I lack sentimentality. I see things forming before me with dissiliency. Understanding what I do about myself, I can't hope for a "normal" life. I am unmoved by concerns about those needing affirmation. There are important things to be done in this life, the pressing interest of these things leaves little patience for gamesmanship. I need to create, and I need to remain emerged in the cultural morass the defines the system we are in. I need to seek justice, and at the least show others where it does not exist.

It boils down to the bare essentials. We all suffer. I am not afraid to suffer, I embrace many aspects of my life that involve suffering. Please, show me the real carnage of war. Show me the body of my lost friend. Show me the infirm unable to take himself to the bathroom. Show me the burning fire that rages in you when you feel the memories of your past. Show me your pain.

But I am no substitute, and my world is as complex as the next. I need so little from others, that you may think me antisocial or asocial. But it is out of deferrence, I ask for little out of respect. Everything about me revolves around reacting to what is given to me. I am not a taker. I am not a giver. I walk the line as a reciprocator, and feel no need to draw out the rest. i will give signals of my willingness, but I won't jump up and down for attention. I am comfortable by myself and my thoughts. I am comfortable in my suffering. And I can challenge myself when no one else is able to or willing to.

Lately, I've somewhat obsessively been thinking about tragedy. Particularly those dramatic moments in plays, movies, or even music or real life that seem to rip through to the core of your existence. Othello's pain when he kills his wife. MacBeth when he realizes the futility of his hubris. Oedipus and his inability to fight back against Fate. And particularly now Woyzeck, and his insanity brought on by the conditions of the society he lives in.

For those unfamiliar with Woyzeck, he was a real person that shocked people across the country when he unrepetently killed his girlfriend (and mother of his son) in Germany by stabbing her repeatedly with a knife in 1821. She had been a sort of loose woman, and Woyzeck saw her dancing with another soldier which was too much for him. Before getting his sentence it had to be determined whether or not he was mentally able to accept responsibility for his crime. A very in depth psychological study was done on him, and it was determined that he was able to take responsibility for his crime, despite evidence that he suffered from scizophrenic-like breaks from reality including hearing voices in his head telling him to stab his girlfriend, an unhealthy obsession/fear of Freemasons, and the sense that walls and other inanimate objects spoke to him. He was sentenced to death and killed publicly.

Georg Buchner wrote a play about Woyzeck, that displayed Woyzeck as a sort of sympathic character unable to overcome his nature in the system that society had created for him. He was overly busy with his job as a soldier, and brutalized by his captain. He was treated as a sort of animal by the doctor who used Woyzeck as a sort of experiment to help him with his own notoriety. And he had no real deep connections to anyone, his closest friend being a completely aloof soldier that he shared a bunk with. In the play, he talks about how poor people are incapable of virtue because they don't have the tools needed to be virtuous. He mentions how he could be virtuous if he had the clothing, watch, and ability to speak like a refined man such as the Captain. Woyzeck frantically moves throughout the play, and is incapable of slowing down. He is a whirlwind of sputtering anxiety.

Later, this play (which was revolutionary at the time) was transformed into an avant-garde opera by Alban Berg. Following in the tradition of the 12-tone musicians, the opera is structurally formed by melodically very uncomfortable. At the end, the loudness and sputtering rhythms of the percussion clashing with the instruments is overwhelming. The discomfort of Woyzeck becomes a musical device through which was are brought into his world melodically, harmonically, and by the timbre of the clashing notes swirling with the difficult song-speak style of the vocalists. The music transforms you from being a witness to the demise of Woyzeck to a participant.

Warner Herzog turned Woyzeck into a movie in the late 1970s with the famous Klaus Kinski of Nosferatu fame. This movie is very true to the original play, and Kinski's performance is mesmorizing and painful. Contrasting the movie with the opera, I find that each experience renders a different sort of pain in me. I can feel them both, but it as though they touch different endings of my nerves. I am intrigued by this, and also enamored.

Why bring this up? The world I live in is painted in the tragic. The tragic brings life to life. What I mean is - if you don't experience this pain of existence, or as others have put it - the puncture through the Veil of Maya (or Apollonian Veil) into that chaotic beyond (the Dionysian wisdom espoused by Silenus's wisdom) - if you don't experience the pain of realizing the intense suffering of life as "a beautiful horror, a terrible beauty" then you're not quite living.

So much I hear people say their goals in life are to be happy. I don't know what happiness is, but I feel more and more I don't want it. I want to find those moments that rip through to the primordial essense of being and then redeem me through the reconstruction of order and the principium individuationis. Not as a sort of exercise, but as a means of truly living.

Life without suffering is like food without taste. We don't need to ask for more suffering, there is plenty there if you pause to chew your food without swallowing it whole. You can find it everywhere, if you're willing to look within yourself and toward your brethren living in worse circumstances than yourself.

This movement that I can fill within myself at these things is tangible, and it puts a dent into the misgivings I have at the postmodern disillusionment of the procession of simulacra. This tragic essense of existence is the desert where only a few shreds of reality remains. Even the most postmodern of tragic plays can recreate this truth, where all other truths are simulated. This is the irony of simulacra and simulations - essential truths can exist beyond the perversion of their perview.