”Why Do You Write?” 

I’ve gotten this one in interviews in the past. Everything I said there was a lie. Let me answer it truthfully: 

I no longer write for you, to get finger claps in Cafes or “Likes” on Facebook. I no longer write to be understood. I don’t do it for fame for fortune, because who are we kidding? It’s public, but only like flashing your genitals in a subway car is public.

I write to momentarily get rid of myself, to get a little more distance, to intellectualize the gnawing in my stomach or ringing in my ears. I like us all a little better when we’ve been turned to symbols. It’s an Other-ing that makes it all more bearable. Sometimes it can even get us a little high, though those are also the worst times, the benders where the words hurt you the next morning and you’re a stranger to yourself. Then the words are like pans crashing and clattering to the ground, lolling around like Murakami’s kittens, and even more words spill out to enclose that noise with comfortable silence. Signal and noise can flip end over end, but that’s subject for another day. That buzzing in my head is already drowning it all out–

“Memory is like fiction; or else it’s fiction that’s like memory. This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa. Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn’t even there anymore. You’re left with this pile of kittens lolling all over one another. Warm with life, hopelessly unstable. And then to put these things out as saleable items, you call them finished products – at times it’s downright embarrassing just to think of it. Honestly, it can make me blush.”
— Haruki Murakami

You’re only a writer when you don’t know why you do it anymore, eventually there’s nothing else but the lie that tells the truth. You’re a writer the way a junky is a junky. It’s got little if nothing to do with anything else. If you’re still talking about “writer’s block” and wordcounts, there might still be hope for you. Turn back. Kick the habit.

I don’t write for you to come with me. We don’t need writing for that.

But since I have your attention, I’ve started working on my new book …

Yesterday morning, I finished reading Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.

It was raining, unusually cold for an August morning, and almost coal black. I couldn’t imagine a better morning to finish this particular book. I sat in silence for a good hour after closing the cover, thinking to myself. (Who else would I think to?) Beethoven was playing in the background. It colored all my thoughts for the rest of the day.

While reading, I suggested it to several people, and one of them asked me if I could explain the ending to her. She was looking for a sort of resolution that Murakami seems typically reticent to provide.

As a result, I’ve been thinking about resolutions. Well, I’ve been thinking about many things, but one of the threads is resolution. I’ll share my notes, and hope that you aren’t offended by “spoilers,” because personally, I could give a damn—any story worth reading is worth reading. It isn’t about the ending.

The idea of “spoilers” themselves gives us a starting point. There are certain expectations that most readers put on endings. It’s an unrealistic expectation, given the nature of life—often the endings that count the most seem to come unexpectedly, out of nowhere. You’re crossing the road thinking about the complications posed by the two women you love, and wham! a truck hits you. These endings resolve nothing.

My point is, endings and resolutions are not the same, and an ending doesn’t need to resolve anything. Something can end, people can drop out of our lives as if they had instead dropped off the face of a steep cliff. But there is no resolution. Similarly something can resolve, and in the process transform into something else, which is a way whereby an end can be turned into a beginning. The Death card in the Tarot is said to be a resolution, for instance. It isn’t necessarily an ending.

Now that we’ve got that straight, I’d like to return to Murakami’s ending for Norwegian Wood, and its lack of resolution.

I phoned Midori.

“I have to talk to you,” I said. “I have a million things to talk to you  about. A million things we have to talk about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning.”

Midori responded with a long, long silence – the silence of all the  misty rain in the world falling on all the new-mown lawns of the world. Forehead pressed against the glass, I shut my eyes and waited.

At last, Midori’s quiet voice broke the silence: “Where are you now?”

Where was I now? Gripping the receiver, I raised my head and turned to see what lay beyond the phone box. Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at  all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I  called out for Midori from the dead centre of this place that was no place.

