an elaborately meaningless mess (published ~early 2012)
a post from my 2012 blog: exact publication date unknown
Sometimes I wish from curiosity that I could see the world naked. I wonder what it would be like if I could look at my table without having any concept of a table in my mind, if I could look at a water bottle without having any notion of a water bottle in my head. I imagine sitting here in this chair, looking out the window to my right at these tall rectangles with the boxes of lights in neat little rows from the bottom to the top. But then I’ve already ruined it. I’m already seeing these buildings through a certain lens – a lens of boxes and lights and rectangles. I cannot see it naked. I will always see it clothed. I will always see the patterns as they are supposed to be seen.
It would be interesting one day to forget language, to empty my mind of it all. And then to just walk down the street, looking at the people around me but not knowing they were “people” as I understand them, seeing them move around yet having no conception that they move with intentions and purposes and thoughts. They would just be blobs of color smeared across other colors. I would stop for a second to look at the river without any way of classifying it. No experience, no language, no cultural training, no genetically driven impulses would dictate the way I saw or perceived anything, and everything would be some elaborately meaningless mess.
A woman in a bathing suit, a pile of excrement, a panting puppy, a stack of books – it would all be part of the same elaborately meaningless mess.
Curiously, I would walk into the “river” until I was “waist-deep” – having an idea of neither a river nor a waist. I would turn around and look at all the “people” staring at me from the shore, but I would not know they were people. I would not even know I was a person. I would not even know exactly that I was, as I would have no conception of “I.” I would not know they were like “me.” I wouldn’t see the point at which their bodies end, the point at which the air around them and the backdrop of buildings and the rocks around their feet begin. The stones and the water and the birds and the dirt and the skin would all blend together like an elaborate and random piece of art, like some painter spilled something all over the canvas and smeared it around for a while until she felt satisfied by how meaningless it was. Taking a swig of vodka to celebrate, the Creator chuckles to herself as she looks at the colors splashed around colors in their odd, unintended patterns. The world before her eyes is without any clear direction, without any evident attempt to depict anything real. But the colors start to make sounds while she finishes her drink. And I would be walking around inside of them, looking at them, wading through them.
Turning back toward the “water,” I would take another step forward, and another and another, until I was floating in the current, vanishing forever in the Potomac.
But in reality, with my real brain, I find it impossible to look at a father buying his daughter ice cream and then to not see it as this – a father buying his daughter ice cream. I can’t look at a puppy playing with a human child and not see the happiness that comes with the bond that the two mammals are sharing as the same chemical, oxytocin, surges from their respective pituitary glands and instills similar loving emotions in them both while they snuggle together. I’m glad it’s not all a blob to me. No matter how hard I try to make it a blob when I sit in my room at night, I cannot do it – I always fail to exterminate these wonderful patterns all around me. So long as we are here to experience them, they shall never, ever go away.
My brain inevitably detects them everywhere. I cannot stop it. I could lock myself in my room and write hundreds of pages every night for a month about how meaningless, how stupid the world is. I could assert over and over that it’s a blob, an elaborately meaningless mess of colors. But then I would go outside and see a father buying his daughter ice cream. I would run into a friend who would say hello and smile at me. I would answer my phone and talk for hours with someone who knows me well. I would pet a dog and throw a small piece of bread to a sparrow. And everywhere I would see and feel these beautiful, exquisite patterns.