Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed. It leads to each other. We become ourselves.
Patti Smith, Just Kids
I want to write this because I have written nothing here in what is supposed to be an online encyclopedia of a polished version of my thoughts. Thoughts that are edited neatly together to talk about books, ideas, philosophy, theories, people, emotions, and life. What I have realized is that life is books, ideas, philosophy, theories, people, emotions, and everything in between. However, if there is ever to be record of life and of my thoughts – either for prosperity, however futile it maybe, or for myself in older age – then I must write.
I am writing here to start to scribble out a sort of self-manifesto. I want to write a declaration for the new year, the new Chinese New Year, the new decade, and the new 12-year cycle that the Chinese start with the Year of the Rat; the year I was born.
What I have since realized is that there are multiple ways to live in reality. There’s the scientific, the absentminded, the logical, the rat-race, the mystical, the poetic, the bohemian, etc. I always thought that our lives play out to a linear train of thought, moving forward based on its own steam of experience and knowledge. However, I have come to terms that this process is not linear like the scientific arrow of time, nor is it accordion-shaped like how Einstein envisioned it, contracting and lengthening based on movement and relationship. It isn’t necessarily cyclical or coiling like that of how Hegel, Coleridge, or Nietzsche thought, but it is close to this. It ebbs and flows based on the present moment and the reality of the interpretation. We are influenced by our thoughts and others to interpret reality based on presupposed judgements, and our mind and reality correlate to this interpretation. Thus, the picture is either only the rabbit or the duck.
Patti Smith, Hegel, Murakami, and Heidegger all have started to show me how to see reality as ‘both’, not as ‘just’ or ‘only’ that we have so rigidly been taught and told. It’s not what the world is dictated to be, but it’s what the romantic and idealist visionaries spoke of, of a reality that is dynamic and shifted to our own thoughts.
While it may be absurd, but if we have our life to live, and or interpretation of it, why can’t we believe that magic truly exists? It’s almost like a modified “Pascal’s Wager”; if we are to live our life and believe in something (science, God, etc.) then why not believe in everything? Why not see reality in the way that Smith writes in her memoirs as being a shifting place of dreams, meaning, and art? Why can’t we live telepathically? Why can’t we just live with our own beliefs, our own soul guiding us, guiding us to each other and ourselves?
With this aside out of the way, I want to start to live by creating dangerously like Camus noted. I want to live with a sense of wonder and awe regardless of if it is scientifically plausible or not. While science has its purpose in discovering the math that God has set out for us, it shows us too that the universe will end, we will die, and regardless of an afterlife or a belief in one, our reality is what we make of it.
So here’s a plan of what I hope to make and explore in life this coming year in 2020:
- Read as Many Books as Possible – Simple enough! More so, I want to read through all of Proust, as much Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as possible, start to get a better grasp of Kant and Hegel, and read things that will expand mind, soul, and reality.
- Find Beauty in All that I Can and Document it when I can, either in picture or in writing, and remind myself to look backwards and reflect on what I have found so it may never be lost or covered again.
- Hone the Craft – I want to be able to make more and dream more with photographs and language and the space between them. This may just be photos, essays, ideas, but I hope too to create in video as well.
- Grow More into an Adult, Without Losing Myself – I am finishing up my Master’s program and so a job search is inevitable. While this will be the case I don’t want to lose the childhood awe within me. With getting a full time job I want to be able to become more independent, be financial more responsible (and stable), and become more at home within myself, which leads me to…
- Know Myself More – I have realized that “the heart, it hides such unimaginable things” and I want to take time to reconnect myself, either to a sort of Lacanian Real or what have you. I just want to re-examine my values, and adjust them to what matters, or what I want to matter. I want to sit with myself, body and mind, and merge them to be one. I want to know who I am, and share that with the world. I want to love and learn.
If you follow the podcast “Cortex”, you will know that they don’t believe in resolutions, but in yearly themes, to help guide our next 12-month journey. I have decided mine…
Odysseys of the Interior 