Musings

[pjthompson]

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I've come to the conclusion that I'm not young enough to be absolutely certain I know the truth. The shades of grey multiply with each year. But that's okay. The things that important are beyond those kinds of thought processes. We can feel around their edges, if we try real hard and remember they're always changing shape anyway.

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I’ve been sick for the last few months, all sorts of unusual gastrointestinal and stomach issues, about every two weeks, interspersed with bouts of feeling absolutely fine. I finally went to the doctor last Friday. He thought it might be pancreatitis brought on by a medication he prescribed just about two months ago, because that’s one of the rare possible side effects. I’m not sure about that because people are usually hospitalized for pancreatitis and he didn’t suggest that. True, I resisted going to the doctor all that time--because that’s just what I do. I finally took myself off that medicine in late June. I’ve been gradually improving, sort of, although I’ve been sick again for the last 4 days. Each bout of this is milder than the last, but I am definitely sick of being sick. I think doc was mostly baffled by my symptoms but agreed with my decision to take myself off the medicine. He is having blood and other tests done, but no results yet.

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Today's Google doodle is quite wonderful--and quite emotional for me. Maybe it's because the moon landing was one of the seminal events of my young life; maybe it's because we had hope then that the world might come together now that we could see how tiny and fragile our Earth was. I've never had that kind of hope again--well, maybe for a short time when the Berlin wall came down. Hope is as fragile as our Earth suspended in the immense blackness of space.

I should also add that I had that kind of crazy hope again when President Obama was elected. But.

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I bet the phone answering system in Heaven is Hell.

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Great article by Maria Popova at Brainpickings: The Banality of Evil: Hannah Arendt on the Normalization of Human Wickedness and Our Only Effective Antidote to It

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Best fortune cookie fortune I ever got? After a long dinner conversation with my artist friend about whether we should continue to pursue our art or give up: "Art is your fate, don't debate." My friend got the same fortune. We told a mutual artist friend about it and went back to the same restaurant, partially because of the food but partially because of the fortune. We got the usual run-of-the-mill fortunes but our other friend, who had also been questioning whether to give up the art, got "Art is your fate, don't debate." #Synchronicity

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That feeling when you listen to a piece of music you loved in your youth that you haven't listened to for a long time...but it no longer works. #NotOdeToJoy

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Watch on YouTube

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The Universe is infinite, yet small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.

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SOCIAL EXPERIMENT: Someone on Twitter posted, "If you come across this tweet, reply with the grade you were in when you had your first nonwhite teacher." Oh God. I can't remember even one, even in college. THIS IS SO BAD.

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People are surprised that a large segment of the public are credulous and strenuously resist logic. Even a casual reading of history shows this has always been so. The difference now is that we have entire news outlets and social media sites promoting the lack of critical thinking.

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Everyone is a conflicted human being. We have to admit that to ourselves or risk getting ourselves into a lot of trouble.

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It's interesting: Because I just write and push through without editing to get words on the page, my first drafts always have a lot more of my working class origins in them. I leave some of that language in if it suits the character, refine it if not.

Comments

[notasupervillain]

I know a truth. It's not The Truth. But it works for me.

[pjthompson]

Yes, I've known many truths, but they keep shifting as time passes. So I've stopped trying to hold onto them and I certainly don't try to convince anyone of the validity of them. Not like I used to when I was young. Whatever works for as long as it works.

[notasupervillain]

And I'm not going to disabuse someone of something I know in my heart to be untrue if their Truth is Good to them. I've helped religious friends over crises in faith, despite being an atheist, because being kind is far more important than being right.

[pjthompson]

Yes, absolutely that. Kindness is the one absolute truth I stand by.

[notasupervillain]

Lol, somehow I'm also having this discussion in an underrelated thread. Kindness, but only if it includes to oneself, and only if you believe that justice can coexist with kindness.

[pjthompson]

Jack Kornfield would agree with you.

