Just Writing.

Only boredom has prompted this writing.

I don't know what to do with myself right now. I'm going out in a little bit. But not yet.

Today was an amazing day at work.

Amazing because I'm still amazed by the way that every day is different, the way that every person always has something new for me, the way that I continue to learn about people and to appreciate them more.

There are many people I work with. Tonight I worked with two of my favorites. They were excellent.

They are both lively, thoughtful, genuine people.

But in different ways.

W and G. Great working with you tonight.

I can't tell you guys I'm writing about you. I can't direct a piece of writing towards you.

But that is the depth I feel talking with you. Tonight. Other nights.

I feel there are these moments where we drift back and forth from being emotional, being silly, and everything in between.

So much respect for that kind of feeling.

Finding depth in laughter. Because we laugh about things that are hard. We talk about things that are very real and very confusing. And then we laugh.

I often have to distract myself with laughter.

I can't just face things straight on.

These days I really don't want to face things straight on.

I'm not very mature yet.

I'm not yet mature enough to do what I need to do.

But I still marvel at my life.

Rilke couldn't have been more right when he said "If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it, blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place" (Letters to a Young Poet, 8). This statement has limits, of course. But still, I think the point is a powerful one: there is so much going on around us, so much depth in ourselves and in the people around us. I want to appreciate everything in its richness. I don't want to be overrun by drudgery. I don't want to be numbed by routine.

I want to be a poet.

I want to be a creator.

Chris Hedges.

I'm super pumped because I'm going to go see Chris Hedges speak on Friday at Seattle's Town Hall.

I love Town Hall. They frequently have very smart people speaking and you can see them for only $5. Also, I used to work for the company that co-hosts events. This means that I can sometimes get my name put on a list, and I can get into the event for free.

Huzzah for networking!

Indeed, this is the way that I am able to get into the Hedges talk. It sold out! But I still get to go! And I get to bring a family member!

That's right! A PLUS ONE! WIMMIE WAM WOZZLE!

I was deeply effected by both of Hedges' books that I read, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, and Empire of Illusion.

Both excellent books.

Excellent not so much for their erudition (though he is clearly well read), but for the spirit that animates them. Hedges sets the pages ablaze. Such strength in his writing. Such fire in his voice.

I shouldn't make it sound too dramatic.

But I just want to communicate the force with which those books struck me. I am very grateful to have encountered them. His writing is both intellectually powerful and emotionally moving. I dig it.

I very much look forward to seeing him speak on the issue of poverty in America.

Thanks for the French Press

I love a good French press!

I love love love a good cup of coffee!

French pressed or otherwise!

WHOOOOOO!

But this morning I am particularly thankful for a french press that was given to me as a gift by my now Hawaiian friend.

It is an excellent press, J-dawg.

I have just finished brewing some excellent Ethiopian in it. Tastes like blueberries yo. Blueberries.

Soon it will be cool enough for me to sip it.

It is nice that I can brew this excellent cup of coffee and be reminded of a friend at the same time.

YOLO

YOLO (You Only Live Once) has become a pretty popular internet meme. I've enjoyed seeing all the different ways that people have rendered this acronym. Often very funny. Sometimes even insightful or enlivening. 

I have, however, just encountered the first instance of an 'anti-YOLO' meme. I'm not sure what to make of it. The meme itself is a bit silly. I don't think that this really points to the true meaning of the YOLO thing. But at the same time the YOLO thing, the attitude that it expresses, is a bit problematic. 

I'm not sure how much I want to say right now. I'm tired.

I was at Top Pot downtown today and it was the Pride parade. So things were a bit nuts. Just constant lines constant work. But it was good because I did get to work the espresso bar for most of the time. Madness.

The phrase YOLO, I think, is about having a certain attitude towards decisions that comes from one's awareness of mortality. I know that I am only going to live once, that I will die and I will not be reincarnated or live in after-life. Therefore the decisions that I make in my life ought to be bold, they ought to be daring, because death will ultimately obliterate me and any trace of my embarrassment, shame, fear, or any of those other temporary mental processes that often discourage me from making a decision that I know, somewhere in me, I want to make.

Steve Jobs, interestingly, has a very poignant way of putting this whole mess: 
"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything -- all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. ... Stay hungry. Stay foolish."

Very odd, indeed.

But all of this YOLO business is all up in this quotation. The awareness of mortality, the imperative to follow one's heart, the insistence on there being nothing to lose. 

All of that stuff is great. I have personally tried to use death as an impetus for action and appreciation. So, YOLO: I understand it and I identify with it. 

But I also have a problem with it.

The thing I'm still working hardest on is working on a conception of historical morality. I know one of its major hallmarks will be the commitment to working within the customs and mores of my historical era. I am bound to use the words, walk the streets, work the jobs, and jump through the institutional hoops that are all unique to my age. 

