The Thinker Who Thinks For One Self: A Reflection on Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer caricatured by Wilhelm Busch

"...the greatest amount of erudition, if it has not been elaborated by one's own thought, is worth much less than a far smaller amount that has been well thought over.

...much reading deprives the mind of all elasticity, as a weight continually pressing upon it does a spring, and the most certain means of never having any original thoughts is to take a book in hand at once, at every spare moment. This practice is the reason why scholarship makes most men more unintelligent and stupid than they are by nature.

...he, that is, who thinks for himself, thinks of free will, thinks correctly he has the compass to find out the right way.

...the intellectual acquirement of the self-thinker is like a fine painting, which stands out life-like with accurate light and shade, well-balanced tone, and complete harmony of colour. The intellectual acquirement of the mere scholar, on the contrary, resembles a large palette full of bright colours, systematically arranged indeed, but without harmony, cohesion, and significance.

For the perpetual, the real, in its originality and power, is the natural object of the thinking mind, and is able most easily to move it deeply...In the realm of reality, however beautiful, happy, and cheerful it may happen to be, we move ourselves continuously under the influence of an oppression, which has ceaselessly to be overcome ; while in the realm of thought we are incorporeal spirits...

...how great and how near us is the problem of existence, of this ambiguous, tormented, fleeting, dream-like existence ; so great and so near, that as soon as one is aware of it, all other problems and purposes are overshadowed and hidden by it..." Schopenhauer, On Thinking For Oneself

During the course of writing this blog, from its inception, until tonight, I have been exploring a world of my own making. I have sacrificed a worldly career-seeking existence for a deep exploration into the development of self-motivation, self-learning of thinking for oneself. That being said, while I have risked the mental balance that all face when they dwell profoundly and thoroughly into themselves, I have begun to a feel a feeling of being in the presence of the trackless way, or "the pathless" as Jiddhu Krishnamurti said. To trust the language of dream is a daily struggle to remember the most obscure part of ourselves that the world tells us to deny, forget and leave far behind in the realm of sleep and fantasy. When dreaming begins to encroach on our reality, we become fearful, and as modern people, defensive. The breach of unreason is an affront to all we have been taught. It is the history of our own soul. When the words of great thinkers like Schopenhauer begin to make crucial sense and gain a new sense of pragmatism outside of the allures of becoming privy to an enigmatic philosophic tract, the inner world of one's own making begins with an awakening, illumined by the midnight sun.

See related post: Schopenhauer and the Unconscious Fate of Recurrent Thought

__________

Apocalypse! Apocalypse! We are at bay! The grocery stores are emptying, the streets are empty of cars and the sidewalks are full of an insane humanity. After days of hiding out, I finally emerge from my apartment, bewildered by the blaring sky. A man shouts prophecies from the nearby grocery store entranceway. A crowd of onlookers listen with eager intent. 

Frescoes in the Upper Church of San Francesco in Assisi, southern transept, scene: Apocalypse, Detail by Cimabue

"Fuck you!" I scream at the man. At once, an elderly lady screams back at me, "Fuck you!". I stare at a blinding yellow ring on her finger, absolutely dumbstruck with comic bewilderment. I return to the street side under my apartment building. To sit with a homeless man on his bed of burning fabric. I stare out, deadened by the silence of a lifeless futility creeping into the human domain from the belligerent rage of Earth; her the final hour.

__________

To obviate from this bland mural,

Its strict pull underlies, as a lightning tremor

In the cooled dust collecting raw answers

From the autochthonous matrimony with foreign alliance,

Over the scarred mud-caked plains

Whose agricultural fertility gave way to chemical strife

In the selfish human pandemic,

Lining the hostess and her following with possibility

In the strong-voiced dirge calling back thousands’

Endless anonymity from the last day that rested with holy failure

...

Embracing the nervous mouth of the whole city in one dire expression

To last

excerpts from "Obviation from the BLAND"  

The Original Meaning of Apocalypse

Apocalypse is originally from the Greek apocálypsis meaning "a disclosure of knowledge, hidden from humanity in an era dominated by falsehood and misconception, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation" (source). Let today be a reminder that there is only one present, and all dreams, fantasies, prophecies and revelations ultimately bring us back to where we are in the here and now. Let us remember that today is always the first and last day. May the renewal of the seasons awaken our senses to the natural light of continuity and the breath of the living voice saying, "it's never too late to live for today." 

________

There he is. I introduce him. Aboriginal poet of the year they say, and the reception is warm. Mythologists and Dreamers convene for the day, to listen to his heart beat to the rhythm of all present to listen. His words ring true, clean and sound through the temple of the mind.

