As far as I know, I don't have any regular readers. I have several posts that get more hits than others, and I want to say a few things about this.
I have had a lot of hits for people searching for the phrase "Living with someone who has mental illness" linking to this post. For those of you who are suffering or struggling with this yourself, I wish the best for you. In that post I outlined for myself how I felt about my particular situation and the lessons I learned for myself. In general, there are things I want to say to all of you out there that are dealing with your own situations:
1) If you are feeling trapped and unable to think clearly, then find time for yourself and get some space. Give yourself an opportunity to see the situation from new eyes. If you are being treated as though you are not allowed to have any space, privacy, or your own internal world then you would do best to get out, and get out quickly.
2) Make a judgement about how you are affecting the situation that you are in. Are you enabling the behaviors that are bothering you? Are you sincerely helping the person that you are with? Are you taking care of yourself and getting your needs met while trying to help the person you are with? What is your role, and what is the role of the person you're dealing with?
3) If you're in a situation where you can't leave (for instance, taking care of your mother), then reach out to people. The last thing you need is to be isolated. There is lots of compassion out there in the world for people that try to do the right thing.
For the many of you that google that phrase "living with someone's mental illness" and find me, I'm sorry that I'm probably not going to be much help. My heart goes out to all of you that are at your ropes end and searching the internet for some clue about what to do next is a last recourse for yourself. If anything, if you feel like talking, I'll listen, and I'm sure others will too. Therapists are usually a good way to go, but also feel free to post (anonymously, if you want) anything here if you just want to get things off your chest.
Now, the for the other big search terms related to Simplexity, Cell Tech, algae, and everything related to that (linked to this post and this post): I suggest you just don't buy that crap. You'd be wasting your money on something that isn't going to help, potentially is dangerous, and you'd be rewarding dishonest people that are manipulating desperate people for a living. I'm sorry for you guys as well that you feel that need to do whatever you can to help your kids, or whoever else and don't want to use drugs or tried and found it didn't work. I hope those posts are doing a service for you to realize why you shouldn't waste your money supporting those scam artists.
It seems that people come to my site looking for answers and help more than anything else, and I do hope I provide something for you that are searching. Mostly, my poetry and philosophical and cultural/political musing are ignored and never read, which disappoints me because those writings are much more important to me (and often, better written, in my opinion). But that is the nature of the internet, and I've grown comfortable with the realization that my writings are seldom read and not well marketed. Perhaps in the future, I'll revisit my poems and writings and do more with them... in the meantime, let them sit out in the open gathering dust until someone else stumbles upon them and finds something they like. I imagine it like The Neverending Story with some exciting connection bursting off the (electronic) page.
While watching an exceptional performance of Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well," Helena (the leading protagonist who spends most of the play vying for the love of Bertram who isn't interested in her until realizing his folly at the end of the play) looked straight at me in the audience and delivered the following lines directly to me:
O, were that all! I think not on my father; And these great tears grace his remembrance more Than those I shed for him. What was he like? I have forgot him: my imagination Carries no favour in't but Bertram's. I am undone: there is no living, none, If Bertram be away. 'Twere all one That I should love a bright particular star And think to wed it, he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light Must I be comforted, not in his sphere. The ambition in my love thus plagues itself: The hind that would be mated by the lion Must die for love. 'Twas pretty, though plague, To see him every hour; to sit and draw His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls, In our heart's table; heart too capable Of every line and trick of his sweet favour: But now he's gone, and my idolatrous fancy Must sanctify his reliques. Who comes here?
Everything I write is a confessional. Every action, every word... everything. Were that it weren't... were that it was easy, that my life flowed from me like an easy meadering brook. But instead, I feel a constant need to instead tear each thing out of me in pieces. This is how things come from me. The alternative is absence, silence, or neglect.
The advantages (or disadvantages, as you see it) of this, is the intimacy of it. I can't help but feel the weight of what I do in almost the same light as Sartre writes of the "anguish" of how each decision in life matters as we would life as if we were living for every man. There is a weight, a heaviness, a seriousness even in my humor and comedy.
