/ must do better.

over the weekend I read Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and much of Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. Steppenwolf is terrifying and nihilistic and at the moment speaks to quite a few different things that I am attempting to understand / ignore.

of Tropic of Cancer, though, I enjoyed the modernism in abstract, which reached to surrealism at points. some passages were a little caustic for my taste. it's well written, of course, and there seems to be some real heart and passion there. overall, it was a fun read, though the themes don't gel with the type of man I'm trying to be, and some of the really long stints of dialogue—between or about characters who are never explored—are boring.

after reading the first few "chapters" I knew I had to rewrite the beginning of my novel. there's a similarity in the context, and though we have entirely different perspectives on how to live, there was a passive rationality in my character—useless and flaccid. it comes to be about the explosion of spirit within a deracinated man, through to its inevitable end. one cannot tell the story of a man coming to understand himself—becoming himself—from such a dull and logical place.

it's often peurilely said that change is the only constant in our lives, but I feel like—even more so than in university—my view on life and understanding of 'being' has been thrown around so rapidly from month to month that just staying upright is difficult; contorting these notions into a coherent narrative seems impossible.

fiction has been commercialised and so split up into such standardised categories that I feel forced to create a novel, however, finished, it barely comes to one hundred pages. this makes it a bloated story, and also makes it feel, to me, unfulfilled—but I also think it means that it is without fluff. the piece started as something that I can spit out quickly; something to peddle to publishers which would be commercially relevant but also unimportant to me.

earnestly, Elliot

we don't go from ignorant childhood to adult individualism, we go from wild child to a disciplined adulthood. we have to make ourselves slaves to our disciplines, and these are cultural, national or racial; all have differing levels of clarity and justifiability; all cannot be true at the same time. I'm not sure I know the question that follows this revelation; I know that Nietzsche ended his investigation shortly after bringing this to a civilisational level;

how are we to live when God is dead?

in bringing the revelation to this level, it becomes (certainly for me) impossible to tackle. he famously prophesied that we must either drift toward nihilism or totalitarianism without God. now it certainly seems that the culture we inhabit has fallen very close to nihilism, as in the middle of the last century we fell sway to totalitarianism and it left such a scar, such a terrible taste in the mouth, that any step towards that direction again has become impossible, and so the slippery slope in the other direction, that heedless crashing towards liberty in itself, which every method of thought, every religion, every ideology, has warned against; has become synonymous with the good.

the limping, tragic figure of the culture we inhabit is open to searing critique from within, and joyfully, and open to existential threats from without, and blindly. if Nietzsche was correct, then it seems we've chosen nihilism on a civilisational level. diagnosis is vulgar, vapid and on the whole unhelpful—it is made of the same spirit as anarchic revolutions which have no solution at the other side.

so instead I can try to focus on just what it means for the individual. I don't know the answer to this question either. how can cultural norms affect an individual? isn't it paradoxical, or at least offensively generic, to be able to investigate an individual by the cultural norms? but clarity of being requires that we do just that, or at least live as though we do. the distinction between people has necessarily become clearer in society as it becomes more diverse. in perhaps its most obvious forms it's the unfeeling nature of perusing foreign news;

I receive BBC Breaking News Twitter notifications. I will read many killed and wounded in explosion in... and my heart will race, but then I'll read Mosul, or eastern China, and I'll almost automatically swipe the notification away. the constant bombardment of news that one is expected to undertake on a daily basis so as to remain up-to-date, is partly to blame—we have only enough minutes in the day to mourn—but if it's twenty-two dead in Manchester, it can affect me for days.

we've been thrust into an uncaring world, goes the cynical and overplayed idea, and brought up by people who barely even know themselves, but then we're taught that to look to the future means destroying the past. I wonder if the ramblings of my millennial peers are just the sensationalism of youth; reactionary views in those who will grow out of them. I'm in two minds, as a conflict within my generation between the alt-right and the communist youth would probably be quite productive.

earnestly, Elliot

I think sometimes—often, some seasons—that I have reasoned myself out of my fear of death. this issue of the fear of death has of course compounded since losing my faith, and I can no longer envision how I felt when I still had a sense of the eternal. I think sometimes that I have outgrown my fear of death, that it's only a part of reality; and perhaps even that it is the existence of death that gives meaning to everything that precedes it. but this ultimately ends up feeling more like ignorance, and thinking on it for any amount of time in an emotional way has me terrified again.

so either we can live in constant fear of death, or we can live in ignorance. being self-conscious has two distinct meanings, one negative and one positive. either it means Someone who cares too much about his body or spirit or Someone who is aware of his body or spirit. maybe these meanings are contradictory and only a slip of language, but in both meanings, if someone stops being self-conscious, they lose and gain something. the negative meaning; they gain confidence but may lose modesty and the ability to police oneself. the positive meaning; they gain a connectedness—enlightenment, perhaps—but lose the sense of time.