Homage to a poet by Giorgione

I cavort through the crowd. Childhood friends move like Romany artists, musicians, gamblers and comics in their smiling delight. The air is communal and warm. Friendships seep through our pores with a nourishing embrace of eyes.

_________

No broken gourd of misinformation,
            Cracked on the headless spine of an open carcass
                        Breeding divine fungi in the tawny mist,
                                    A tempting kiss stolen across the breath
Of a warring ocean disengaged from its godly host

...
Anger in the tempest of religious man,
                        A cork-bottled nightmare
Emerging suddenly from the abyss,
Encouraging the lion’s stare
            To recede from tropical gore
                        And inculcate the masses
                                    Into a final tour
...

 Impressing the abstract wonder of the fearless
                                    And preparing a light
                                                For here

excerpts from "find Inspiration!"

21st Century Space Race of Sustainable Housing

“My version of the American Dream…it’s not about having stuff, although I do have nice things and I like them, what I like even more is time, time not to have to work to pay for a lot of crap that you probably don’t really need that you bought because you think you were supposed to have it. If you don’t have a mortgage and the taxes are low, how much do you really need to keep going?”

From the film: We The Tiny House People (Documentary): Small Homes, Tiny Flats and Wee Shelters by Kirsten Dirksen

Sustainable housing and the race to own is part of the fundamental underlying psychology of American and Western life. Making the shift is becoming tougher as the laws that govern mass society tighten their hold. I live in an apartment that is 18 (width) x 21 (length) feet. I've been living here comfortably with my wife for almost two years without complaints.

Read one of my recent publications on this theme at Outward Link

_________

With unspoken clarity, the Voodoo eyes of an Andean homunculus trespasses my mind with the depth of innumerable multicultural narratives; a grandeur of spiritual insight in the night of youth’s upbringing, synchronized in the silent sweep of imaginary play and the experiential divide of my true, hard-felt ascension atop a cavern mount of an empty and dark fate. Memory brushes oblong throughout the imperceptible, brittle light, a medium of failed intent in the thoughtful bondage of gross time. I look up, and to opaque, starless night.

Effigy Bottle by Anonymous (Recuay)

The human sky of night’s imagination dawns, as a cloth of plaster and wood, incinerating in the buzz of a static electric mire of projected brain, as follicles of neurons splay magically in a host of speechless disquiet, the air is pockmarked with the living breath of subconscious flesh downpouring its rain of enmeshed golden ash onto my waking perception with the rife torrent of singular mystery, the subtle crossing, tread between inner sight and the outer eye.

Travellers surprised by rain by Hiroshige 

The mountain seethes. My father’s forecast beckons truth from my brain, spouting a translucent passion, to see through the entertaining fires of apocalyptic forbearance. Yet, it is true, and in three days, the temperature rises through the Earth. The seas boil and the atmosphere blinds with stinging fright. The core, inflamed, invites solar lust in an embrace of human extinction. The rich, whose dire plans to descend into the safety of well-stocked caves, are burnt away as the fire breathes an exhale from below, and all else are incinerated with the dry lick of the inhaled flares of our sun, dying at an astronomical rate in a cloudless space of astral silence.    

________

We drank in the rains
        Big drops that fell like ignorance
        over the spout-stopped Manhattan rubber
                Atop the fashioned grave, splitting at the seams
                         To unravel the blistering mummified dives
                                  In the panegyric future
                                  of the African ankh

...
In the breastfed porridge soup American city,
        Our children bred to be poor
              After the Baby’s boom
              turns to the Baby-bust generation

excerpt from "Daily Bread: Drug of the Illiterate" 

Borges On Volcanic Riddles of the Unconscious

“The great English writer and dreamer Thomas de Quincey, wrote in some of the thousands of pages of his 14 volumes wrote that to discover a new problem was quite as important as discovering the solution of an old one. But I cannot even offer you that. I can only offer you time-honored perplexities.”

“And in our less beautiful mythology we speak of the subliminal self, of the subconscious, of course those words are rather uncouth when we compared them with the muses or with the Holy Ghost, but still we have to put up with the mythology of our time.”

