SMITHYPHUS
"How was your new Camus book, Myth of Sisyphus?"
Camus says the absurd man, to live the full absurd life, has to live on his own terms, has to deny God (so there's no hope of an afterlife). So basically, today there's the absurd man, who's alive, and there's Death.
The absurd man has to live a full life with multiple roles, so as to get more out of life in the face of death. But you can't hope. There is no hope. Because there's You, and there's Death.
There's no God for eternal life. Fame, all that stuff don't matter after you're dead. So there's what you do now--fully--without hoping for anything more.
I don't hope for God or Afterlife. I certainly don't hope not to die. But I do hope that I can keep getting better at being Smith. So I hope constantly to improve. I commit Camus' sin of Hope.
I'll take mine over his. Things are going to Hell worldwide! But it's still possible to decay with grace.
Anyway, I like the book.
"There's an inherent conflict in trying to achieve happiness but also trying to be a reasonably informed Citizen of Reality."
No, tho each of us has a responsibility to arrange our own lives for maximum happiness, this excludes the domain of blissful ignorance.
"How do we know we're not constructs?"
We all ARE our own constructs. Shakespeare says, "Beware of the disguise you choose for the masked ball, because you are your disguise."
I've created myself. I took bits and pieces of film noire, detective stories, and built my standards on characters who did the right thing in down times. So I've taken bits of what I've seen along the way and used it to construct my image of me. We all take bits, pieces from here and there. Took a bit of Jack Kerouac, took a bit of Aldous Huxley. I think you build yourself along the way. Some of the stuff you take don't work.
"What an amazing insight."
I think it took me almost sixty years to get comfortable with myself.
I've had a lot of good metaphors. Like 'Paradise Prairie.' As a poet, you can't ask for a better metaphor than Paradise Prairie for growing up.
"It occurs to me that you're a Westerner type."
That's interesting. I've read that people in that area are really nice to you. Let you in quickly. But they don't let you in very far. I think it's the space, having all that space, and the sight line, and the mountains of course, interrupting both.
Inland Empire. They also call it that. The Pacific Northwest.
I got a lotta good metaphors from my past, for my construct. I created an image of myself, for myself, that I had to learn to live up to. That's what you do with your construct. You grow into it.
"I felt absolutely alone until you."
Most people in your life were probably constructs. They get most of it right, but they can't care. They're constructs. So, you can feel something's missing. Again, you can check. Look at the eyes of the people in the TV commercials. See if they're human, or construct.
So maybe you have no real people in your life until I came along. It's real easy for a smart guy. All he has to do is look for a woman with a lot of constructs in her life and just move right on in.
"I feel like most peoples' vanity shields are up, and you can't get to know the real them."
I have that problem with my various psycho partitions. I have little defenses between myself and my self.
We could start a whole new church whose main premise is 'unknow yourself.' That's the basic problem. Most people DO know themselves. Now, most people are lousy human beings. When they know themselves, they KNOW they're lousy human beings. So we're going to teach them to 'unknow' themselves. LOSE all this horrible knowledge.
Once they 'unknow' themselves, we can fog the issue. Let them rebuild in enigmatic bloom. Imprint much nicer self images. We'll have to serve a lot of wine, too. So we'll give people new self images to their selves. Good self images. Now that oughtta be worth something... unknow yourself.
And of course, 'unknow yourself' would cut down on teenage masturbation, because they could not 'know' themselves that way.
Don't want to give too many church precepts away. People will start their own church.
"Ah... I see. You want to sell your philosophy."
Yeah, I want to franchise it. Little franchise groups of 7. People can chip in, buy one Smith Unit of prepackaged philosophy. Makes it sort of like a philosophy class or a church, that's why you need that number. And there's always an alpha philosopher in the group to run things.
We've had a lot of problems with Judas philosophers lately, too. Like Judas goats, they'll take you down the wrong path. There are a lot of slick philosophies out there for the bad guy.
"Like what?"
Buy on Credit, do This, do That, eat Here, eat That. Rat Race Run!! They wear you down with all that effort and then they beat you to death with their textbooks.
Be All You Can Be, Buy Now Pay Later, Be the Top Dog... that's all competition, acquisition. Like you're Alice, running in the same place.
When we sell my prepackaged packets of philosophy to buyer groups of seven, we need seven, because when the package is opened, we have to determine the alpha philosopher. He will run the pack. An unled pack of philosophers is a sad sight. They doddle all over the place.
"Don't you mean dodder?"
No, that's what their daughters do. Their daughters dodder.
So once my prepackage is opened, these seven philosophers turn on each other to establish Alpha Philosopher slot. This is all anticipated as part of the educational package which we start teaching right away.
Once the alpha male's established, he sends a self addressed, stamped envelope and ten dollars. This is for our little mail order concentrated philosophy cone.
"And the decoder ring?"
Oh, you get a decoder ring for every seven purchases.
"So you have these people waiting... for the Answer?"
Isn't that what philosophy's all about? We're all self taught. I'm just giving them a chance to catch on! We can work it in with our Church of Unknow Yourself.
"So what happens after they get the Answer?"
Well, there is no Answer. There is no External Answer; that's the problem. You have to trick them into recognizing something they already know, so you make them think they got the answer. Kinda like snake oil...
See, it's good to have hopes and dreams. One of these days we'll appear on one of those trash tv shows like Jerry Springer. And we're gonna bait the audience with poetry. They've come for trailer trash tales; we hit them with poetry. Cause a riot, chairs thrown and stuff like that. So we're gonna start an actual riot with words on TV! Prove the power of poetry. And then we'll turn on the government and warn them: they'd better back off. We're gonna let loose more poems.
"Seems an unlikely scenario to me."
You have to believe. Click your slippers together three times, Lady. There will also be strange men in odd shaped underwear attending us.
Lady K
Myth - Lady K |
