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Perhaps it's the change--solitude and inactivity after several days of business and company--but now, when I've the time and motivation to work on a long term project of some sort, a drawing or a story or a song, little comes. The kids are outside beating each other with sticks, Gail's in bed with some stomach bug, and mama's downstairs reading; if there were a soundproof room, I would sing. But I don't want anyone else to hear me, so I can't.
It's not that I'm bored; I'm not unhappy or restless or any of the negative states that words implies. I am hardly ever bored, not when there are books or paper-and-pencil or mp3 players or even just my own mind to wander through. I've had all kinds of wonderfully profound thoughts on this trip, knowing even as I thought them that I'd never be able to remember or articulate them to share. But I don't have them to share, I have them for myself, even the terrible ones.
I thought for awhile about the arbitrary biological origin of every change in my mood, and how futile it would be to live in order to make myself happy, when it accomplishes nothing and I am easily satisfied. But then, why accomplish anything? Why contribute to society? What's society worth? Music and art and literature, all high aims and trappings of civilization, are all either methods of expression or records of arbitrariness, both of which I've defeated with the assumption that feelings are arbitrary anyway. So, taking the dilemma up several orders of magnitude, I pondered whether it matters to me personally whether the universe has a point, whether I would choose to preserve sentience on Earth if the choice were given to me, either as an exchange or just freely. Oddly enough, none of this really bothers me, although it did once. Joy posed the same questions in some other clothing, and it upset me deeply that she didn't see the point of life, and that I couldn't think of one.
I could accomplish something, and I even want to. I'm not deterred by its futility, because, well, so what if it's futile? I like it, even if that means nothing. I like being prevented from doing other things I like by socially constrained moral and ethical restrictions, too. I'm fairly miserable, romantically, though I can ignore it most of the time, but I find my unsolvable quandary aesthetically pleasing, and don't intend to change it. If it doesn't matter how I conduct my life, whether I marry happily and have children as a genuflection to the social norm, whether I withdraw into socially unacceptable but literarily awesome hermitage to conduct my life in prayer and worship (of a deity or a person or a person's art, writing or music), whether I slouch along in the track of a middle-class white female and get a good job or a bad one--
If it doesn't matter what other people think or even what I do, what does? Nothing. That's okay.
It's as Salad explained, drunkenly and with no portentious preamble as his wisdom is wont to appear, when these angsty and emo issues arose at the Stag's Head one evening after rehearsal. We're preprogrammed, whether by biology or sociology, to respond a certain way to stimulus, and free will is an illusion except at the most intricate and irrelevant level. So you go along on your... well, not predestined, because what is destiny but the arbitrary interaction of a chaos system... your fairly inflexible journey through the spacetime continuum, and take comfort that it feels like your own choice what you do with your life. Or, if it doesn't, that it could if you weren't constrained by other lives.
Maybe I've been reading too much trashy sci-fi. Maybe I'll go write some. Or maybe I'll keep listening to the Bat Boy soundtrack and not accomplish anything.
It's not that I'm bored; I'm not unhappy or restless or any of the negative states that words implies. I am hardly ever bored, not when there are books or paper-and-pencil or mp3 players or even just my own mind to wander through. I've had all kinds of wonderfully profound thoughts on this trip, knowing even as I thought them that I'd never be able to remember or articulate them to share. But I don't have them to share, I have them for myself, even the terrible ones.
I thought for awhile about the arbitrary biological origin of every change in my mood, and how futile it would be to live in order to make myself happy, when it accomplishes nothing and I am easily satisfied. But then, why accomplish anything? Why contribute to society? What's society worth? Music and art and literature, all high aims and trappings of civilization, are all either methods of expression or records of arbitrariness, both of which I've defeated with the assumption that feelings are arbitrary anyway. So, taking the dilemma up several orders of magnitude, I pondered whether it matters to me personally whether the universe has a point, whether I would choose to preserve sentience on Earth if the choice were given to me, either as an exchange or just freely. Oddly enough, none of this really bothers me, although it did once. Joy posed the same questions in some other clothing, and it upset me deeply that she didn't see the point of life, and that I couldn't think of one.
I could accomplish something, and I even want to. I'm not deterred by its futility, because, well, so what if it's futile? I like it, even if that means nothing. I like being prevented from doing other things I like by socially constrained moral and ethical restrictions, too. I'm fairly miserable, romantically, though I can ignore it most of the time, but I find my unsolvable quandary aesthetically pleasing, and don't intend to change it. If it doesn't matter how I conduct my life, whether I marry happily and have children as a genuflection to the social norm, whether I withdraw into socially unacceptable but literarily awesome hermitage to conduct my life in prayer and worship (of a deity or a person or a person's art, writing or music), whether I slouch along in the track of a middle-class white female and get a good job or a bad one--
If it doesn't matter what other people think or even what I do, what does? Nothing. That's okay.
It's as Salad explained, drunkenly and with no portentious preamble as his wisdom is wont to appear, when these angsty and emo issues arose at the Stag's Head one evening after rehearsal. We're preprogrammed, whether by biology or sociology, to respond a certain way to stimulus, and free will is an illusion except at the most intricate and irrelevant level. So you go along on your... well, not predestined, because what is destiny but the arbitrary interaction of a chaos system... your fairly inflexible journey through the spacetime continuum, and take comfort that it feels like your own choice what you do with your life. Or, if it doesn't, that it could if you weren't constrained by other lives.
Maybe I've been reading too much trashy sci-fi. Maybe I'll go write some. Or maybe I'll keep listening to the Bat Boy soundtrack and not accomplish anything.
