothing to defend.

This is me, the them to one, the they to another,
Crafting and creating yet another blunder.
What value my arcane, wisdoms gleamed from another.
What strength my armor, a bulwark to wonder,
To be at the end of the day, just a confirmed bachelor.

The Nilihism Tango

In the corner of nothing, nothing can begin,
The fears in virtue, the hopes in sin.
Whatever the desire, wherever the destination,
Wishing for failure is always a win.

Cursing the gods, embrasing the spirit,
Always expecting to end in the pit.
Look for the flaw, search for the defect,
What you fear to see, but always to find it.

To see grace in place of so much despair,
Find the blance to all, and all will be fair.
The wonder of woman, despire all of her scars,
When all else is counted, there’s still reason to care.

The virtue of a hermetic life…

What is the virtue of a hermetic life? It is a life bereft of tenderness, though not of joy. One may say that the human heart can find joy in almost any place. Others are not required for it. Though others do have a way of both magnifying and diminishing that joy, like some sort of confused variable in an esoteric equation.

What is the purpose of a hermetic life? Is it a transition from the life that was before to the life that comes next? Some sort of karmic balancing act resulting even bigger scales reaching their equilibrium? Or is the purpose to be found in the time spent before moving towards the next joy, the next job, the next incarnation of self.

Finding my own path has always been something of a personal blessing and a curse. Others have seen courage in my actions, striking out on my own when they say they are too afraid to follow, to leave the trappings of their standard lives behind. Ironically, it is those trappings which each of us seek, though in our own time and in our own way. These people call me couragous, but I call me a fool.

The trouble I find is in the infinite regress. If this life has a purpose, if holding on to it is so virtuous, then what determines that purpose or that virtue. Secularly speaking, both have their origin in the society; an anthropological development which in its’ own way helps further the society as a whole. The question comes, what help can their be from an individual so hidden away from the society it is supposed to influence.

It is somehow pleasing to think that I hold a position held by the creeping woman down the street with all the cats, or old man Copeland, who refused to give us our ball back after we kicked it over his wall for the umpteenth time. Somehow comforting to see myself as that which exists behind the gruff outward persona. The woman who keeps to herself after dealing with too much heartbreak to bare; the man who loves his music so much that it is all he ever needs in this world.

Perhaps the day when purpose and virtue and all that guff will no longer trouble my mind.

Locked out, shut down

I know this feeling will fade… in time. For the moment, I will have to look to other placed, other motivations to keep me occupied through this funk. I have things to do. Yes, I have many things to do. But, each of them I want to do for… someone.

It’s been this way for a while. The first projects had the names of my friends in place of the antagonists and protagonists. This allows both a personality crutch around which I could form the individual characters and it game be a sense that I was doing this for and with other people. The craft is such an isolating thing. Warren Ellis once wrote, about comic books, that each of us comes to it alone. We find each issue, each book ourselves, experience it ourselves. Even if we hand if off as soon as we’re done to a friend to read, we still have to await their isolated experience before we can compare.

Such is my craft. I’ve no one to write for. No one to celebrate with. No one to be with. No one to bounce ideas off, to share in the process. So, all I am left with is brief moment of the joy of creation punctuating the long, long deadening silence.

Not that I can think of a way to correct this. The choices I’ve made, while not wrong have certainly led me down a this path. In a world of no ultimate consequences, I’m left with the truism that the only thing that matters is what we do.

Perhaps it is my lot to create for a future generation. Perhaps it my lot to be forgotten. Perhaps she’s around the next corner and all of this deep sadness is for nothing. But, I can’t see it. I can only see darkness around me. Please won’t someone…

End of Time

When everything’s been said,
Every contest has been scored.
When the silences are dead,
It’s time to head for the door.

Each man their intrinsic value,
Each time it’s place, and place it’s hour.
There comes the inevitable view,
That things always, eventually, go sour.

Every dog has their day,
Every mut his purpose resound.
But what is the piper’s pay,
When the next day dawns on the hound.

With the risings and the sets, time moves on,
The clock ticks another ever-after.
Fools think their happiness never gone,
When ends are all you’re after.

Ode to Phantasm

Empty of soul and hollow of its’ ring,
Without the stresses of a most beautiful thing.
Sour the taste and hopeless the wanting,
Of dreams and of yearnings that will never sing.

Of satin and lace, of the best of all things,
Set flight long ago, on light’s blessed wings.
The distance of now, the choices that stings,
Give rise to inevitbilities that time always brings.

Once again these works willing to bring,
A revelation of sorts, a most cosmic of meeting.
If only the one who lives only when dreaming,
Could come from the night, to the light of day’s dawning.