- Borges, from his 1967-8 lectures "The Riddle of Poetry"

_________

An acquaintance, an intellectual from Latin America sends me an email bursting at the seams of the twenty-five megabyte limit. The prolific backlog of written research, charts, graphs and maps is stunning. He has proved, through simple correspondence, a scenario for the turn of the tide, an epochal shift in the geological age of the planet. The continents will roll, as on a dial, between the ocean currents. Coastal lands will be subsumed one on side by the leeching magma, on the other by tidal waves with enormity enough to swallow entire cities in a heartbeat’s notice. During this time, mythical beasts make themselves known, many from the below, many from above.

The Edge of Doom by Samuel Colman

The swirling aftermath of an ocean-swept city follows us upwards toward the mountain peaks. The shifting plates boom and gush, spitting fire and ash into the sunless sky, raining in metals and the boiling fury of an endless toxic night. We are protected by a subterranean demi-god, hidden to our waking eyes in the days of light. The simian beast grapples a crushing hammer, defeating a swimming ape three times his size emerging from the opaque, deathly soup of ocean water below. The battle is, to our human eyes, a goliath sight, many proportions beyond our own. Greedily, fear seizes as a last hope in the will to life. The blasting mountaintop seethes with equal force as the rising waters. 

________

Volcano

"To see a volcano in you dreams, signifies that you will be in violent disputes, which threaten your reputation as a fair dealing and honest citizen...Volcanic eruptions in dreams usually represent our erupting emotions. Feelings that you may be harbouring during the day might take the form of a volcanic eruption in a dream state. The unconscious psyche might be releasing positive or negative feelings in a safety of a dream (e.g. strong sexual feelings, passion, anger, rage, and fear). Superstition-based dream interpretations say that pouring lava is a warning about poor health. Dreaming about a volcano means the dreamer is in danger of losing a close friendship if she is not honest with that person." (iDream)

________

...
a planetary dissolution,
wavering on the edge,
deemed a wanderer,
stolen soul,
dreamer in artistic wonderland,
or violent binge-seeking parasite,
working miracles inside a silenced freedom,
without home, or conceived place
guiding mundane goals,
roaming vagrant, or seer,
yet still unripe,
recently fallen
from knowledge,
into wish, luck, intuition, and the all ecstatic
passion,
bellowing "good and evil are through"
impaled by the one breath,
strange yet true
...
throughout the known universe,
into the home of a single man,
living atop a mountain,
dreaming in the orbital spawn,
a satellite, the globe itself,
winding round, predictably,
to the course of light,
ending with beginning and finding us along the way
on the way,
all along

- excerpts from "Divorce & Diaspora" 

The Archaic Rape of Earthly Society

"Society is designed so people are free to choose their own interests, develop formerly hidden potential, and pursue dreams without government intervention or financial constraint." (p. 78)

- Final sentence (before the conclusion) in Jacque Fresco's book, "Designing the Future" of The Venus Project

_______

I can see the eye of the storm. The massive plain tumbles and writhes under the violent sky. Winds frost and spit with ferocity over the engulfed earth. With dramatic sweeps, I gesture into the monstrous movement, the land hurricane slows with animated motion with my every beckoning.

In a torrent, I glide effortlessly directly into the eye of the storm. Debris swirls about at lightning speeds, coins engraved with headdress-adorned figures move into my vision with holographic reality.

In a misdirected bout of blind seizing into the frothy gusts, I grab onto a globular orb. A living replica of Earth, the orb is with piercing light, vibrant with enduring mystery. As I begin to recognize continental form within the orb, gazing with absolute absorption, the storm subsides overhead.

I am safe, overlooking a ruined high plain fever of ancient life. Aztec, Mayan and African features bedeck a man and his two women-wives. There is a striking, volatile cruelty in the air; survivors of the apocalyptic storm are moved to a traumatic escalation of end rites. The man is fully armed and adorned in ceremonial dress. He forces one woman to dig in the mud.

As I observe, I feel a heavy weight around my neck. I look down at my breast to find a brilliant necklace, of thick girth, bejeweled with precious, exotic stone, around my neck. The woman, bent over, with bottom up, is penetrated violently by the man, thumping into her so hard that blood streaks down her thighs. She continues to dig at his command, while she is raped.

In horror, no one notices I am present, watching the stubborn abuse, shocked. The man grabs her vagina as he continues to penetrate her, wiping his face in the putrid blood. “This will make me young again! Whore!” he yells in wild abandon.

As the hole she’s dug becomes large enough for her to sit in, he pushes her, laughingly in the subsurface mud. Other men walk over, sick with tortured minds, they lower their loin cloths and ejaculate into the mud pit, as more and more men fill the woman’s pit, others pour in creamy goat’s milk.

