How Shattered the Glass

How shattered the glass beneath my feet

How broken the lives I’m yet to complete

But cracked is the shield I try to repair

Prevent all the pain of a soul laid bare

Good and Evil

In response to a quote from Ralf Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance.

"Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong is what is against it.”

The biggest issue that I see with the terms “good” and “evil” is their use as a descriptor for any given interpretable force or idea.

Using the example of selfishness, one can assume that humans all are, to some extent, selfish. This word comes with obvious baggage in the form of a negative connotation by our modern interpretation. Selfishness is seen as the food of greedy businessmen and the schoolyard bully. However, from a more optimistic viewpoint, the idea of selfishness could be reworded to the idea of survival; one will tend towards putting one’s own needs ahead of the needs of others for the sake of evolutionary progress and self-sustinance. This idea will obviously have a much more positive connotation to any Darwinist, progressive thinker.

Another fairly simple answer would be love. Generally, people would say love is the epitome of good, but others might say it is simply falsities and impairs judgement, leaving the somber, darkened connotation of an addictive drug.

For any disputable idea or force, wide discrepancies will be found between the many possible interpretations, each, to some extent, seeded in one’s own moral viewpoint. Because these interpretations follow directly in the path of personal viewpoints, it is important to remember that the connotations one assigns with any idea are solely personal.

Almost any idea or force could be, at this point, assigned to either the “good” or “evil” sides of the spectrum, the two sides of the spectrum being constantly balanced and conflicting with one-another. For ideas such as love, the societal mean will undoubtably lean towards a positive connotation, but there will always be outliers to the mean. These outliers deserve unbiased and uninfluenced respect in conversations that do not directly pertain to the subjectable idea. If judgment of the idea is included in the discussion, this judgement both removes all other paths possible when an alternative interpretation is considered.

I see this possibility of paths like the expansion of a family tree. With each new child in each new generation, the opportunity for infinitely more children is opened up, exponentially increasing the total amount of people in the family. The shape this expansion creates, with increasingly many possible children from each new child, is much like that created in a discussion when an interpretable idea is looked at from multiple directions. When any of these interpretable ideas is looked at with a predetermined connotation, it closes the door on all opportunities that would potentially arise from its alternatives. If all ideas are looked at pre-connotated, only ONE out of the infinite possible conclusions can be reached. Surely this cannot be seen as a preferable route for rational, abstract thought conversation.

The reason I have a personal intolerance for the terms “good” and “evil” is that they are the simplest, and most judgmental forms of pre-connotation. Classifying something as either “good” or “bad” gives no real understanding of the concept, or the speaker’s full standpoint on the subject. Instead, all that is gained is the knowledge that the speaker finds this idea either preferable, or not.

On a personal level, I am however a full advocate of thoughtful and meaningful classification. If, after thorough analysis of the subject matter, the thinker can fully summarize all parts of a finite idea (i.e. not love, as it is terribly undefined) towards either “good” or “evil” progress, this can come in handy when making personal or internal conclusions or arguments. More simply put, classification makes the personal decision-making process more efficient.

Despite the need for personal efficiency, it is still important to maintain an open mind regarding ideas for not only personal growth, but the benefit of discussion as a whole.

It's Not Easy Being a Teenager

It’s not easy being a teenager. We age in our abilities and our potential far too quickly and far too all at once. Overnight, without warning, our eyes are held open and forced to investigate the vast supply of knowledge, information, technology, opportunity, and inherent error that is our world. The suddenly expanded capabilities of our minds are overloaded by the possibilities of thought that are suddenly opened up to us. The dark, mysterious nature of our reality, infinitely interpretable and essentially ambiguous, roars, with its all-penetrating voice, “examine me!”, and we do just that.

When I first set my mind on, well, thinking, things got ugly fast. In all honesty, it’s only gone downhill from there. With every moment, my mind unravel another layer of choice and ideation, and opened another door to possibilities in patterns, paths, and directions of thought. My mind is one massive family tree. When any one more factor to thought, experience bringing change in mind, or concept needing inspection blindsides me from out of nowhere, the whole tree takes a hit, needing to be reexamined and reconstructed.

