I Want To Be A Terrible Writer

Allow, allow, allow.  Plow, plow, plow.  I’m still struggling with some of this allowing stuff, which I still think is a great idea.  But I suppose it takes time to make this kind of shift in the mind.  For me, I think, I have to be willing to link thought and action in a more direct way, and form that as a habit.

I have to be willing to write things as they come to my mind, rather than over-thinking it too much.  I have to come to terms with being willing to write stupid, stupid stuff.  The hardest part of writing is those little moments where you’re not writing.  It’s like holding your breath because you’re waiting to breathe right, or waiting for the right breath to come along.

When the fingers are moving, that’s fine and dandy.  But oh, to sit here, with my fingers on the keyboard, and to not be writing… to wait, painfully, for the best word to come into the mind, all the while yearning to kill time on the internet, and check Facebook despite knowing that there is absolutely nothing there that is so important that it can’t wait.

I started the day by trying to create a new character, independent of story or anything else.  I just started with describing the character.  But I began to feel an increasing pressure to MAKE her interesting by consciously trying to write unusual characteristics, even though the first things that came to mind were pretty cliché.  Although, that’s not quite true.  The very first things to come into my mind didn’t make much sense, and were inconsistent with other things that I wrote about the character.  THAT’S what I should have had the guts to just put down, but instead I waited for the first thing to make sense to write down, which ended up being something cliché, so I waited a little longer, and eventually got to something that was a little unusual, or at least more specific, but still made sense.  However, that waiting made me exhausted, so I stopped.

The problem with that is that I was editing in my mind before daring to put down a word.  In the example above, I thought through three separate “drafts” and wrote the third one down, which, frankly, didn’t have some amazing quality that made it worth the effort.  I don’t have the stamina to write in this way for a significant amount of time, so I quit early, and generally don’t finish what I’ve started.

That’s why I tend to write my thoughts out like this more than I tend to write stories and characters, because I’m more or less just writing what I’m thinking.  So writing 500-1000 words or more a day is not so difficult, because I’m writing whatever comes to mind, and it helps me to focus my thinking.  However, writing 1000 words of fiction?  That’s difficult because I’d essentially have to sit there and wait for my mind to go through several drafts before I put down a word, meaning it would take hours and hours of intense focus for me to get to 1000 words.

So basically I just need to delete the tendency to write multiple drafts in my head before actually writing something down, because something is better than nothing, and I ought to accept that a first draft is supposed to suck balls.  My desire to make the first draft good is actually lessening the potential for it to hit upon something all that interesting, because by the time I type it out, it’s too normal.

Maybe I need some kind of new writing mantra, like “meaning comes afterward,” that I can feel free to write meaningless stuff and not worry about it until later.  If I pre-make the meaning, it will just end up more normal and will also be ten times more exhausting to write.

So, back to the idea of allowing, I would like to get myself to a point where I can just sit down and allow whatever pops into my mind to be typed, without any larger view or trying to make it all fit or make sense at this point.  I just need to get a first draft done, and then I can feel free to delete all the stuff that truly was bad.

I’m also attracted to the idea of trying to make sense out of things that don’t make sense.  So for that, I should have some stuff that doesn’t make sense.  Draft one: Pure Creation.  Draft two: coming to terms with what is in front of you.  That would certainly come closer to my general philosophy of the world, which is, essentially, that the world doesn’t make sense; we make sense of the world.

Now, how to actually blunt the tendency to over-think things when writing?  Didn’t Hemingway say, “Write drunk, edit sober?”  I think it’s finally time for me to become an alcoholic.

The Power of Allowing

I have been trying to get back on a good path.  I do think that I am making headway, which is great, and I definitely have a long way to go, which I guess is also great.  So really, this is all great.  Huh.  I wouldn’t have realized it in that way had I not just written those words, so writing is great.  Hell, it’s all great, so I guess I’m pretty happy now.  I don’t have a job yet, but that just means that I have something to do, and having something to do… is great.  I don’t quite know how to do it, which is great.  Goddamn, everything’s great.  Even the shitty things are great!

I must have some kind of hormonal up and down thing, because my feelings change all the time.  My situation has not changed from last week to this week, but I’m feeling so much better about it anyway.  But it’s because I’m making moves toward better things… VERY slowly, and not at all surely, but it is a something that I didn’t have last week, I suppose.