I am alienated, and I can say I've been thus all my life since I can remember. But don't mistake that for emotional distance. That is something else. I carry my emotions close to my chest and feel quite heavy the weight of what transpires around me and with me. As much as I may write about distance, alienation, and meaninglessness or the collapse of meaning... do not forget that the weight of all comes from a real emotional place and I feel this all come forth as a confession, an inescapable will to testify. I can't feel shame for it, despite knowing this discomfort this may put others in. It is my being.
The Curious Case of Howard Mumma's book about Albert Camus and Christianity
Several days ago I finished reading a book written by an American pastor who claims to have come close to converting Albert Camus to Christianity near the end of his life. While most of what Mumma says is plausible, I think he greatly misunderstood Camus's "pilgrimage" toward delving into religious studies and extrapolates an "end point" for what Camus was doing that doesn't necessarily follow.
Most people might read the book trying to extrapolate whether or not Camus was well on the path of becoming a good new born Christian. Even if what is said in the book is completely true, I don't believe that Camus would be a "Christian" in the sense that most Christians are.
Camus was suffering greatly at the sense of emptiness that pervades a life built upon absurdity. If we have nothing but the world we make in a world filled with horrible evils of suffering (like the Holocaust), even a life where meaning is built upon revolt can be exhausting. Camus was looking for something more to life, more of a connection. His self-described pilgrimage doesn't strike me as an attempt to escape the wearying emptiness of living in constant awareness of the absurdities of life, but rather as a spiritual journey to connect with the existence he had in a different way.
I noticed several things in the conversations Mumma had with Camus. Camus was most engaged with the mythological aspects of the Bible. He liked the stories. Keeping in mind that Camus did his master's thesis on Greek philosophy, engaging in Christian mythology for Camus is similar to the tasks of engaging Greek mythology and stepping into the myths as he had done with Sisyphus, Prometheus, and others.
Camus touches on the problem of theodicy, or how can an omnipotent, benevolent God allow evil in the world? Mumma makes a fairly reasonable argument about God leaving it up to people, but hoping people work toward good and having a stake in it.
Throughout the book, Mumma shows that there are similarities between those who search for the problems of living in an absurd world without God as there are problems for those who live in an absurd world with God. Mumma doesn't make arguments to Camus about the afterlife, which is important when reading this, Camus is not looking for escape or relief in anything outside of his current existence - he is, however, looking for more from his existence outside of himself.
Keeping in mind the despair that Camus was suffering through at this time - his personal and professional meltdown after Sartre's attack on The Rebel, his wife's multiple suicide attempts, his recurring crippled bed-laden spells caused from tuberculosis - it is clear that the starkness of life could be reawakened with a new sort of mythological thinking in his life.
I hope that Mumma was being honest in his work, and I also hope that he didn't portray Camus in a biased way in order to advance an agenda for converting atheists to Christianity. I could sense in his book that he did have a sort of desperation toward converting Camus and he demonstrated a lack of understanding basic facts of Camus's life by calling the car wreck that ended his life an "obvious suicide" when he was travelling with others in the vehicle.
In fact, Mumma basically says that which would be expected: he grew up with a tacit understanding that God existed and the Bible was correct because he was born into it. He grew up "with God" around him, and clearly struggled with the idea that one could live without this basic understanding of life. Camus approached existence experiencing a constant struggle with feeling confident in his understanding of what life was about, despite writing one of the clearest essays about the problems of existence in "An Absurd Reasoning" (about the problem of physical and philosophical suicide if life is absurd) and the accompanying parable "The Myth of Sisyphus." Mumma seemed very confident in his beliefs, but also came across (in my point of view) as almost fake and manipulative in his concessions to Camus about his struggles in life when he seemed to so clearly be against confronting his own faith. His eagerness to convert Camus comes across as a sense of validation for his own faith, which ought to have absolutely no connection between the two.
These meetings supposedly took place in the 1950s (Mumma refused to give dates as per Camus's wishes, but still published this book against Camus's wishes). It strikes me that The Fall was published in 1956 because Mumma the converter comes across with a similar cockiness that Jean-Baptiste Clamence did as he leads a stranger through "lessons" from his life as he shares his truths by revealing the underbelly of his misgivings. It makes me wonder if Camus's meetings with Mumma served more as fodder for his writing than the amazing conversation of an existentialist atheist as Mumma portrays it.