Here the protagonist is calling Midori—the girl he has decided he wants to be with—and she is distant, but she does take his call, which reaches her as if over this great expanse. When I read it, it seemed as if the camera was pulling away at the end of a movie, and he’s just this little piece of jetsam floating in the ocean. The protagonist fades into a sea of people, no longer central, no longer even notable. Just a face, a dot, nothing at all. More notable, you never find out what Midori’s reply is. There is no resolution.

This seems to be a common element in Murakami’s stories, for instance in many short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, and it is a tendency that I personally find refreshing, given how much pressure I’ve been handed as an author to always resolve everything. When you don’t, some people accuse you of bad or sloppy plot-work, as if you simply forgot to resolve that which you intentionally left unresolved.

Another misconception that arises from this approach is that it is at all new. It has been one way of ending a piece of classical music since Beethoven, radical that he was, played games with the form. At the end of some Beethoven pieces, he ends on an unresolved chord.

Murakami is employing the same kind of ending. In fact, I could almost hear that repeated, lingering chord at the end of the Moonlight Sonata as I read those closing lines to Norwegian Wood.

This was one of the many things which in his time was considered incredibly controversial and original. We can’t hear Beethoven now, I mean, we can’t hear how revolutionary he was. We’re too used to it because he was so successful in changing Western music. Success can come along with its own form of curse, so that while he may be immortalized, the reasons that he’s been immortalized are in some ways obscured by the enormity of his success.

My point is this: we shouldn’t feel pressure to resolve our stories in any particular way. Our job is to find what a story wants to be and help nurture it. Some pieces may call for a classic resolution, or even an ironic twist on the classic resolution, like at the end of the 7th symphony 2nd movement, where the ending seems to be almost an ironic telegraph—“here is the ending you were expecting.”

But if the resolution to a story would require a new book, then give your reader a wall of mist, rather than that. You aren’t law-bound to provide a resolution. Midori’s answer, given across that immense expanse, is the beginning of a new story, not the ending of that one.

Not all calls are answered. Not all chords are resolved.

(By the way, a little bit of self-patronage: my novel Fallen Nation: Party At The World’s End was just published. I’m going to go buy myself a bottle of wine and think about beginnings, now.)

The pupils dilate. The rush of expectation met and satisfied.

Everyone who’s done coke knows this: the expectation of the rush is as rewarding as the dopamine hit itself. Maybe more.

In a Behaviorist universe, we’ve come to understand the world in terms of this simple mechanism: supply and demand. We’ve stripped ourselves down, re-purposed myths of spirit, turned ourselves into hungry machines. And we’re machines driven by predictable needs, rewarded by chemical combinations.

I could be describing a junky scoring their next fix, or of the promise of seduction rewarded. I could be describing the satisfaction we receive when our virtual characters level up, or when we vanquish virtual enemies with our vorpal sword of badassness. (Some of us will even ostensibly sell our children for in-game currency). Hollywood has devised various formulas involving the offset of expectation and the big payoff: the protagonist “gets the girl,” the “bad guys” are destroyed by the hero after a fierce struggle. What is the chemical formula of fear, of love, of mindless compliance?

Like most of the things I contemplate, this train of thought has a grounding in personal experience.

I was waiting in line at the Pharmacy, anticipating the refill of my prescription of Oxycodone.

I have a legal and demonstrable need: pinched nerves in my back. The physical dependence that results makes you no less sick when your supply is suddenly cut, but our myths about drug addiction are still harmfully misplaced. I wouldn’t kick over a fruit stand if my supply was to go suddenly, unexpectedly dry as the Colorado river. I’d just puke and be in more back pain. The fiver in Grandma’s purse is safe.

The reward that washes over me when I know a prescription has been filled isn’t nefarious; it’s the comfortable knowledge that if I wake up with an icy pain running through my legs, I know I can take something that’ll make it all a little more bearable.

These pills are a comforting presence, like the State. And like the State, they aren’t nearly as benevolent as they at first seem.

Now that’s a thought. Where do we draw the line between one kind of pain and another?