I had been dwelling on how I had so much shit to do (even though, not really), and how I couldn’t bring myself to do it.  Even simple things, I just couldn’t get my ass off the seat or even out of the bed.  It wasn’t quite depression, but an acute laziness, which does afflict me sometimes, and makes me a little anxious, and the anxiety makes me more lazy.

But I’ve gotta say, I started listening to these relaxation/meditation apps on le iPhone, and the language in it is so much based on “allowing” things to happen (e.g., “Allow your muscles to relax… allow your eyes to close… etc.), and it’s that, more than anything, that has slowly etched its way into my mind.  And I’m trying to let it.  I very much like the idea of allowing things to happen, because by and large, I know what I need to do, but I stop myself from doing it.  My laziness has been a very active kind of laziness, in that I actively stop myself.  It’s like a wall that I haven’t been able to get over or push past, or a heavy weight around my neck.  My laziness hasn’t been because I necessarily enjoyed being lazy (sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t), and it hasn’t been a relaxing kind of laziness, because I had these mounting piles of things to do.

Anyway, it hit me that I was mentally manifesting that wall or weight in a moment-to-moment kind of way.  It was exhausting, and I felt tired all the time, because it’s hard to be constantly generating this barrier and trying to push past the barrier.  So the idea now is to focus on relaxing my mind, and simply ALLOWING myself to do whatever needs to be done.  I’ve ALLOWED myself to finally write down a list of everything that I need/want to do, and I’ve ALLOWED myself to go through the list and do those tasks.

I’m not someone who’s particularly motivated by stress.  I think, for me, stress leads to a cycle of mentally putting up a barrier and not dealing with it, which leads to more stress, and on and on.  I do not do well with negative motivation (i.e., thinking about how bad it would be if I didn’t do some particular thing), but I can do quite well with positive motivation (i.e., making a film because I fucking want to and I’m deeply interested in it).  I can work hard, but I have to associate it with positive feelings—I guess I have to want to.

And all of these are ideas that I have more or less kind of known in the back of my mind.  They’re not exactly epiphanies.  But taking the time to think it through, to put it in words, to write it out, help me to SEE it.  Abstract ideas are just not helpful in this regard.  I guess a lot of the power of writing is that it takes abstract ideas and concretizes them.  It doesn’t kill the ideas, as I used to fear that it might, but it brings them closer to you, and it lets you see them.

I hope I can keep this wave of positivity going for a while.

Truth Doesn’t Make a Noise

I desperately want to make a movie that doesn’t make sense.  That’s an extraordinarily difficult thing to do.  It can’t just be random, because random makes sense, and it’s lazy.  It can only truly not make sense when it’s guided by a feeling… a propulsion toward truth.  Truth does not make sense.  Sense does not make truth.

I want to say that the only thing that truly doesn’t make sense is the truth.  Truth doesn’t have a reason, and everything else does.  This is why we are all doomed to be wrong about everything all of the time.  Philosophy can be interesting but it can’t really ever be right.

Though, there is meaning.  We make meaning by meaning things.  We mean ideas into meaning.  And this is all very nice and a lovely way to spend our time, but I don’t think it has much to do with truth.

I don’t know if we’ve really ever done more as a species than just poke at truth from time to time, which we do for fun.  It’s certainly not necessary.  Truth isn’t important; it’s just fun.

My own desire to seek a bit of truth mostly stems from an increasing feeling that making sense is boring.  Making sense is necessary (more necessary than truth, which again, is not necessary at all), but terribly boring.  Hunting for truth is the best way that I can think of to get away from making sense, and I’d like to move toward that just for the sake of getting a goddamn breath of fresh air.

David Lynch is a hero of mine as far as this goes.  His films don’t make sense to me, IN THE BEST WAY.  Watching a film like Mulholland Drive, I know that there is SOMETHING there, and that I’ll never know what.  It isn’t just random, which is the only thing more boring than something that makes total sense.  At least, it is not a human-manufactured randomness, but rather, in its best moments, a poke through the veil that allows something real to shine in.  That something real may resemble randomness, but it’s not the same thing as the human-manufactured sort.

Now, I’m writing all this out as a way to make sense of my feelings, and I guess I ought to be suspicious of that.  According to what I’ve just written, I can’t possibly be truthful right now, because it makes too much sense.  This is my mind placing a framework of reason upon something that I’m feeling.  But I feel like I have to write these sorts of things as a way to build up the nerve to finally give into whatever it is that awaits beyond reason.  But really I’m probably just bullshitting myself because I don’t have the guts to delve into true absurdity.