The lady, neck-high in the lowering goop, cries in terror, her psychotic eye gleans a ghastly stare into my eyes. She’s the only one who notices my innocent presence. The other lady then climbs atop her head, naked from the waist down; she begins menstruating a gorge of blood into the pit.

Speechless, I race forward with the orb in hand, and leap over the menstruating woman on top, stabbing her in the back. Impaled, the woman immediately becomes a skeleton. All the others follow, becoming the shallow dust of incinerated, skeletal remains. The orb transforms from its metal shaft, on top a gold coin forms.

The entire ritual site is then swept in the height of the storm once more, as I look into the engraving on the gold coin topping the orb, swirls of coins and debris, with feathery headdresses and ancient icons flash and flicker in the fading mud of ground, disappearing below me. 

_______

Rape

"In a dream, as in real life, rape has very little to do with sex. It is about power, control, anger, and other very destructive emotions. In order to understand this dream, you may need to think about the areas of your life that causes you great anxiety and fear. If you are superstitious, take this dream as a warning. Take precautions, protect yourself emotionally and physically and don't engage in careless behaviours. A dream about rape (whether it was you or someone else being attacked in the dream) suggests that you are feeling violated in some way. Something or someone is jeopardizing your self-esteem and emotional well-being." (iDream)

_______

once travel to a foreign country becomes reminiscent of that
one too-many,
that last girl
before profound commitment
to feminine and masculine union

in the outer-penetrated world,
that person must begin anew to create novels;
i.e. the moment's performance in novelty

a historic moment, the duration of time itself,
temporal currency formed and formless together,
emboldening our hands

sweet as the dreaming, unborn child,
in mother's prophetic womb

lit with raw desire
to fill the inward sky with primordial flight
bringing life to a boiling gamble

...

smoothed over with aged, colonial bureaucracy
craving selfless deserts
to be in solace,
yet drained with inhuman night

an eclipse spans this biblical day
cast over a rude Mesoamerican eye

...

a near-rape
whose victimized lover embodied human love
with the animalistic need to survive,

and the virgin blood
glutted in cults

alive with a supernal darkness
unto depths that thrive on the breast milk of Mother Earth's deeply passed esophagus
drawing aphrodisiac urges

to thrill onlooker's gods with human creation,
flooding the universe
as lactations' milk warms the needful infant's belly
still dripping from the inner womb
flowing with primordial goo,
their warmth is the bed in which we feel unprotected

sex

losing grain
as the foreigner's sites are exhausted before the eternal Altar,
whispering "Create!"

- excerpts from "travel to a foreign country" 

The Story of MAY DAY Returns upon Waking

A May Day Garland for 1820 by Samuel William Fores
"Dance away my Friends, I have been the cause of all their fun by your Help and Money - Edward the Instigator!"

"This is the story of the rootless ones. Your bones already know the story, though your mind does not yet understand it. One day, in the waking world, this story will come back to you."

- from "The Witch's Child" a brilliant zine on MAY DAY

___________

In the old-fashioned aesthetics of a New Spain colony, the federal district of Mexico in the 15^th century is featured on a piece of black and white cartography. The historic document is imprinted in my memory as I glare out over the Manhattan skyline. The urban grid lies before me. I am headed towards the last line on the grid, one hundred and something street. Atop a bristling hillock in the strong spring winds, a fair temptress bounds effortlessly over sprigs of dandelion-bloomed grasses, her clothing flaps wildly as she mounts my hip in a leap of embracing lust. She’s asked me to find my way past the blistering outcrop of one staggering urban nightmare, a chaotic mess of colonial history, a Tenochtitlan of North America, sprawling in a frayed mess of abandoned wires and charcoal heat. In an apocalyptic vehicle, I brave the incendiary beyond. 

__________

Heat

"To dream that you are oppressed by heat, denotes failure to carry out designs on your account of some friend betraying you." (iDream)

__________

“as we swallowed awful breaths of meager and sinking failure

she gave it her all and courageously fit into the brew of my panic, and surprise

and we could figure the rains, as they hit charred disdain in our unfeeling dream

of croaking drink, and vile moans 

that troubled our disgraced, fugitive blame”

“as I sought out your Gaelic whispers with a charm for sage-grass forlorn

there spun a hint of deranged angst for the painful distance 

expressed in the age of a silent rasping damage

to condemn an unknowing

in the broken guilt 

that goes aimless and unforgiving

as the bellows of sorrow and the un-chosen regret

of a million graves violating the entrenched sky”

as journeys go

afraid into the wild

calls of a single space.

- excerpt from "Breathtaking Images"