Like so many Americans, I have anxiety and depression because I’ve not had a regularly paying job in two years, and doctors want to prescribe me medications for that as well because they can’t prescribe me an income. That’s the bitch of it, isn’t it? Our reduction of self to neurochemical automatons has some really questionable repercussions, especially when married with a pharmaceutical industry operating out of a profit motive. If a doctor acknowledges that being broke is making me depressed, then why would Prozac be the solution? Shouldn’t they prescribe me a trust fund?

I’m thinking all of this standing in line. I’d describe my surroundings to you, except that none of it is relevant or interesting. It was a Walgreens like any other Walgreens. We were all a bunch of people, like any other people. All the products on the shelves are identical. We are not, but pretend to be.

As my prescription was filled, as I took a pill, as I washed it down with a sugar-laden drink, it dawned on me that I’m not some kind of unique case. I just have the opportunity to get a less ubiquitous angle on this common experience, because we are all junkies.

Most all of us, anyway. Junkies to the core. Junkies to things far more dangerous than opiates. As a society, we are hooked on our junk so deeply that we’ll rape the planet, we will screw each other over, we will do absolutely anything possible to get our fix. It’s best if we can outsource and offset the damage done, avoid having to stare the damage we’ve caused dead in the eye. But either way, you know. We’ve gotta score.

I know this may piss some of you off. Many of our addictions aren’t just socially acceptable. They are socially mandated. Re-enforced and entrenched in our ideologies so deeply that we think any other possibility is downright crazy. Gasoline, cash, sex. We are insatiable, and our myths re-enforce our right to these things. How dare anyone imply otherwise? One kind of addiction is bad, the other good. The Television tells me so.

It’s been a while since I’ve worked a job that paid regularly, but I remember what it felt like when I got my paycheck. It felt exactly like I felt when I got my prescription filled. Exactly.

Corporations and our government counts on our addictions. Our needs and insecurities and fears are predictable, and predictability can be leveraged for profit. Even if we get past our fear of death, the things we use to pacify ourselves are pretty comical. “I was going to revolt, but I got a dulce cinnamon latte instead.” Above everything else, we’re addicted to comfort and safety. So long as we can maintain a square foot of real-estate that seems safe and familiar, we’ll overlook even the most egregious horrors. Scouring the planet of life, but so long as we have our latte, our pill, our paycheck—whatever it is—we’ll stay the course. When Americans can’t get a hamburger and a beer, that’s when our government should fear us.

I get it, man. I’m a junky too. I can barely leave the house without needing to get a mocha, can’t go more than a few days without missing my favorite shows. I see what’s happening to the environment, see the stress fractures forming in the cornerstone of our society. Like anyone else I want to get laid and eat well. Like everyone else I want to feel secure. The status quo presented to us by myths like the inherent value of a 9-5 job is hard to resist. I don’t think I can ever go back to seeing the world the same again, though. I’m just distracting myself now. Working as hard as I can on the things I am passionate about and praying that something presents itself. I’ve taken the first step: I’m a junky, and I’m not talking about the pills.

If you can’t even acknowledge your addictions, well. Then you’ve really got a problem.

Looking around for some paper to start writing down a schedule for project development and releases over the next six months, I found an old marble journal that I kept a long time ago. Flipping through it, I saw an entry that made me realize something. While in some ways we change so much from day to day, week to week, and year to year, in another kind of mysterious way, we also don’t change all that much. (Though I’ve since revised my position on metaphysics, apparently. But that’s another thing.)

This was written in 1998.

I was driving home the other day with a friend when the car jolted to a halt. Sitting in the middle of the road was a blackbird. Or maybe a raven. I don’t really know birds. It was black.

“What did that mean?” he wondered, once the bird hopped out of the way.

“What do you mean what did that mean?” I asked reluctantly, when the car didn’t move. They symbolize death, right? But why? Apparently this was an important question.

And then it hit me:

All of our everyday experience is metaphorical of a deeper, unknown substance; it points at what we really are. The dark – that is, invisible – side of our persona.