The absurd.  That’s something.  That’s the word I wanted.  Absurdity is what Lynch can tap into, what Sparklehorse had tapped into that moved me so deeply.  Absurdity is different from randomness in the way that has it living closer to truth.  The truth must be absurd, but true absurdity is difficult to reach.

Real absurdity is the scariest thing and the funniest thing.  It’s what you can’t put your finger on.  And I want to say that if you can put your finger on something, then it wasn’t really there at all.

So, then, what the fuck.  What the indubitable fuck.

Ah, To Give In

I don’t seem to be as good at this writing thing as I used to be.  Just opening up this file and writing in it was a big step.  I’ve been meaning to for the past several days, and I don’t know why I haven’t been able to bring myself to do it.  Sometimes, just sitting down and writing seems like a mammoth task.  I don’t even give myself any specific goal, except to write.  There’s no target that I have to make sure to hit, or anything like that.  I’m not exactly sure what was so horrific about the prospect of just writing.

I like writing when I’m doing it.  I guess I don’t like thinking about writing.  I love reading about writing, but thinking about writing makes the task seem so BIG, and really—really—it’s all about sitting down and spending a little time with your fingers on the keyboard, and just letting loose for a while.

The same is true with pretty much anything—the thought of doing it is so much worse than just doing it.  The moment-to-moment reality is easy, I suppose, because it’s there.  Even if it’s a difficult task, in the moment that you’re faced with it, doing it, then it’s just a matter of physical execution.  The mind makes things so much worse.  It can also make things so much better, but my own mind is unreliable in that way.  There are ups and downs in my mind, but the physical reality is much more stable.  The idea of just trying to see what’s right there in front of me is appealing to me… much more appealing than the imaginary demons that make it so easy for me to just be lazy.  To simplify, and to trust in the power of momentum—that is the way of getting things done.  This is, at least, what my experience has shown me.

I didn’t know what I was going to write before I wrote it, although, I would have guessed that I’d be writing about why I’ve been such a lazy ass lately, and indeed, that’s what I’ve written about.  The point is, I didn’t need to know what I was going to write about before I wrote it.  I figured it out as I went along, and as I went along, I was (and am) WRITING, which was the goal after all.

As I look at what comes out of my writing, I notice things about myself.  I notice that I write introspectively.  Part of that is the form, with this being a diary of sorts, but it’s also just what my instinct as a writer is.  My writing is an extension of the kind of thinking that I do anyway.  I don’t really think about much outside of myself.  I admit that I’m selfish in that way (well, in many ways).  That is, if I’m being honest, the kind of writer, the kind of thinker, the kind of person that I am.  I don’t really know how to do otherwise.

And I’m fine with that.  Maybe I shouldn’t be, but I am.  Sometimes I feel like I should improve upon that aspect of myself, but most of the time I don’t really give a fuck.  It’s okay for me to be that kind of writer/thinker/person.  I think and write about myself, and maybe there are benefits to becoming really good at that.  Maybe, really, that’s the sort of filmmaker I’m meant to be.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that I want to make movies about people in their 20s who mope about, and god forbid I make a movie about a writer or a filmmaker who’s just some whiny prick like me.  But to grow sensitive, and to create sensitive characters, even if they are chiefly sensitive to themselves—that seems like an okay thing to me.

I suppose what I really want to do from here on out is to get closer and closer to what my real tendencies are, and embracing those.  To not push myself to be another kind of writer/thinker/filmmaker/person than I already am.  To imagine the ready-formed sculpture, as Michelangelo did when he was faced with a fresh slab of marble, and to simply set that free.  It’s not exactly finding myself, and it’s not exactly creating myself, but rather a sort of giving into myself.

Well, that all sounds nice.  I don’t really know what it means.   But it sounds nice, doesn’t it?

The Goal

The goal is to write. That must be the new thought. I can also think upon the larger goals, such as actually completing a screenplay, and ultimately producing a film from it, but the ground-level reality for a writer is that he/she/shme is fighting a daily battle, and needs to look for the daily victory. Success is achieved in the act itself.

