Sunday, November 25, 2007

Knowing

No one knows anything whatsoever. I don’t know what I really what to do or where I really want to live. The same is true of you and pretty much everybody else. When you are young because you are young; when you are old because you are old. Truth is, no one really knows anything whatsoever. And we still want to know. We love knowing; we embrace it; we cherish it; we look for it; we need it. Yet, we somehow manage to survive without it.

This is not a balm that’s meant to sooth you; nothing more than the recognition of a disgrace. There’s no such thing as knowing yourself either because there’s no self or because there’s no knowing. The choice makes no difference at all. Either way you loose your grip.

There is no necessary connection between one day and the other, one view or the other. There’s no predetermined list of things to get done. There’s not creationist alignment of actions to follow. Nothing needs any other thing to go through. And yet, we want things to be such. We want to follow straight lines. We want to be thorough, we want to be honest, and we want to be done. Some day!

All of which makes us humans. All of which makes no sense, at all, whatsoever. Aiming at straight lines with crooked timber. Such is happiness under human existence. How can we dare to know anything whatsoever about ourselves, when no desire begets any other desire by necessity, when no belief causes any other belief inevitably so, when you can be a professor for twenty years and then become a cook, or a plumber, or a thief. How can anyone know anything whatsoever? What they want, what they like, where they want to be, how they want to live?

The prospects of human projection are far more near-sighted than what we think of them. Some times it makes no sense to go beyond a few days. After that what you are fulfilling is not a long-term project but a short-term torture. How can we dare, then, to chastise and judge so much projective behavior on a moral basis? If projects make no sense, we can’t be responsible for their failure. And, surely enough, we can’t be responsible for their success either.

Yet, it seems we manage to project, to cheat on ourselves, to prolong our existence with overreaching hopes and desires, with ungrounded beliefs and fears, with nothing more than figments of our imagination we float and stumble, roll and fall, move.

No one knows anything whatsoever. They don’t know what they want, they don’t know where they are, don’t know where they’ll be or want. And there is nothing to be known, no chronology to follow, no ingredients to compile. No life necessitates any other sort. We can be kings; we can be miserable, gods or simply humans. Either way, it makes no sense, no need, and no push to go on. Because there’s nothing to be known, no one knows anything whatsoever on who they are or what they want. It is not difficult to see moral discourse as a useless tool for unnecessary purposes. It does little work for that much space in our toolbox.