A white car passed us on the road.

What does that mean?

I decided to categorize my all my responses and observations. To make a library of metaphors. I thought about the white car, and about the emotional undertone – subtle but present – that was connected to that moment. I thought about my naive presupposition that there is an object made of synthetically re-configured materials that is a white car. White is the color that it is not, everything that the object rejects as repugnant.

We live in a world of imagined constructs, never thinking about how this perceived world affects, reflects them; never seeing the intangible level the object points at; as symbols (like the word “car” points at what hides behind “car,” it points towards it but neither contains nor describes it.)

There is no higher validity in this metaphor and metaphysical perspective (which an artist calls upon to inform their work.) There is no Jewish father figure hiding behind the world of appearance, ready to chastise his unruly children. There is only You.

If you dig deep enough into the interaction of events in your life, realizing them to be transparent, metaphysical symbols rather than opaque material reality, you will begin to find what you are. Footsteps leading backwards and forwards towards your center. (Death. Incomprehensible non-existence.)  And you will also find that you are not what you think you are.

What a cheery “young adult” I was, huh?

Tell me if this is a normal conversation to have while standing with the other groomsmen at a wedding.

“Never before has there been a generation of Americans so disillusioned by the American Dream.”

“Maybe in the 20s? It’s hard to compare.”

“Totally broken down. You can see it on everyone’s face. We all know we’ve been had.”

I was fidgeting with my sleeves. I’d never worn a tux before. “Just going through the motions. So. What you been doing lately?”

“Mixing cement.”

I’m not sure it is a normal conversation, but who wants to have those? Beautiful wedding, otherwise, at least what I remember through the haze of pain medication. But he had a point, didn’t he? Arguably that dream was always a bill of goods leveraged by the blood and sweat of the poor, but never before has the general public so generally recognized that we’ve been had. Many feel the downward slope yawning before us, as peak petroleum, an Empire over-extended, and an unstable climate push us into a troubled and horribly wondrous near future.

Or so it might appear. Our future runs through our past. In the first century AD, there were revolutions within Rome that made its history seem bleak. I imagine in times like those, it seems like the entire world is about to end. As it turned out, those were the explosions that birth a sun, not its death throes in nova. That wouldn’t come for three or four centuries when the Visigoths helped dismantle an already collapsing empire. It should come as no great revelation that systemic change comes about…systemically. Call it the hand of God, if you want. There will always be “the Visigoths,” in one form or another. Just as it seems there will always be fascists, the great organizing principle of Empire.

We don’t truly have the clarity of hindsight that might come from living a couple centuries, so we can never really know what our future holds. Writers are lucky in this regard. What we don’t know, we can invent. We can ask: what light could history shine on this feeling of an Enlightenment lost, perhaps before ever reaching any real apex?

A question like this can very easily lead you to a novel, if you let it. Theme is ephemeral. We can only dance around it, like drunken hummingbirds.

There’s truth to how we answer existential questions, at least to the extent that all myths are true. Always. To the extent that you believe in them.

That is the kind of question that fiction can let us explore freely, posing endless what-ifs, myths that begin with elements of personal or world history, but that spin off in whatever direction we’d like. So far we’ve only been looking at this macroscopically. I think we all know what this feeling of “Enlightenment lost” feels like on a personal level – we reach for something, nearly grasp it, but it slips away. Maybe our premises were all wrong, or we simply happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Then it seems like the rest of our lives follows suit. We are shown just how far we have to fall.

Our ancestors may look back on the passage of peak oil with a similar sense of loss and wonder what could have been, if humanity only heeded compassion instead of avarice. Carl Sagan, in his Kermit-the-frog voice, hypothesized that if the superstitious and violent elements of Christianity hadn’t risen to the top, we may be voyaging to the stars as we speak.