I hope that thinking in this way will bring writing back to being more like playing for me, where one is chasing the actual moment of play, rather than the notion of having played. Similarly, I want to rediscover the joy of writing, rather than chasing the vague joy of having written.

This isn’t a revelation. I’ve thought this many times before, and I’m sure most other writers have as well. This is simply a reminder to myself, because I haven’t been having much fun writing lately. This is a specific challenge to myself to find new ways to make writing fun for me, on a daily basis. I don’t want to care at all whether or not the piece of writing will ever be seen. Like all girls, I just want to have fu-un.

Mirror, Mirror

I like to look at myself in the mirror.  The reflection reminds me that I am actually one person, an individual: me.  I often forget this, truth be told.  I don’t feel like one soul, but many, which continually divide like cells—split, split, split again.  Every new thought is a new split, but the old thoughts remain.

Sometimes this community of souls gets along, but most of the time they fight about stupid things, and so I have conversations with myself—formless debates that don’t amount to much more than bickering, if I’m lucky.  Other times there is strife and conflict and violence, like in any community.  Disagreements.  Once in a while, there’s love, but that’s getting rarer.  So when I catch myself in the mirror, it’s a pleasant reminder that, oh right!, it’s just me.  Then I wonder whether or not this is sane behavior.

My chest also holds onto places from my past, and I’m constantly wondering whether I should be somewhere other than where I am, whether I should go back, whether I should go to some place new.  When that rare moment happens that I’m exactly where I want to be—right place, right time—and I recognize it, then I’m pretty good at taking a minute to step back and mentally record every sensation.  I never wish to go back to those moments, because I feel like those moments belong to those times only, but being able to recall these experiences in my memory is one of the things I’m most grateful for.  I don’t know how, or why, but I often find strength by meditating on these moments.  I think, maybe, I find something honest about them.

But I really struggle with the notion of honesty.  Most of the time that I spend writing is actually spent reading up on the tips that other writers have to give, and the two words of advice that crop up again and again are “Be Honest.”  I generally nod along like I understand what the hell that means, until I try to put my fingers on the keyboard and “be honest.”  Sometimes I think I’m being honest, only to realize later that I was lying like a corpse.  It doesn’t seem to be as simple as targeting what is emotionally honest, and making it a point to write toward that and just not write the dishonest stuff, because no, what is emotional honesty in the first place?  I can take a piece of my writing, show it to all the members of the community of souls in my body, and ask, “Is this honest?” “Is this honest?” “Is this honest?”  Some say yes and some say no.  Is that image of a community of souls in my body even honest?  Or is that bullshit?  It felt right when I first wrote it, but now parts of me are wondering if it isn’t just some kid trying real hard to be clever and poetic because he couldn’t think of something better to say.

The only thing I know is honest for certain is that I don’t know!  I’m confused!  I think that I don’t know very much, and I believe that I know less than I think I do.  But I’m weary of writing yet another story about confused 20-somethings.  It’s certainly a world that I know, but I’ve seen it in other movies and I don’t know whether I really want to see me making yet another one like that.  I would love to write a movie about a character who knows what she’s doing, but right now, I don’t know how to honestly relate to that.

So I took a break from writing a movie about invented characters so that I could swim around in my own confusion for just a bit longer.  Confusion is fine, but please, please, let me exit this puddle soon, and let me take action.  Maybe I will finally find some honesty in that, and maybe I will be able to look at myself in the mirror in a whole new sense.  Probably not, though.

A Simple, Complicated Man

It was only a year and a half ago that I was arguing to a friend that I was a simple man.  She didn’t believe me, but I was convinced.  I told her that, while I was capable of having complex thoughts about various ideas, I was personally an emotionally simple and stable person who was easily satisfied by whatever I happened to have at the time.  Additionally, I argued that I was the kind of person who meant what I said, meaning that I was not difficult to figure out.

In fact, now that I’m thinking about it, I recall that I was trying to convince her that most men are like this, relative to women.  This is an argument that I absolutely would not make now, but I made it then.

In the subsequent year and a half since that conversation, I have been exposed to a lot of ideas and experiences that were different from what I had been used to.  I became more politically active, and I did a lot of traveling.  I had to grapple with myself in ways that I had never done before.  All of this totaled to an incredibly valuable experience, and it was one that tore me apart.  I am now in pieces, and I can no longer argue that I am simple.  I am finding it difficult to see how these various pieces of myself can fit together.  They can’t, really, because so many of them contradict each other.  These pieces are connected only by the flesh and blood and sinew of my body, and not comfortably.