Recognizing these fundamental elements of life as historical can be a painful process. Everything I love and do and interact with is a passing trend of history. None of it has this universality. It has only a historical flow. This recognition has led some folks to conceptualize morality as a rejection of history and tradition, and instead making a radical break that somehow launches a new kind of path. And of course this has to happen one way or another, new things must always happen, new decisions must always be made, and we should be active in the creation of our own history.

But I don't think that the best way to go about creating our own future-history is to reject our actual, concrete history. Because our existence can only be historical, we can only live if we are willing to accept that the most important elements of our lives, including our 'self', are riding on a historical wave, forever changing, never to be still and never to stay the same.

My claim is that the best way to go about creating our own historical life, the best way to be free, is to come to terms with ourselves as historically constituted beings, ones incapable of living in any world other than the historical one in which we find ourselves. Moreover, I believe that this type of commitment to historical living, binding oneself to the  habits and traditions of one's time, is also the best way to go about creating something new. 

This has to do with some ideas about repetition, culture, and newness. All culture, I have begun to think, is a form of repetition. Everything we do, every word we use, is something that we have seen or heard someone else do and that we are repeating. But every time we repeat we never repeat it quite 'right'. Something is always a little different. Something always changes.

This means that I want to use repetition as an to approach decision making and newness in life. I want to go about creating myself as something new by repeating the people or ideas that are most appealing. 

I'm not sure what this all means.

But it definitely means that part of me is hostile to the YOLO sentiment because I think it encourages the idea that freedom is achieved through a radical break with habits or traditions, and is thus tacitly anti-historical. And there is definitely something to be said about freedom and breaking habits. There is something in all of this stuff.

But at the same time we do owe something to our history. We have a unique duty to our families, to our friends, and to our communities, that can't be fully explained by rational thinking. There is an importance to these customs, these rituals, these ways of living that we cannot reject. 

Our history is the only water through which we can swim, the only medium through we can hope to understand ourselves and create something new.

A Breakthrough

Of sorts.

Since I completed an essay in February I've been brewing on some other major stuff that I can't get my head around.

These things takes time.

And I'm so young.

My thinking will (hopefully) have so many more years to develop.

I've been working on the idea of historical morality. I'm trying to ask, "Why is it that certain thinkers insist that cultivating the habit of historical thinking will also produce the habit of moral thinking?"

Because this is what my boy Collingwood says.

He says that if we really truly understand what historical thought is all about then historical morality should be easy for us to see.

I am now starting to understand that what Collingwood intended to explicate in The Principles of History was converted into The New Leviathan. That is to say, if I want to know what Collingwood meant in his outline for The Principles of History, then I need to think about The New Leviathan. I have been trying to think about it for the last six months or so. It is a seriously challenging book.

I'm not yet sure how it fits into his thinking as a whole.

The minor but important breakthrough I've made has to do with the relationship between moral thought and narrative.

MacIntyre, Collingwood, Gaddis, others, insist that human action only becomes intelligible when told as a story, when placed in a narrative that renders it understandable. No time for demonstration of this point. If it does't immediately make sense to you and you care then check out Gaddis or something.

If the understanding of human action depends on narrative, and if moral thought depends on our capacity to explain and think of behavior in certain ways, then the cultivation of a moral attitude might hinge on our ability to construct more forgiving or compassionate narratives.

I have been struggling to place the issue of narrative in my thinking about historical morality.

But this makes sense to me.

It is a starting point, at least.

I can see now that aesthetic/historical education are morally valuable in that they train the imagination to be capable of constructing different types of narratives, thus occupying different moral positions.

Roger Smith is very concerned with narrative and self-creation.

I, too, am concerned with this issue.

I'm still not sure how to resolve that relationship, or even state it as a problem.

But I think that clarifying this relationship between morality and capacity for narrative explanation is a step in the right direction.

Hmph!

We shall see!

Personal Stuff.

Yo.

Pretty soon I'm gonna be dropping some real talk on this blog.

I got ten pages of writing sitting in a word document and one of these days I'm gonna go BOOM!

There it is.

In your face.

It is a memoir of sorts, but almost an essay.

I'm writing a bit like David Shields does in The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead.

Trying to blend memoir, philosophical reflection and personal reflection.

I'm excited.

A very dramatic bit of writing, of course.

All kinds of hyperbole and exaggeration and stuff.

But I'm gonna continue to work on it today. I'm anticipating twenty pages when finished.

I've never written anything quite like it.

Tautology.

This is what I have to do because it is what I have to do.

Ain't nothing to it but to do it.

Both infinitely wise phrases.

I am slowly working on understanding the importance of tautological thought.

I doubt it is of real significance.

But these are fun examples that point to something larger.

So maybe it has real significance. I'm not sure.