Regardless, this book shows that Camus is ever more complicated and multi-faceted than he is often portrayed as, and I can appreciate that about him. The book creates new problems for me to sort through, but I don't think this book in any way diminishes the works that he has done and his unflinching attempts to always live an authentic existence in good faith. Camus's willingness to engage Christianity at that point in his life is a fine testament to his humility, which is one of his greatest attributes.
It was a good time to see a play tonight, with thoughts about drama swirling in my head because of Albert Camus. I've never acted in a play in my life. The thought never occurred for me to do it in high school, and my lack of experience and involvement in other interests has kept me away from this field.
One of my good friends was one of the leads in this play and portrayed the villain. At a few specific moments he did things and said things that gave me chills up my spine. The ugliness of his character came from a place inside of him that I'm sure he was tapping into. It came across as authentic and truly scary. The woman in the scene with him, had been acting through the entire play as though she were blind exceptionally well. It was believable that she was blind, and it was so strange after the play to walk up to her and shake her hand and notice how different she was when she wasn't acting blind and also how much shorter she looked up close than across on stage.
Going along with other forms of my favorite art- music, painting, literature... these things take you to another place, and that emotional content is so important. Regardless of whether I'm writing poetry or playing music, I like it the most when I'm able to really feel it. Even when feeling it comes from a dark place inside of me (it usually does, in all honesty) that release and connection creates such a good feeling that can last for a long time.
We need these releases, we need them to be connected to our inner-being, and it requires a large degree of vulnerability. I admire my friend for what he did tonight, because he had to take a leap of faith in himself to take on the role and a leap of trust to allow himself to go so far with his character.
It strikes me that Camus must have loved theater for this reason. You are given permission through acting to be yourself in ways that aren't acceptable socially in any other circumstance. Getting involved with drama allowed Camus to delve into himself in the solidarity of others, and no other facet of his life allowed him to do that.
In two weeks I'm going to be seeing five other plays, and I'll have more thoughts on this, for now I'm just going to appreciate my friend's performance and the medium of drama and how powerful it can be.
Broaching this topic is rather strange as I sit alone in a coffee shop with an uncertain future as to where I'll be sleeping tonight watching a woman across the room vigorously text on her cell phone while sitting alone with her legs crossed.
I've finally finished another comprehensive biography of Camus's life, but this one focused much more on Camus the man than Camus the philosopher, or Camus the writer. Camus the man interests me as much, if not more, as the other Camuses. There is enough material in this book to sustain me and my thoughts and reflections for many months, but I realize I have a need to re-read many things I've already read with a new sense of context. Wikipedia and a few of the biographies that I have read through do nothing for generating a real portrait of Camus.
Why is it so important for me to get this portrait of Camus?
There are too many coincidences between the content of his philosophy and politics with my own for me to be able to simply accept his words without wanting to know what inspired them. I have a fairly decent understanding of myself (in some respects) and I have a need to understand how he came to these conclusions. I need to know how his life shaped him and the language he used that extends so wonderfully from the page.
I'll be writing much more on Camus, but I want to start with a theme that I've noticed throughout reading this recent book. The continual movement between periods of Solidaire (solidarity) and Solitaire (solitude) in his life. How wonderful that these words are so strikingly similar, because in many ways they have the same function.
I am impressed by the anecdotes about Camus's life and how people in his village all knew him and loved him. His funeral involved everyone in town. He consistently helped people in somewhat surprising ways, yet also so consistent with his personality. He used money from his Nobel Prize to help wives and children of men who were killed in the Hungarian Revolution. The talk of the "human cost of war" was often overlooked when talking about WWI and WWII in contrast to the great cause of these wars. After WWI, the mass destruction created a vacuum of meaning that lead to absurdist movements like DADAism, but also left a more tangible mark on Camus personally due to his father dying in the war. WWII is often talked about as the great cause to defeat the evil NAZI expansionism, Holocaust, and brutal occupation. Camus continued to talk about the simple costs of life on a much more individual level. The respect for individuals, and the feeling of solidarity he has with those in the human experience, particularly those who suffer is exceptional. Likely, so much of this has to do with growing up without a father, poor, with a mostly mute mother, and suffering most of his life from very painful, crippling episodes of tuberculosis. Camus understands suffering, and his "Mediterranean sensibilities" along with his university work on the Greeks and interest in theatre are such obvious places for Camus to obsess that we should almost expect it.