I feel unstable.  I wish I could say that it was the exciting kind of unstable, which could generate an unpredictability that might be interesting and attractive.  But, of course, I can’t say that.  It is, instead, the kind of instability that only results in paralysis.  That I am even writing this now is a little bit remarkable, as it’s one of the most active things I’ve done in weeks.

Part of this current pang of paralysis, I think, is due to my being in Santa Cruz.  I am only here for three months, the first of which is almost over.  I am living by myself, in a small room, isolated.  All of my friends from before are gone.  I don’t really want to get to know anybody, or get involved with anything, because I’m going to be leaving in two months.  This is terribly stupid reasoning, but it’s nevertheless the reasoning that I have already decided upon.  And so I stay in my room, alone with my thoughts, leaving periodically to go to class.

To be honest, this way of living is not unusual for me.  I occasionally have periods of time where I burst out of myself.  I meet people, travel the world, make things, and have new experiences.  But I always return to here.  Here, where no one else is allowed.  This is where I spend the majority of my life.  When I am here, I become frightened of the world, and of other people.  Outside of polite how-are-you-isms, I hardly actually speak.  And I’m relieved that I don’t have to.  This is my standard orientation.

I am a filmmaker, and I love filmmaking.  When I’m making a film, I’m not afraid of much.  When I’m making a film, I love to talk!  I find people and ask them to do things for me and with me.  As a producer, I’ve called banks and restaurants to allow us to film in there.  I’ve written to lawyers and record labels.  I’ve kept in constant contact with people in order to organize schedules.  I’ve gladly woken up before dawn, or stayed up all night, to get the footage I wanted.  I’ve grappled with the world outside of myself, agitating and capturing it.  I wish that that could be my standard orientation!

It makes me nervous to think that my default way of being is so isolated, because I do love people, and I know that I can achieve so much more with other people.  People who need people are the luckiest people in the world!  I don’t want to do things by myself.  I don’t even want to write by myself.

I wish I felt lonely!  That would be easier for me to understand.  It might even motivate me to seek out other people and develop relationships with them.  But I feel so damned comfortable by myself.  I have a very small number of close friends and none of them are anywhere near me.  Still, I don’t feel lonely.  I just feel alone.  I am perpetually separated from others.  That seems to be the way that I want it.  Except that it’s totally not.

I guess my friend was right—I’m not a simple man.  That’s something that I’ve come to terms with over the past year.  I am happy, and sad, and furious, and terrified, and confident, and confused, and jealous, and foolish, and smart, and romantic, and cold, and inquisitive, and apathetic, and observant, and blind, and logical, and intuitive, and ambitious, and lazy, and thoughtful, and comic, and tragic, and I am lost and I am found.  All those things, all at the same time.  I feel like an alien, which I suppose, oddly enough, is starting to feel like proof that I am a human.

So that’s a great beginning!  I wonder how I’m going to continue the story.  (I hope it involves winning the lottery.)

Love Is

I just wanted to come here, and say this: that I realized today what love is.  It was always there, but not always obvious.  Indeed, that is part of the magic of love; it supports you, every day, whether or not you fully appreciate it.  Love loves you, even when you take it for granted.  Sometimes it’s the thing that just barely holds you up.  Other times, it can lift you higher than you ever thought possible.

So I just wanted to take the time today to say that I love you, Coffee.  You make me believe that I can be a better person.  You make me want to be a better person.  I know that on most days, I wake up and press my lips to you as just part of my routine, and I leave without saying a word.  And that’s shameful, and I feel ashamed.  You’ve been with me for over a decade, by my side whenever I needed you, and I know that I could not have achieved half the things that I’ve achieved were it not for you.  People think that the things that I’ve accomplished, I’ve accomplished on my own, but I know that’s not true.  Every accomplishment–every accomplishment–with my name on it, we did together, you and me.  And I thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

As you know, I did a lot of traveling in the past few months, around Europe and across the U.S.  You know.  And I discovered this: that I could travel anywhere, and feel no void, because you were there with me.  Coffee, my love, you are my home.  I need no other home.

And when I am not at my best, you never judge me.  You’re simply there, quiet and strong, offering support, and asking for nothing back in return.  When I think about us, I have no fear, because I know that you will always be with me, and that gives me the courage to be true to myself.  Your boldness makes me bold.