from a Western perspective, our sense of time can be understood as The I which continues to exist. of course we can only be aware of time in the form and speed in which we experience it, and therefore it can only be understood self-referentially. my fear of death rears its head when I think of things emotionally, which paradoxically seems to be happening more as I become more of an adult. I'm 26 now, and even two years ago I was militantly rational, of the dogmatic opinion that reason is the way we understand the world, but now my opinion is much closer to believing It is impossible to understand the world with reason.

since my last blog post, I have visited Germany for a celebration of my great aunt's eighty years, and for a relaxed blood-get-together. the place I took the above photo, Römerberg, is a beautiful historical village, a set of houses in the old style. it was completely destroyed by Allied (British) bombshells during the Second War, and so what stands there now are a modern reimagining. this knowledge didn't make them any less beautiful, but it did make the experience more melancholic. no, what made the experience less-than-beautiful was the anti-Erdogan rally (understandable, I'm sure) which disrupted the whole of Frankfurt and then settled inside the square. the cropped bottom of the photo shows shaken pedestrians and military police.

and of course yesterday, the attack on Manchester happened. I'm not using this blog as a news journal, or a way to convey political beliefs, so I'll speak of things through my new emotional lens, which is inherently self-focused, but hopefully it won't seem too narcissistic. when I first heard the news of the explosion (at that time it was thought to be either a balloon that burst and caused a confused stampede, or a speaker that exploded), I lamented at the tragedy in a detached way, thinking of all the ways the facts could be relayed, and interested to learn more. it was not until midday today, when they announced the first few names of the deceased, including an eight-year-old girl, that the other, much older, part of my brain took over; what in times prior we would have called Heart. the news stopped me, I was unable to talk to my colleagues more than grunts, and I couldn't concentrate on work. I became unfeasibly sad at the news, as I was very aware that either I would become very sad or very angry, and anger wouldn't have been 'helpful' in my situation. even now I can't stop thinking about the lives lost.

wow, a very disjointed and hastily-written post this time.

earnestly, Elliot

to a large extent I have given up on trying to understand the world, and therefore have given up on trying to explain myself within the world. if I do not understand where the world is, and certainly not where it is heading, then I do not know my own place in it. this is an easy conclusion to come to, and perhaps it's cowardly, but I certainly don't think it's something tired and overused. there is something inherently surreal about the world, and perhaps it is some kind of lazy historicism to call the current age 'the end of history', but it certainly makes sense. Kurt Vonnegut wrote,

I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. the best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. this theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. they are super-sensitive. they keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realise that there is any danger whatsoever.

I think those words now aren't only prescient but quite intelligent. but in its prescience it also has a time-specific quality to it. there are many adventures that mankind have undertaken; some damaged us more than others, and some seemingly tore us apart that we might not heal, but this might be 'the end of adventure'. the idea that we may have had our day—that man reached a pinnacle and thereafter can only fall—is one that every day has more weight. a man must be very careful when he makes these sorts of proclamations; as doomsayers have been proven wrong almost every time they have sprung up, but we also can't lose ourselves in the colourful blur of meaningless optimism that post-modernity promises.

so the picture above showed two tips jars at a coffeeshop. the idea was that you were casting your vote with your change. the coffeeshop sits on the crossroads which ties together four worlds. one way takes you to the East Asian (Chinese, mostly) campus of the university, one way is to the Magistrates Court, one way is to the degraded part of the centre of the city, and the last way is to the arts school. the clientele is therefore quite a comprehensive selection of the modern city society, and yet the change was not evenly distributed. it's harder to tell from the picture, but there was three or four times as much change, and with more valuable coins, in the glass titled "Platitude & Happiness". the glass titled "FREE will", before I put my change into it, was nearly completely empty.

either this says something important and worrying about humanity, or it says something terrifying about humanity. either, it is simply the richer people who want Platitude & Happiness, because they have already made their money, they spend their money well and they tip well. this means that they have more purchasing power, which means that society is damned to go down the road of meaningless consumerism. or, it means that there are simply more people who value Platitude & Happiness than people who value FREE will—that the British penchant for sarcasm has become fully, and with self-awareness, nihilistic—and this means that we're already at the end of that road.

earnestly, Elliot

P.S. on the website that I found this quote (while looking it up for the exact wording), the quote underneath it is "from a withered tree, a flower blooms" - Buddha. so maybe all isn't lost, and all we have to do is make it through the hard times that I see coming.