Tuesday, May 02, 2006

i've never believed in reincarnation. the human soul is too obviously contingent, a product of its physical substrate and environmental pressures, and famously instable. at the "pulse of life" level, it is too generic and thoughtless, too deinviduated for a linear, body to body, journey. for this reason, a karmic doctrine asserting that the conditions for this current life have been set or in any way influenced by behaviors and preoccupations in a previous life have always struck me as either absurd or as an ideologically motivated ruse, one which paints the current situation as somehow pre-determined by the irretrievable, and thus unchangeable past. however, it is not unreasonable to claim that the lives we live have been set in motion by the actions of others, parents, grandparents, etc. and that we are carried along by the momentum of their dreams, their successes, their failures. we act out and out of their passions and, unless we take the time to consciously recollect our origins, or the origin of our origins, we do indeed live lives of a blind, karmic pre-destination.

On the other hand, karma is really just a doctrine of cause and effect. the entire universe is a complex chain reaction that goes on and on and on and, at least theoretically, there is a continuous chain of cause tying all current being to every other state of being, in its totality, stretching back to the primordial, original cause. There is no doubt that my behaviors, my actions, even my intentions, are part of an unbroken chain of physical events reaching back from this moment to the beginning of time, criss-crossing with innumerable other chains of discrete events, and carried along by the wave of all things happening forever. Reincarnation may simple mean that a particular chain, or more likely, complex of chains, has once again attained personhood. The exploration of past lives is always only an effort to understand this life and capture, in a highly symbolic narrative, the forces which have shaped both our proclivities and experiences.

Monday, May 01, 2006

apparently blogging is about updating content with an alarming frequency

i'm eating pretzels and am getting fatter by the minute

when i am living in the woods, fleeing authority, reflecting on the decisions that led me to commit the regrettable, the forever undoable (what can ever undo the done?) and wondering if, though i am at large, i will ever feel free (for the hunted live in the shadow of pursuit - never resting, only hiding), i will thank the Utz company for their manufacture of these salty carb sticks, which my body thoughtfully converted to fat in anticipation of this now inescapable eventuality.
in five minutes i've got to do something

awoke this morning thinking about the alt-rock indie underground - can't explain why -

mind too prone to relativize, to absolutize, in an ascending and descending sequence - a genetic code of culture, but in reverse, an entire universe of individual entities (that means "beings") that don't matter to anyone - since "things"
only matter to "someones" - or so I'm told

if someone said, "I saw Julia Roberts yesterday," and you asked, "Where?" and they said, "On TV, they were replaying "Pretty Woman,'" you would think that odd. "Seeing" someone is supposed to be different from seeing a picture of them. But for movie folk, they mainly exist for us as images. Real images, in other words. (Thoughts I had after seeing a man who looked like Tom Cruise and wondering what it would be like to be a recognized image, like him, but then walk anonymously down the street in a Boston city. If you are used to being recognized, and then are not recognized, does this cause pain? Does this cure pain?)

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

i'm going to return to this blog and let the world know what i think

WORLD, YOU ARE OFFICIALLY ON NOTICE!