the power of ethical reasoning

'The most callous, stupid things were done
just because regulations required them
and no one thought to change the regulations
there are many human beings locked away
in special wards throughout the country
some of them abandoned by their parents
and sometimes unloved by anyone else
just as a hamster can be conditioned to press a lever for food
a human being can be conditioned by professional rewards
to ignore intellectual contradictions and the suffering of others
professional prestige, a vague sense of progress, cash money
all-stars, and the opportunity to travel
were the maintaining factors
in our society...'

    - Tao Lin

pessoa

'Everything that surrounds us becomes a part of us, it seeps into us with every experience of the flesh and of life and, like the web of the great spider, binds us subtly to what is near, ensnares us in a fragile cradle of slow death, where we lie rocking in the wind. everything is us and we are everything, but what is the point if everything is nothing? a ray of sun, a cloud whose sudden shadow warns of its coming, a breeze getting up, the silence that follows when it drops, certain faces, some voices, the easy smiles as they talk, and then the night into which emerge, meaningless, the broken hieroglyphs of the stars.'

Perhaps deep down most people feel that they are something like nothing - maybe nothing isn't quite the right word. I don't, necessarily, mean a blank kind of nothing but perhaps, sometimes, an abundant kind of silence. In the world we put on a show that this or that audience demands. Much trouble seems to stem from seeing these masks as ourselves or pinning others to the masks that they happen to be wearing. We drive ourselves around like bumper cars bumping into each other gleefully and, occasionally, when the cars bump into each other, someones face hits the steering wheel and their glee turns to tears. Perhaps beyond all of that there is something like an always present beginning - the beginning of all things, things that are re-created and created so poorly in the faded mirror of ourselves. While we might walk in the clear arid air of the beginning there walks beside us a person that the world calls "us" or "you" or "I" and as much as we might want to reject our supposed selves, s/he follows us and demands that we enter into ourselves. Perhaps we're better off not heeding this call and meeting the air out there as the air in here. Our awkward travelling companion never drawing us out of a sometimes abundant and always endless silence. Look closely enough and there is mostly, a not exactly empty space, where virtual particles might draw energy from the future to momentarily make themselves. Get enough distance and the milky way is just one of many very thinly dispersed dots of light against a vast black background. We are of and not off this earth however, and so what other starting point could there be than here? 

"I've been trying for some time to develop a lifestyle that doesn't require my presence." - Garry Trudeau