Tuesday, January 21, 2014

The Conversion of Loneliness

I took a battery with me but it was without charge. It reminded me of a man without spirit; a cold blooded wreck. The only reason most men live is to please other people with impressions. Once the impression dies out you are to face your self. Then you see yourself alone. The questions that you had buried come alive again. It was no doubt, comforting to think all the while that these buried questions would one day turn to dust to never return again. But hope alas has its disadvantages. To hope that the answers are in the future is to kill the present. The only thing that dies is your imagination. The questions remain buried all the same. They are alive to this day to disappoint you.

I feel the same whenever my brain goes weary and my faculties lose charge like the battery. I need ideas but where do I find them? The broad daylight does nothing to help but reminds me again and again the necessary evil of rut! Where do I find that stimulant when I am blinded by the sunshine that makes me see only motion without essence; quite simply a life without purpose. I may go to a library or a museum. Isolated by the dictates of monetary pressures I decide to make way only for the cold blooded pragmatist. What does this pragmatist do? He makes me turn into him and reminds me not to indulge the whims of a lonely intellect. The intellect, he says is seldom interested in immediate pleasures but longs for permanence, the end that dare not speak its name. 

He shows me the picture of what my intellect would make of me. At the outset, I could only see a broken man with a vicious smile as though he has discovered a treasure that has only some private meaning and is absolutely of no use to the external world. It appears to me that this man that my intellect would make of me deludes himself in his pursuits of isolated recreations and concludes that he has found a new meaning to his life. At this point the pragmatist and I have moved away; disconnecting me with everything around me, I see living in the shadows as a necessary evil but I do not even consider being a pragmatist as a shadow. It is far worse!

A man who sells his sense of purpose to a distorted version of civilization is undead, no more than a puppet without even the value of a shadow. He is not dead because he is alive and he is not real because he is not himself. Mistaking this pragmatist for an individual he decides to go about his life as a routine. This decision ends up being futile when he finds himself unable to give back to this society a value worshiped beyond reconciliation. If I find myself moving in this direction I can only survive as long as I am able to create this value for a reasonable length of time in the eyes of this society. If I want this standing in society where I am no longer an individual but yet another illusion then my intellect is jeopardized and its whims however grandiose remain to attack me.

I then see this dichotomy and this 'need for the other' can survive only on a material plane if my intellect succeeds in transporting me beyond the shadows into an infinite reality called 'permanence'. This 'need for the other' is no longer a substitute for permanence. I can experience this stimulation when I cease to look into the broad daylight. The 'kick of the shadows' forces the adversary, who in his attire of pragmatism, relinquishes permanence for monotony. This shadow reveals the real image in front and he looks completely different from what I have seen of myself. The message is 'I have found it'.

This lonely man was nothing but what only the pragmatist could see and that which I could never be.