Please see my inspection of Good and Evil for more on that exact idea. Now, back to my insanity.

As I started with, we learn and gain ability far too quickly. If, possibly, these monumental and life-changing developments could come at points evenly incremented through a period of say, 10 years, we would be able to adapt to and utilize each one to our own, personalized, best fit. As it is, we need to pack these years, lifetimes, of thought and evolution into as little time as we can deal with, packed down underneath everything we do on the surface. There is so much that we are called upon to accomplish, when, even spending every moment of our days, not even then would we have time time to intellectually capture everything that we need to do to satisfy our own, personal need for thought and understanding of everything that goes on around us at every given moment on any given day in this insane, overwhelming, and intrinsically complicated reality filled with things that we can every day only hope to comprehend in their entirety in order to live out our daily doings to an extent that makes them productive and enjoyable to the slightest of acceptable notions of productive and enjoyable.

There is a lot on our minds.

The First Person

Yesterday I read a section from Thoreau's Walden, or Life in the Wood, which said "that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well." This brought up a deep-seeded belief that, so far as I know, I've carried with me as long as I've thought abstractly. People can only speak through themselves. How else would it make sense to explain anything? All that is seen, heard, and thought must go through the complicated pathways of our brains, being deconstructed and rebuilt along the way. Only then can we create any sort of personalized idea from it.

It should be considered as a part of Locke's Natural Law that any utterance given by a person is his own, no matter the influences. It is true that human thought is infinite, but it would be impossible to build, create, or think without first having the blocks to build off. For this reason, when a person is speaking clearly from themselves, rather than a scripted circumstance, influences should be disregarded, and word taken as his own.

As I write these blog entries, I will not abstain from using the first person, because that is inherent nature of my words. I will, however, from time to time, move to the third person for rhetoric or artistic flair, or quote from any one of the sources I hold nearly and dearly to be true, but the words should still be taken as my own.
I thank any readers in advance for their understanding of my views.

Why I'm Here

I need to create. The intrinsic obsessive-compulsive need to be productive that is in every adolescent has been a part of me as long as I can remember thinking profound thoughts. Sparked by the ever-present pressure to achieve, but driven by the simple goal of being myself, it is constant, evolving thought that drives my sense of individuality, which in turn, drives my need to create. Creation is the most direct means of self-expression, as it comesfrom myself and from myself only.

For far too long I’ve constrained myself to solely the medium of music. However broad a medium it is, it is still predominantly formulaic in nature. For this reason, an artist will spend far too much time trying to find the exact right rhythm, intonation, allusion, diction or rhyme, and not enough time developing exactly what it is that he is trying to get out. His thought.

While these tough restrictions may have the ability to separate the truly genius artists from the rest, it is a devastatingly laborious process that often leaves the true beauty of creation in its dust. In my experience, I have become so fed up with my own creations by their completion, that I was unable to enjoy the idea I originally set out to present secondarily to the world, but primarily to myself.

For this reason I have set out to explore writing. Writing as I see it is the most primal way that our thoughts can be permanently preserved and expressed. We practice the skill continuously and persistently every moment of our lives, organizing words and ideas into whatever order we damn well please to suit our needs. Sadly, the majority of the beautiful process of human thought is left between our own ears, rather than being shared with someone else’s. How else better than to bring fruit to your conscious thought by giving it contact with paper (or a blog in this case)? That way, your individuality, rather than being spread to one person through conversation, can be spread infinitely by paper.

With this blog I hope to explore what it means to be truly human, and take any readers along on my journey. As I believe that abstract and profound thought and ideation are intrinsic human qualities, I know for a fact that anyone, were thy to look hard enough, would find a chord ringing truth in my long, sometimes descriptive but always hard to follow, run on sentences.

I will, of course, continue to explore my passions of photography and music, and will try not to let my societally bred perfectionist qualities show, as true beauty is found in the raw, untamed thoughts of the mind.