The gravity of the seriousness of Camus's passions weighed on him, no more than the Algerian independence movement near the end of his life. He attempted unsuccessfully to create a peace between the French Algerians and the Algerians, and suffered greatly as his true home, Algeria, tumbled into a violent mess and ceased to be the true home of his youth.
Camus's retreat toward the solitaire was very necessary for him to face these great problems, but it wasn't easy. He often complained of not accomplishing anything, and had terrible bouts of writer's block that lasted for years at a time. This can help give me some perspective, but I'm beginning to really feel the weight of having truly not done anything as each year passes.
The push and pull of needing to feel a sense of solidaire in his life and retreating to a solitaire state are reflective of his idealism and moralism and the lack of finding these ideals/morals in the world and in himself. This tension is central in all of his books, and the importance of this cannot be understated.
Women played an important role in this, yet a complicated role... I will discuss this further at another time.
Mozart's music eases pain (scientists tell me) so I don't listen to it.
I could describe melancholy as an awareness of memories distended and languidly enmeshed with the sensual experiences of reality.
Loneliness can be a comfort like an old immobile uncle seen once a year at family reunions:
safe and familiar with few surprises.
The moment is its own refuge.
Music is its revenge.
Music can intensify pain so tonight I'll avoid Mozart because I want nothing to soothe my senses.
I will remember nothing and bite the notes through my teeth.
I will render sounds into leaves
dry and heftless crumbled particles exploding into the air.
That burning sensation caught in the nostrils tastes of melodies torn asunder as the molecules diffuse through me.
The acrid harmonies force my eyes open and my back to straighten.
And the broken beat distills the ground surrounding my planted feet and extends new light from the sun peaking out of shadowed clouds hovering with impunity just over the horizon.
A quick breath and I look around me:
I see people I know with familiar hands held at their sides.
I hear other sounds and feel disposed to listen as new melodies surround me.
I forget everything I asked for and let all of the music forge the growing night sprinkled with hazy stars with warm old casacading hues.
1) Camus was haunted his entire adult life by his failed first marriage that ended when his wife got heavily involved with drugs. Throughout the rest of his life this affected him deeply, and he continued to send her things anonymously to try to help her with her drug addiction.
2) Francine, his second wife, suffered from major depression and tried killing herself twice by jumping. The second time she broke her pelvis badly. Camus blamed himself for this due to his adultery and particularly of importance, falling in love with his lover, Marie, who was an actress in his plays. She was no longer able to be in his plays after this incident, but strangely enough, after his fatal car accident Francine and Marie were able to talk and become quite close friends with each other.
3) Camus's mother was mostly silent, and according to him had a 400 word vocabularly. When he told her that he turned down a meeting with the French president she agreed with his decision because "those people aren't for us." She was the most important woman in his life, and he could barely communicate with her.
After reading through some biographies about Albert Camus, my suspicions about The Fall have been confirmed. The book is a confessional. But so are all of his books in one way or another.
My favorite author has injected aspects of what is truest to his heart and also the most painful and tragic aspects of his life and failings into his work, yet he has managed to also stay guarded in some way.
I can relate to all of this, but I wonder if the dimness of my life and my flailings and failings compared to his wild swings has also stifled my creativity. It is possible for me to jump into the world of Don Juanism, though I've always been faithful to all of my girlfriends that I've had. I too feel more rejuvenated in the company of women, but the brotherhood of men is also important to me.
Loyalty is a word often ignored, but my loyal friendships mean more to me than everything else. I am now a year single, and have not had a single moment of doubt, regret, or apprehension about moving on. Guilt was a driving theme of The Fall, and I understand now this is primarily because Camus felt himself a guilty man. As in The Stranger, Camus identified in many ways with Mersault and other characters in the book. But it is more complicated than that, as it always is.
