21 April 2005; 07:43 PM
care, and the problem of other minds
i seem to be surrounded by difficult, insane, and beautiful people. i am one of them. sometimes it's very tiring, but mostly, it's better than being dead. and by dead, i mean, being anything other than the passionate creatures we strive to become every single day. sometimes i imagine my friends, scattered as they are, in their rooms or homes, and how they must be feeling. i try to tap in. they mostly don't even know i think of them, maybe.
let's say there are ten qualities of my life. there are millions, in fact, but for this exercise let's say there are ten. ten attributes that make up my being. at any given time, some percentage of them are Bad and some are Good. it's always rotating. For example, on Monday, two of the parts of me were Bad and needed to be changed, punished, or squelched. however, they remain, and today those two parts of me are Good and the other eight parts of me are in a skirmish about which of them is to be concerned about, today.
there is a wave: lapping, rising, falling. sometimes it fades into the ocean. sometimes it crests and seems violent, wearing away at its rock. same wave, different day. same ocean every day.
when will the day come that all the parts are in harmony, and i'm not filled with doubt? not worrying that something out there is a lie, not afraid or ashamed in those tiny ways we all get throughout the course of the time between waking and sleeping?
every day i ask myself a question about what i should do, what is right, what would be best for me. every day i look at my lover and wonder what goes on inside his skull and if i can take not knowing. the desire to merge is so powerful, but i am stuck in my own self too. the problem of other minds.
on wednesday afternoon i talked to davi about the reason why talk therapy can only get you so far - because so much of the reason for being alive is the murky undercurrent that can't be verbalized. i imagined a thin membrane holding back a sea of water.. touch it with your fingertip, drown. but never explain it. i have some kind of nebulous requirement about that undercurrent, that ocean, and how i should feel that i am in it, with my lover. how can you ask for that? there is no way. davi, in her spring wedges, she did her job, rephrasing it back to me: "so you want to be on the same wavelength." well, i guess so.
...
have you ever had an experience where you interacted with someone who you simply knew was a detriment to society, should they continue to exist in their current form? not that they are violent or dangerous, but that the way they are thinking is hurting us all? is this too huggy for you to really want to get?
anyway, last night:
i watched m from phil class smile rudely and roll his eyes, looking up and the ceiling while re-iterating his meanness out loud. at that moment it seemed that the roving focus of the concept LACK OF COMPASSION had stopped to rest upon room 224. to clarify: imagine that the quality LACK OF COMPASSION exists as a sort of conceptual storm cloud. now imagine that it moves freely around the world to rest in different areas and make itself known. last night it stopped for about 15 minutes over the heads of some people involved in my philosophy class. hovered, and hopefully moved on. but i left before i could see it out.