Let’s explore more. It is hard to imagine what it must have felt like at the turning point of an age, now long gone. What a sense of loss it must have been to see the Library of Alexandria, a cathedral to the best knowledge of that time, pillaged down to scraps and fragments, ancient knowledge lost to a growing darkness that lasted an age. (Sounds like something out of Lord of the Rings, doesn’t it?)

At the time of its destruction, the Library of Alexandria was overseen by Hypatia, who was a surprising figure in such patriarchal times. She was was reviled as a witch because she wouldn’t take a husband, and, probably the worse offense, she dabbled in the dark arts of philosophy, mathematics and science. These were about to be largely written off as occult sorcery for several centuries.

Even in the 16th-17th century, Giordano Bruno was killed for proclaiming the Sun was merely a star, adrift in the suburbs of the milky way and the Earth just her dark passenger. (“Milky” because of the milk cast off from Hera’s tits, I find that amusing.) This was roughly 1000 years after Hypatia had her skin flayed from her body with pottery shards for having the audacity to embrace reason. Quite a learning curve.

We toss off such facts casually, but if you identify your reader with a character, and then have her skin peeled away like the rind of a stubborn fruit with pieces of broken earth, they’ll probably take notice. (And wonder why you’re such a sadist.) I’m not sure why many of us consider reading this kind of thing entertainment. Maybe it gives a visceral sense of the extremity of a moment in time, so long ago.

Despite its distance in time, it is not as if we are much further developed as spiritual beings. I know that’s a bitch of a word to use. What the hell does it mean? We still kill one another as a result of misread metaphors and petty differences. The tension between religion and science remains a bomb ticking in our classrooms – made of equal parts C-4 and stupidity – created by people that don’t seem to understand the function of either religion or science. It comes out to be a bit like claiming a bulldozer is true and a grapefruit is not. Take technology out of the equation and we have, unsurprisingly, not evolved a whole lot in fifteen hundred years. (Put it in the equation, and we still haven’t, but that’s a different story.)

I’m sorry to digress on this point, but I don’t want to be misunderstood. Science is an iterative method which functions best in the absence of belief. Religion is a means by which individual is linked to society to divinity. One is an instrument of empirical discovery and verification, the other, a social institution or personal relationship between an individual and their own understanding of the divine.

Just through looking at the etymology of the word, we can see this. “Religion” comes from the Latin religiō, religiōn-, perhaps from religāre, “to tie fast.” Note that the meaning of this word is fundamentally the same as the meaning of the Sanskrit word Yoga, literally “union, yoking,” or “to join.” In both cases it is an attempt at joining the reference, which the religion refers to but cannot in itself embody, the social body, and the individual. This “joining” may also apply to the social body of the religion, though it is usually through the imposition of social dynamics that the religion polarizes into its opposite, and atrocities (holy wars as with the Crusades, bloody in-fighting over interpretation as with the Protestants, inquisitions, etc.), occur. (The Immanence of Myth)

In other words, primate pack behavior has a funny way of sneaking into our own packs. We’ve yet to outgrow it. Biologically, it may take a half million years.

It was maybe only because of Aristotle’s view of divinity as the perfect mind that worked behind the Empirical world that the ideas of Classical antiquity could be re-purposed. Many old ideas were reborn during the Renaissance – what hadn’t been burned or buried, at any rate. It was only when a way was found to render these ideas palatable to the biases of the time that science and math could again flourish, this time, when married with industry and war, as the part of a new tradition running out of control as religion did in the previous era. The Renaissance reversed the age of darkness, but it was in some ways merely an amplified echo, a carrier wave dragging ideas kicking and screaming through time. If we pretend that history is a strictly linear process, it is easy to imagine that we are approaching our own dark age as the sine wave crests and falls.

It doesn’t matter if that’s true or not. If we look at past instances of systemic collapse, we can find patterns relevant to our fictional explorations.