We don't need a god to deal with guilt, humans suffice on their own. This idea is taken from Camus as well, and I'm stricken by how many people I see wallow in their guilt. So many people waiting for judgement, for the verdict, for the reckoning. The feeling of guilt is an over-riding agony compared to the relief of reaching a verdict. And in crimes of the heart, crimes of not being good enough, crimes of aloofness, crimes of feeling unapologetic when one thinks he should, crimes of caring for the wrong things, crimes of not feeling guilty when you know you should... that last one is particularly odd, guilt about not feeling guilt.
But the truth is, despite everything you may think of me - I am a very moral individual. Where I exceed Camus is that I don't falter on my core beliefs, but that may not be good for the artist in me. I don't have that tension swirling in me about my moral turpitude. Instead, I fall in the other direction... I feel often as if I've not done enough, failing on the side of inaction. I could do more, but finding my voice and my path hasn't come as easily to me as it did to Camus. However, it is clear now that he will be my marker of comparison from here on out, regardless of the fairness to myself or to him. Contemporaries be damned... this world is somewhat lost to me, I don't see how to fit into it. Camus ended his life marginalized on all things that he cared about by the mainstream of society, and now in his death he is being rejuvenated. I'm not really interested in what happens after my death, and I doubt that I'll have a legacy like his, but I feel the weight of time moving constantly.
My work now does not suffer from a lack of commitment, but a lack of focus. I need to zero in on the essentials, on my themes and develop them. I need to develop myself and I need to feel more discomfort and exhilaration. Both are available in droves. Both are waiting.
There is no basis for basilisks extending glances slyly wayward from a dark cove. A rare September heat baking rocks along streams welcome lizards to lay.
I've never met a gila monster but I wished I wore his skin. A September like napalm swells like summer and neon suns.
I have no birthright with skin like this. Scaly, poisonous pieces slough off in tiny fragments.
For once this heat feels nice capturing time in the waving horizon of asphalt emissions -
because I am not ready for winter when estranged loneliness creeps along a molting spine.
Africa settles as an abstraction in my heart. The desert monster doppelganger of my likeness sits near an Arizona soundstage on a well-crafted movie set (like the Three Amigos after leaving Hollywood).
The doppelganger watches me as I watch television dispassionately and google philosophical fragments:
"alienation" "postmodern"
"borges map" "loss of the real"
"Steve Martin" "wild and crazy guys"
"solitude" "suffering"
"Wisdom of Silenus"
"Obama's health care plan"
"right wing political violence"
"1968" "political memory"
"Algerian sunset"
I think about basilisks dispassionately turning me into stone and feel slightly grateful that they are mythological. They then dispassionately turn toward my doppelganger that dispassionately turns away.
As Albert Camus got older he lamented the loss of landscapes appearing in his notebooks.
He married several times and died in a car wreck.
I, too, love the desert landscape and can lose myself in the scintillating refractions of sun and stars off the sea.
And simulated desert landscapes feel almost as desolate sparkling ironically in pixilated Las Vegas hues.
There is a place for me in the desert beyond the basilisks by the lizards and the blinking text marker of my word processing program.
And now we're concerned with Simulations and Simulacra in this instance...
There is a campaign to boycott Guitar Hero 5 because of its depiction of Kurt Cobain that has been growing quickly across the internet:
In this brief clip we see Kurt Cobain talking (out of context, or, more correctly - with no context) about how he's been turned into a cartoon character. Then the clip shows footage from the game in which a virtual Kurt is doing virtual performance of a song that I'm sure he never would actually have performed.
There are many clips that demonstrate this strange simulacra of Cobain performing unlike he ever could have or would have before in the game:
These "performances" are, indeed, tacky and probably disrespectful to his death and the legacy of his life as an alienated superstar that struggled with his superstardom and his self-esteem. But this just underlines a greater issue that games such as Guitar Hero bring up.
Simulations are generally the mode in which the gaming world is heading toward. First-person shooters involved crystal graphics and real physics represented in the movement of the characters and projectiles and explosions/gunfire. Racing games are becoming more and more "real". The Nintendo Wii is very popular due to the simulated physical acts that control gameplay. Before the Wii we had Dance Dance Revolution and simulated dancing. Before that we had Duck Hunt.
