Truly a Thought that came unbidden:
Hate isn’t the opposite of love. Apathy is the opposite of love. In order to hate you I have to still care about you and hate, like love, requires a depth of involvement so great it has the potential to consume everything you are.
With apathy my investment is nothing.  And nothing will always and forever be the opposite of something.
I bought my winter holiday cards today.
Yes, I am deranged. Further proof: I’ll probably have my shopping done by Labor Day.
The night is warm, the moon is full, and my head buzzes heavy with the Thoughts That Come Unbidden as the Department works overtime. I can’t sleep. I could weave a tapestry of $3 words and phrases like “dark night of the soul” and “vision quest” but the reality is this: Life is hard and it isn’t always fun.
Yet, life can also be brutally, stunningly, surprisingly beautiful, so beautiful, in fact, that the breath rushes right out of you and you feel as if your heart might stop.
Life is full of passages, some marked by official recognition with mortarboard hats, special dresses, and expensive parties. Most of those passages, though, happen to us without our even noticing and it is the not noticing that is the crime not the changing. Changing is inevitable. The key is to be aware and to shape that change as much as it shapes you.
Postsecret is what you’d get if you threw a community art project in a bag with the Catholic confessional and, I’m coming to realize, added a big heaping dose of passive-aggressive behavior.It’s a neat idea, really. Instructions from the Postsecret site read:
You are invited to anonymously contribute your secrets to PostSecret. Each secret can be a hope, regret, funny experience, unseen kindness, fantasy, belief, fear, betrayal, erotic desire, confession, or childhood humiliation. Reveal anything – as long as it is true and you have never shared it with anyone before.
The passive-aggressive comes in thusly: each Sunday the site is updated with new secrets which you have, roughly, a week to look at. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good (or until Frank decides to replace them and then edit them into a book). Not only can you not go back and look at them at your leisure there is no guarantee that if you send it your secret it will be judged worthy enough to display.
There were two secrets at Postsecret today that echo things that I’ve been feeling lately. Since we’re only allowed to post one image as a link back to the site, I’m going to go with this one and hope for the best.
It has been beautiful here in DC lately. Not quite successions but just enough of those fine spring days where the breeze that would have been cutting and brutal 20 degrees ago suddenly feels welcoming, like a long lost and still desired lover’s caress across your face to make you realize that all that time you put in on the calendar during the winter was absolutely worth it.
Because it has been beautiful I’ve been walking a lot, and with walking comes thinking. With warm weather, unfortunately, also comes people, and the more people I encounter the more I tend to think about people: why we act the way we act; why society functions as it functions; how popular culture being, theoretically, a reflection of a society’s values mutates and changes. No matter how long or hard I think about “people” as a group I eventually circle back to the same thought.
I don’t much like people.
People are thoughtless, self-centered, and arrogant beyond any demonstrated skill. We are short-sighted thinking not of the ramifications of our actions but only of what feels good at the time presuming of course that we give our actions any thought at all. We are easily led and influenced by the most flimsy of reasons. We demand without justification that consequence be separated from responsibility and we assume that our ability to make tools, machinery, clothing, and pavement places us at the top of the food chain giving no regard to the fact that we live in a delicately balanced system without which we couldn’t survive. We create Philosophy to explain a world that is completely beyond our comprehension and God to explain away our fear of the unknown.
Individuals, the ones who come up with music and art and humor and random acts of kindness as simple as letting you share the one table in the sun at the cafe on a day that is just slightly too cold to be sitting in the shade when the wind blows, them I like. People as a group get no love from me. And don’t tell me that “people” is made up of individuals: if that were true then “people” would be much kinder, saner, and happier.
I think this and then I wonder: is it possible to understand your own species, much less anything at all, with any sort of objectivity?
Semiotics tells us that each consumer of a text – whether that text be something written, a photograph, a TV show, a painting, or a piece of music – brings to the text preconceived notions, a framework, if you will, through which she digests and interprets the text. If we bring those preconceived notions to text (to things we create) why, then, do we pretend that we can interpret things that we do not create (such as the behavior of other animals), much less our own society and behavior, without those preconceptions?
And if it’s not possible, or if it’s more than marginally difficult, to interpret society (which is really just group behavior) and the behavior of other people without preconceptions is it possible to interpret your own behavior without illusion (willful or otherwise)? Is it possible to know yourself, to know your own motivations, to the extent that you can look back on your actions and see clearly why you made the decisions you made?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, and it’s quite possible that they are unimportant to anyone who isn’t motivated, as I am, by the how and why of things. But I recently figured out the how/why of something quite important in my recent history and doing so was a revelation. I discovered, much to my shock, that knowing why such a thing was so powerful, why it held such attraction for me, completely sapped it of any influence in my life.
So while whether or not it is possible to know the whole of something is (probably) endlessly debatable, perhaps it’s enough to be able to figure out the things themselves individually and to be able to hold them all until they can be put together to make some coherent picture.