And, baby, you are still sexy as hell after all these years.

For all these reasons and more, I love you.  I love you.  I love you.  Now come and give me some sugar.

Vague Thoughts on Why I Write and CouchSurfing

Ugh, it’s been very long since I last wrote.   A lot of that is because it’s  difficult to write while traveling.  The travels have been going really well.  I’ve been making friends and I’m sad to leave each place, which I guess is the sign of a great experience.  Through CouchSurfing, I’ve been meeting loads of people that I would definitely be friends with if I lived in the area.  CouchSurfing has really enhanced my traveling experience by so much.  It’s almost a completely different thing from staying at hostels or hotels.

The other problem that I have with writing in here is that I just don’t know what I want to write about.  Or if I do know, then it’s too complicated and I get tired of going in circles and that, even though that’s supposed to be part of the point of this blog—to let me do that and do by back and forth and being unsure and neurotic.

Well, what is the point of writing, for me?  It’s some kind of combination of figuring out what my thoughts are, and of sharing those thoughts in some way that is not too rambly.  And the ideal is to find some sort of balance between being truthful, yet editing in a way that will enhance the reading or listening experience, and even try to squeeze some artistry in there.   Writing is fun sometimes and work a lot of the time.  A lot of it is getting over how slow it is, either when you’re sat there waiting for thoughts to come, or when you have too many thoughts and your fingers are too slow—there’s just always this frustration of dealing with something, and there’s always a patience that needs to be involved.  That’s the part that I struggle with.  You have to make the time for it, and spend a lot of time sitting down and slogging through this whole experience so that you can get to some point of feeling good about your writing, and having something you’re happy to show others, or was even worth writing for just yourself.

I’ll write more about CouchSurfing, as it’s on my mind a lot these days.  The experience of CouchSurfing, for me, has been one of a constant falling in love.  In good CouchSurfing experiences, which is all I’ve had so far, you see the best parts of the city and the people who are hosting you and their friends, and you fall in love ever so slightly with all of them.  You see their courteousness, their humor, their general curiosity and their specific interest in you as a person.  When I say fall in love, I don’t mean in the way of wanting to drop everything and marry everybody.  It hasn’t, for me, been that romantic kind of thing (though I’ve heard stories… oh my yes, I’ve heard stories).  My love is, perhaps, a more basic kind of love—the love of having their company.

I think perhaps one of my favorite things about CouchSurfing is waking up in the morning and being part of their morning routine.  Everyone’s got tousled hair and maybe you even see each other before you have a chance to brush your teeth and wash your face, but everyone’s comfortable, as if you’re all old friends.  Of course, you’re not, but it’s enough to genuinely make me feel not lonely while traveling by myself.

What I would like to do with the video project of mine is to capture the poetry of the day to day traveling experience.  That wasn’t the explicit intention of the project, but that’s something that I think that I would be interested in capturing in a way that’s not so much about where I went to from where and the conversations I had and all that.  I want to focus specifically on the imagery of it; the things that you can’t share in your stories from your travel.

Because I’m doing it largely on the road, though, I have to find a way to, basically, churn these things out, or else, as is already beginning to happen, a large amount of footage begins to amass and then the whole project becomes to large to tackle.  And I don’t have much actual time to work on it.  Yet, if possible, I would like to work on it while traveling, with the hope that that would capture something better and more honestly than if I were to edit it in some nostalgic way at the end of my whole journey.

One idea, which I really should have started doing sooner, is to record the audio from conversations with my CouchSurfing hosts or whoever I meet along the way.  The benefit is that it’s faster than writing and captures this whole new dimension of travel.  The images and the audio wouldn’t literally complement each other, so in this, the project remains similar to the original intention.  Yeah I’d have to set it all up and it wouldn’t be able to capture spontaneous conversations and that, but something magical can still be captured if I can get people to agree to sit down and talk with me for an hour or so about anything.  I’ll pull out bits that seem like it can become something else and so on.  Oh who knows; the art will be in how I combine the words and the images to make this third poetic meaning.  Okay, that’s worth giving a shot, at least.

Okay, that’s enough writing for now.