The history of video games goes back to Pong, which in a sense is simulated ping-pong, but the distance between an authentic experience of ping-pong and pong was so great that there was no question of the difference. With technological improvements, games seem more and more real and also have become more of a total experience.
While I understand the outrage against Guitar Hero 5 for this depiction of Cobain, I think it misses the larger cultural problems we are experiencing in the world of simulations and the following simulacra. Simulated experiences are replacing reality. Guitar Hero in no way makes you an actual guitar hero, as evidenced by the world recorder holder in Guitar Hero, this 12-year-old boy:
Given that the boundaries between real and simulacra are already completely blurred, if not that reality has already been mostly been replaced by simulacra, then I find it interesting when people suddenly find something that offends their sensibilities when all else doesn't.
Is it because Kurt died? It is because of his seeming authenticity that we felt we a relation to (despite not really knowing him at all)? What is it that which repulses us so much about this experience?
I would suggest that it was simply poorly done. The magic of the simulacra is that the creeping world of simulation slowly encroaches on reality and we don't realize the incremental loss of reality. Kurt clearly is not Kurt when he is singing and moving unlike how he'd really sing or move in the game. It is a cardinal sin, because it outlines so clearly for us the emptiness of the representation. We glom onto the metaphorical meaning of Kurt as the rare authentic musician and feel repulsed by the perversion of the metaphor - the metaphor has been flipped upside-down.
This is so much more easily fought against using the strange digital world of YouTube. Archival footage abounds, and is easy to isolate and use in a digital campaign. How ironic that the best way to fight against this digital perversion requires jumping onto the same playing field so readily.
Guitar Hero 5 made the cardinal sin, we aren't supposed to feel this incremental change, else we feel the unreality of situation. Instead of feeling comforted by this generative reality, we feel constricted by it. But it is already too late... because we are only complaining of the choice of Kurt Cobain, not the system that could create this problem.
We are left in a system of incrementally losing the "real" and incrementally fighting this loss with the larger causes that are already taking place in the simulated playing field. The simulacra has extended over the plane of the real, and this battle highlights to the extent to which this has already happened. The colonization is total, and ever-growing.
"[T]he silence of an unknown prisoner, abandoned to humiliations at the other end of the world, is enough to draw the writer out of his exile, at least whenever, in the midst of the privileges of freedom, he manages not to forget that silence, and to transmit it in order to make it resound by means of his art." - Albert Camus, from his Nobel Prize banquet speech
Too many accept the horrors of the world as unavoidable, unfortunate, and thus - best not to be thought of. This is the playing field of the artist - delving into pain that is found anywhere across the world and connecting it to ourselves.
I am struck by reading Camus how closely we share an understanding of existence based on confronting absurdity with a sense of rebellion and resistence, but I am struck more about how his conclusions about what to focus on is so strikingly similar to mine. I knew nothing of Camus as the WWII underground journalist fighting against the NAZIs with his Combat publication. I knew nothing of his obsession for human rights and his hardline stances that alienated him from his philosopher friends.
Independently, I came to many of the conclusions Camus did about existence. Independently, I hold the same strong beliefs about justice and caring for those in the worst situations. The connections between the philosophical backbone and the humanistic inclinations we each have must be strong. Perhaps a rebellion to the absurd with holding a head high is tantamount to holding your head high and staring into the depressing beast of the brutality happening around the world. Knowing in your heart that you cannot end absurdity is not a far step from staring injustice in the eye knowing you cannot end injustice on your own either, but by God, don't flinch from it. Stare the injustice in the eye, and respect those who are unable to step away from their injustices by being in solidarity with them in your thoughts and deeds.
I am not afraid of failing in these consuming matters of justice, because I accept from the starting point that the standard for failure is so high. Feeling connected to the rest of humanity in suffering is not a failure, even if you cannot change that which you feel so painfully close to your heart. Feeling that pain alone is the beginning of success. Solidarity in the human condition is such a fundamental philosophical stance, and everything can flow through it even in the face of otherwise experiencing the most painful and confusing states of alienation.