[pjthompson]

The other thing I might add here is that I think this shiftingness of truth applies even to (or especially to) religious faith. I've long maintained that faith is experiential, not received wisdom. If all you have is received wisdom, faith is never going to withstand the rigors of living. Once you've crossed that boundary of experience, though, faith has the ability to adapt and change. If you let it. Some people are so wedded to a single interpretation of spiritual experience that they can't see beyond it and try to bend all of life to fit their rigid mold...until it breaks. Adapt or die.

[notasupervillain]

I'm very curious what you mean by this!

I'm an atheist who thinks I'd be happier if I believed, but I can't. Because I have to be honest with myself, and I don't believe.

I used to. But I've lost faith in virtually everything that I thought sustained me, and yet I remain.

[pjthompson]

I've never been religious, but I consider myself spiritual. And that spirituality is fostered and sustained by numerous experiences I have had that convince me there is something in the universe besides materiality. Some of these experiences I've had alone, some with others, some have been creepy, some have given me great comfort. But they are the basis of my faith.

Now, because I am who I am and always questioning, I've long-since reconciled myself to the fact that they may be illusion, "mistaken identity," etc., etc. But as I have more and more experiences, it gets harder to deny that something weird is going on. But I try to stay flexible with it, not confine it.

If I was a Baptist or a Catholic, for instance, I might have to consider some of these experiences as manifestations of the devil (because they believe all ghosts are evil spirits trying to fool us into thinking we've been contacted by our deceased loved ones, etc., etc. ad nauseam). If I believed there was one God who was just and righteous and ruled over everything, I might ask myself "So why did He allow the Holocaust to happen?" and it might shatter (or at least erode) my faith.

But the one thing that I know absolutely is that I don't know what rules the universe. It may be nothing, it may be a lot of somethings, it may be one something in many aspects, it may be something I can't even conceive of in with my limited human POV. I don't even know if it's a just universe. All I have are those experiences, not the received wisdom of a religion or religions—which are always filtered through limited human perception anyway. Those experiences are not something you can hand off to someone and say, "Here, this happened to me so you should believe as I do." But that hasn't stopped many people trying just that through the centuries.

I know that I do not know, and I have my experiences, which allow me to feel comforted even in the midst of a vast uncertainty. They allow me to adapt and change, and to keep seeking answers, being surprised when new things occur to me that I hadn't considered before, but still moving forward.

[wayfaringwordhack]

SOCIAL EXPERIMENT: Someone on Twitter posted, "If you come across this tweet, reply with the grade you were in when you had your first nonwhite teacher." Oh God. I can't remember even one, even in college. THIS IS SO BAD

I thought I was in this boat, too, but then I remembered my Home-Ec teacher, who was also my Spanish teacher, in 11th grade was Hispanic. I may have had other teachers who were nonwhite, but I went to 13 different schools before 8th grade, so I think I am forgiven for forgetting many of them, regardless of their skin color.

What are you writing on these days? Ramona's story? :P

[pjthompson]

It's definitely forgivable that you don't remember them all. :-) As for the lack of representation in schooling, it makes me so sad. Maybe things have changed since back in my day. God knows it was a hella long time ago. I hope so.

As to what I'm writing, that's been mostly on hold since I've been sick. I manage a day or two here and there. I'm hoping I can get back to it again soon. I'm actually writing JK Montmorency's story, stringing together all the short stories and novellas I wrote about Dos Lunas within a framework in which JK is going through a crisis. But I'm also finishing Dos Lunas stories that I started but never finished if they work within this framework. Amongst those is one called "Ramona! The Chickens!" :-D Of course. My girl Ramona demands her due recognition. And I've always thought my novel Venus In Transit was as much Ramona's story as it was Sam and Marian's. Ramona thought so, too. :-)

[asakiyume]

Eichmann In Jerusalem--the book where Hannah Arendt first talked about the banality of evil, was breathtaking, changed my thinking. I like this quote from the Maria Popova post:

thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.

[pjthompson]

Yes, I absolutely think this is true. Depth and layers which the simplistic tyrants of the world can never comprehend.