As a writer of modern myths – let’s not fool ourselves, that’s what a fiction writer is – we are also untethered from historical necessity. If the record doesn’t match our theme, we should feel free to borrow from it as we see fit, and toss what doesn’t match our crazed designs. So, we can see in our past a limitless sea of themes which will be reborn in different forms throughout our collective futures.

We could turn such “darkness” into the theme for a science fiction or fantasy story. We could cast it in a realistic-seeming alternate history. That’s purely aesthetic. For instance, the movie Aghora deals with Hypatia and this idea of a culture’s decline into darkness, however, the creative team inexplicably felt free to actually exercise their creativity.

Of course, a solid theme and setting based on a mental exercise like this won’t assure a good story. That’s the job of a writer. I don’t think anyone reading here needs a crash course on the craft involved. But a well-paced and crafted novel devoid of a broader theme is an exercise in futility if we are looking to take Zeno on and shoot for the bullseye. An arrow can reach its mark by progressing in half steps, as all writers know. I’m fairly convinced that is the only way books are written – in defiance toward common sense.

I’ve been big on confessions lately. There’s much we can learn from one another by being honest, even if we give ourselves a certain poetic license with the form that honesty takes. So bear with me a moment.

I wrote a piece on modern mythology in May that talked about how I came to identify as an artist. I first started thinking about this because I asked UK-based artist Laurie Lipton a similar question in an interview, “Was there a sudden point when you realized ‘I’m an artist,’ or has that always been with you?,” and I realized I had never asked myself that question.

Being an artist seems like no big thing, but it takes a real psychological shock to stick with it.

“Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means, of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all this meaningless gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission.” -Hubert Selby, Jr.

That sentiment rings true for me. At the same time, you don’t get on a path that requires such a commitment without having a psychological reason for following it. We have to be tricked or cajoled by fate. For him, it was ostensibly being laid up in a sanitarium for four years with tuberculosis. For me, an alcoholic Grandfather. Either analysis is actually specious. Our latent traits are like fuel for the fire of our lives. Do we really want to atomize and dissect ourselves into a series of anecdotes born from our personal history?

I certainly don’t. The truth is, “A” (for artist) isn’t the only scarlet letter I’ve sewn to my chest. Though I admit it selectively in public, close friends and lovers know that I also identify with another unfavorable term: philosopher.

If you didn’t shudder or laugh at that proclamation, I imagine you don’t have a pulse. I can’t blame you, but let me at least try to explain myself before you get out the pitchforks or tell me to cut my hair and get a real job. (I went bald at twenty-four, so genes beat us all to it.)

I want to talk openly about ideas, and about writing. I don’t know any way to do that but to confess my sin openly rather than have it leak out a little at a time.

Being a philosopher is an orientation. We hope such signifiers give a liminal glimpse at that most mysterious companion in life, ourselves. Whether or not that is the case, I know it comes off as pretentious to proclaim “I’m a philosopher.” Maybe it’s a little like pretending you’re a wizard or a silver dragon. Worse, a philosopher might be someone that is trying to put themselves on par with a bunch of illustrious, stuck up dead men. Not all of us can be Socrates, and if we have any sense of self preservation, it’s probably for the better.

“Indeed, the crowd has for a long time misjudged and mistaken the philosopher, whether for a scientific man and ideal scholar or for a religiously elevated, desensualized, desecularized enthusiast and sot of God. And if a man is praised today for living “wisely” or “as a philosopher,” it hardly means more than “prudently and apart.” Wisdom—seems to the rabble a kind or escape, a means and trick for getting well out of a wicked game. But the genuine philosopher—as it seems to us, my friends?—lives “unphilosophically” and “unwisely,” above all imprudently, and feels the burden and the duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the wicked game—” -Frederich Nietzsche

If we slander philosophy, maybe it shows a bias that has burrowed so deep into our culture that it’s gnawed right down to its brain-stem.

I imagine cultural bias is the real root of the anxiety that “philosophy” evokes. There’s no good reason why anyone would want to identify with such a thing in America in 2011. We have learned to only value what leads to the illusion of quick and easy profits, even if most of us are quickly going broke chasing that illusion with staggering debt and empty dreams.

