A couple of first paragraphs

Arguing with BULLSHIT

How could one, knowing fact from conjecture, knowing inference from observation, ever be totally certain? And without selling the truth short to put on a mask of certainty, how does one then debate the illogically obstinate? Employing logic against blind, stupid lunacy leaves one in much the same position as a wave crashing against a rock. How then does one deal with such a situation? How does one argue with BULLSHIT? More importantly, how does one keep at bay, cynicism and apathy? Perhaps, Max Planck was right when he said, “A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

Cold Days

At times I wake up knowing that the day will be passed in quiet desperation. Some time during the night, my mind must have wandered somewhere dark and the old, familiar monkey is back upon my shoulder. First glimpse of daylight and I already feel tired… life, it seems, is an oppressive, utterly pointless tedium. I look out the window and the sky is an impenetrable mass of gray, which seems rather appropriate. I got through my morning routine – calisthenics, shower, coffee – even though every thing seems harder than usual. I step outside and there’s a cold wind blowing rain drops into my face like little, icy needles. Pile on the misery! But through all this, there’s a glimmer of something somewhere in a corner of my mind that tells me “This too shall pass.” So, I can’t stop, I can't even really slow down… I must just keep on keepin’ on.

The Linearity Trap

I have not written for some time now – over a year – in part because I’ve not felt the need to put down any of my thoughts but also in part because I’ve been struggling to find the words to express myself with. There have been many, many first paragraphs, even a few second. But nothing seems to translate, to flow. My conscious mind tells me I should be very troubled by all this, but curiously, I’m not. Realizing that brought a fresh question to my mind – do I need turmoil to fuel my writing? I’m certainly cognizant of how much I’ve depended on writing as a means to find clarity in times of confusion. Indeed, most of my writing was fueled by mental flux. Emerson was right on the money when he said “Bad times have a scientific value. These are occasions a good learner would not miss.” But oddly, in learning to live through difficult times, I seem to have forgotten how to deal with placidity.

And perhaps, along the way, my writing has become dependent on mental flux as a source of inspiration – all indications certainly point to this being the case. The past six months or so have been a period of relative calm (I think) and I have had the hardest time writing anything at all – and this has bothered me immensely. The resultant unease drove me to reexamine myself and my recent past. Careful recollection tells me that these months have not really been entirely calm – no more so than substantial chunks of my past, anyway. So, what’s different now? The answer, it would seem, is me… more precisely where I stand with respect to the events that make up my life. It appears I have moved with respect to these events, suddenly finding myself closer to the eye of the storm… that little island of calm from whence I can observe the gusting winds. More importantly, with respect to my current predicament it would appear it is the perception of flux, rather than flux itself, that I’ve come to depend upon as writing fuel.

But why would any of this unnerve me so? The reason lies what I see as the value of writing: it has helped me to learn and to grow. And, without growth, there is only stagnation – the thing I fear most – for stagnation is decay and decay, death. So, it is that writer’s block felt every bit like an existential crisis – oddly, a quiet but persistent one – and therefore, I persisted in my efforts to write. As with every task, I set myself a seemingly easy goal: to write a page of something, anything at all. Weeks turned into months and the accursed page just wouldn’t fill up.

Jump across space and time to at cinema hall at a multiplex, the evening of last Wednesday. I’m watching, in 3D no less, Werner Herzog’s new documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, about the Chauvet cave in France. The cave, apart from being a place of breathtaking natural splendor, is home to the oldest known cave paintings. And they were far indeed from simplistic stick figures that I expected. Even as I marveled at the beauty of the lions and horses painted on the walls, the thought crossed my mind that they had spent thousands of years hidden within the cave while history happened outside: the dark ages, the renaissance, two world wars… a whole lot of history.

And then, I got to thinking about that notion itself. It was a fairly interesting thought but it wasn’t much more than that. It was not the start of a chain of logic that led me somewhere more interesting. It wasn’t the only such thought I had during that movie either… there were several such isolated, amorphous thoughts. Each one interesting in its own right, within its specific context, interrelated even but not in any linear fashion. That’s when it hit me: I’ve had a lot of these amorphous thoughts over the last several months. But I don’t know what to do with them. Even the descriptors I can muster for these thoughts – amorphous, non-linear – only tell me what they are not. Therein lies the fundamental problem: I am limited by the linearity of my thought. In identifying this limitation, I have discovered my next challenge – to move beyond linearity. Perhaps, in time, I will make some headway in that direction and write about it on this blog. For now, I can only wonder how such a post would be structured.