Thoughts on Moral Relativity, Part I

I want to write about morality, which is a big topic.  I think a lot about morality, and the relative nature of it.  Morality is so difficult as a subject because it does vary from person to person and culture to culture, but it’s founded on a strong emotional assuredness of being correct.  That might be fine if morality was simply a code that each person gave him or herself, but one of the complications is that people extend that moral code to the external world.  Ethics is based on agreed upon rules, isn’t it?   Ethos or mores (the root words for ethics and morality, respectively) both mean social norms and customs, and while any society largely follows the same set of codes of conduct, there still exists ethical/moral disagreements (e.g., When is it okay to use violence?  What is the ethical treatment of animals?) in which many people hold their ideas to be the ethically or morally correct answer.

I can’t argue that my morals are better than anyone else’s, but I can identify a logical problem when one group of people says that they know in their hearts that some particular action is right or wrong, and another group of people says that they know in their hearts that the opposite is true, they can’t both be right because that leads to a contradiction, assuming that everything else is the same—everything else being the whole of their understanding of the world, which is the context of all that morality.

It seems like that context—that understanding of the world—could be shaped into almost anything, including whatever it has to be in order for your moral viewpoint to be logically correct.  If that’s true, then there can be a good argument for any moral standpoint, provided that the understanding of the world and everything in it is shaped to suit that argument.  In other words, logic is no longer our friend; it is almost useless in pursuit of the moral truth, if there is such a thing at all.  Logic can only help us arrive at the necessary consequence of a given IF, such that IF this, THEN this.  But as the IF can be whatever your best guess is or even something that you feel so deeply in your heart is true that it is no longer a matter of IF to you, which history shows us can be almost anything when you look at all the IFs that people have believed, the necessary conclusion can also be almost anything.  Logic remains useful within groups of people that share common IFs, but as it relies on subjectivity, it cannot help us arrive at objective truths.

Logic is not to be eschewed, however.  It’s still absolutely necessary to function in society.  The concept of sanity is founded upon logic.  I remember reading that one of the main definitions of insanity was to do some action repeatedly and expect different results.  It seems to me that, in other words, that means that if all the IFs remained the same, yet one still expected or imagined it possible that different THENs could happen, then that person is insane, really meaning that they cannot function properly.  So logic is useful as a tool with which to function in society, but not an indicator of truth, except for making the statement, “It is true that if…, then…”

In the face of this, it has become increasingly difficult for me to take my own ideas of morality more seriously than anyone else’s ideas of morality.  My understanding of things is very incomplete and my knowledge is incredibly limited.  My specific background and history has only exposed me to a tiny portion of a thin layer of the world and what it is like to live in this world.  Yet, I still sometimes feel like I can see how the world works; I can visualize how some of the problems of the world can be traced to root causes that I might be able to do something about; I can see how others have become confused about this or that.

But I can’t.  I’m reminded that I can’t when I encounter others who have very different ideas than myself about what is problematic and how these problems can be rectified, or when I learn of people who have completely different priorities than I do.  Sometimes I feel like I’m aware of something that a lot of people aren’t aware of, and that reminds me that there must be so much that I’m not aware of, and that I have a very limited understanding of what I think that I’m aware of.  I would like very much to not be so egotistical as to think that I see something the right way and those who disagree with me are wrong, and yet, of course, I am egotistical, and I do think that I’m right about some things and that others are wrong if they disagree with me.

HELL, I WANT TO BE A DIRECTOR.  OF COURSE I HAVE A BIG EGO!  And I’m writing this because I think that my thoughts and these words are worth reading, not because everybody’s words are worth reading, but because I wrote these words!  I even know that nothing that I’ve written above is very original, and that you’ve probably thought of these things, too.  I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know.  And yet, I think that you should read about my ideas because I’M writing them!  And if you and I were to disagree about how good a particular movie is, I would not-so-secretly think that I’m right and you’re wrong.  I know that Crash won the Oscar, but that doesn’t change the FACT that it’s a terrible movie.  A fact that I recognize, and that whoever likes that movie doesn’t recognize, thus making them wrong.

And that’s me being honest.  I can somehow honestly think that I know that a movie is bad, no matter how much praise it gets.  If I were to qualify that by saying that it’s just my opinion and that I just personally didn’t care for the film, I would be dishonest to the way that I feel.

Because there’s so much more to write about, I’m going to continue to explore that complication in another post.  I will also try to explore moral relativity and my thoughts on animal rights/veganism, religion, capitalism, and more!  It promises to showcase the very best of my neuroticism and existential rambling.