I’d take a shot at explaining this cultural obsession, but I think it is such a vast topic that it could easily be the subject of a book. So, instead, I’ll pull a quote from an episode of The West Wing as I am prone to, without warning or clear cause, from time to time:

Toby: You’re a good father, you don’t have to act like it. You’re the President, you don’t have to act like it. You’re a good man, you don’t have to act like it. You’re not just folks, you’re not plain-spoken… Do not – do not – do not act like it!

President Bartlet: I don’t want to be killed.

Toby: Then make this election about smart, and not… Make it about engaged, and not. Qualified, and not. Make it about a heavyweight. You’re a heavyweight. And you’ve been holding me up for too many rounds.

The point is, it is not accepted in American popular culture to be an intellectual, let alone a philosopher.

So, let’s be clear. Maybe some of this objection that says “plain spoken” is somehow more “real” is justified. I don’t mean an intellectual need be a member of the intelligentsia. I don’t mean having obscure degrees or bullshit postures of righteousness because you are the leading Sanskrit scholar. The virtue of philosophy isn’t dependent on holding a popularly arcane belief, degree, or qualification.

Those are some of the true pretensions of academia. A philosopher is simply engaged with ideas. We should all be philosophers, in addition to whatever else we are — lovers of wisdom and skepticism, passionately exploring ourselves, willing to knock one idea against another until we come upon something interesting, or our eyes start to bleed and our hands turn to dust.

It is a sickness of the academy to use philosophical debate as a thin veil on top of the primate territorial bullshit that drives Hoi Polloi. I’ve often felt like the social dynamics seen in chimp groups is not at all unlike the posturing of inter-departmental groups in academia. There’s something refreshing about the directness of an ape that smashes his rival over the head with a firm length of wood. Professors do the same thing with the minutiae that lesser mortals couldn’t possibly comprehend.

When in doubt, we should not level blank ad hominem attack, but rather turn an idea around on its head and try it another way. A myth of cooperation that fosters dialog, rather than one of competition, fostering habitual unthinking? That isn’t widely accepted in our society, at least from what I can tell, and that’s a horrifying thing.

“Stupid” we can all fix simply by accepting the staggering weight of epistemological uncertainty, the gravity of what we don’t and simply cannot know. We’re all a bit stupid one way or another. (I was outsmarted by a two year old the other night.) Apathetically ignorant, on the other hand… nothing can be done about that.

Nothing can be done about a posture of superior cynicism either, embodied best by the legions of semi-illiterate culture police that wander the hallways of the Internet waving a big old bat of stupid at anyone with the audacity to produce creative work they don’t care for. These people want to knock everyone else down a peg, rather than work together to lift ourselves up. Nurturing conflict has always been the forge of creative communities.

I remember having my nose squashed on my face like a cherry tomato for reading too much when I was a child. I’m stubborn. It only made me want to read more. Some things never change, but I’ll never understand why being mentally engaged is received with such hostility, why the lowest common denominator is God of the modern proscenium.

Or maybe I do know, and I simply don’t want to accept it. We are easy to manipulate through common and base needs, and few of those have anything to do with philosophy. The truth is often depressing, and America is only sustained at this point by the delusions of endless profit and unlimited resources. It is a fictional Happiness machine. Whatever America once meant, philosophy is clearly anti-American today.

Reflecting on life is, quite plainly, the only philosophy that has any meaning after Wittgenstein so boldly declared he’d killed Western philosophy in one stroke. He used logic to demonstrate the limits of logic, and as a result, many have drawn the conclusion, as I have, that logic is not after all the central tool of the philosopher interested in existential questions. (I’ll talk about this in another essay.) Reflecting on life is also the task of the writer. So, abstract ideas and personal history both are the stuff of literature. When we talk about ideas, we are really talking about ourselves.

Literary authors and philosophers are both fugitives of pop culture.