Collapse of the 4th corner

What is this new feeling? And what are its roots?
I've been having feelings of contentment on and off for the past few months, but now there is also a budding of a sort of positive, active attitude towards the world. It is as if for a long time - perhaps the whole of my adult life - I have moved along a passive continuumm of resistance/acceptance, avoidance/tolerance. The best I could hope for was to avoid embarassment when with people and learn to make the best of my solitude. I was an old man in a hut, hiding from visitors and gathering scraps dropped by strangers. Now I have a sense that I am growing younger and could leave the hut if I wanted.

The passive introvert. To me this shelled up life has always felt like the norm. People who eat life are a different species. I find it amazing that there are people who actually have an energy which drives them to do things, be with other people, seek things from the world not for solace but for fun. Could I metamorphose into such a person?

This recent feeling of openness began, I think, with a shift, which will I think be very difficult to describe, in my perception of my relationship to the world. Based on this new feeling, I get the impression that I normally regard the world as a kind of surface out there, a wall or canvas on which everything happens, and on which I could imagine myself plotting a pathway, painting in a little area which would be my life. There's me, slowly filling the next 30 or 40 years of a small area of space, painting it with a degree in Chinese or a year in Vietnam or whatever.

The change in perception is something like realizing - not just intellectually but at a deeper, more intuitive level - that the canvas is not out there. The canvas is created in the act of looking, and all looking is in fact a looking inwards.... When I think about myself it is always me in the world, an agent interacting with other people or slabs of experience, doing things which will bring happiness, pain, boredom, etc. But now I sensed that this me-external world dichotomy could be further dissolved by turning inwards, exploring the contents of my mind without any reference to an external world and my place in it, not as an excercise in discursive meditation but rather as a fishing for creative seeds that might give birth to a poem or picture. Hmm, is this just a convoluted way of saying I've rediscovered the dimension of creative self-expression that's been absent from my life for a long time? Well, maybe. So what. Fuck it. I need a drink....

Time

For we, the immortals, it seems a tragedy that so many of our fellow humans have died and will continue to die. Each of those lives was as precious and important to its owner as mine is to me, as yours is to you, and yet while their time on this Earth was limited, I (and perhaps you - we are few in number, and nobody reads my blog anyway...) will live on, watching the aeons pass, seeing civilizations rise and fall, miraculous discoveries and inventions made (I predict nanoscale wind turbines in the anal passage, powering embedded wetware which provides us with a continuous feed of everything that's happening everywhere right now on the ground as it happens. And sprout wars.), making my own philanthropic contributions here and there (... isn't this the plot of a Simone de Beauvoir novel? Ah yes, All Men Are Mortal (thanks memory)).

I often seek different perspectives as a way of crow-barring some meaning into life. Consider recent human history - or rather prehistory, preagriculture. Consider those generations of people who were anatomically and cognitively identical to modern humans, yet whose lives were lived in small groups of hunter gatherers (as some still do now in certain parts of the world). How would they have thought of the future and their relationship to it? We in the modern world are locked into the idea of progress and have been for centuries. There is a sense, so deeply ingrained that it has become invisible, that we are going somewhere, that our civilization will continue unbroken into the far future in a process not just of change but of improvement, improvement for everyone, eventually, probably.

Viewed from space there is merely, century after century, a change in the arrangement of physical matter (to borrow Beaty Russel's idea) on the surface of the earth, but for us down here these rearrangements are associated with our hopes and dreams, daily needs, work and play. When I think about my own life, my own possible futures, they must necessarily find their form within the larger forms of 'progress' to a better tomorrow - or at the very least the forms of 'maintenance' of what we have now. But when I think back to those nasty, idyllic, brutish, halcyon prehistoric hunter-gatherer days, I can't help feeling that that was the default form, the correct form, the non-aberrant form, which we must necessarily return to over and over as civilizations continue to collapse and reemerge. It is like a pulse, a leap to nowhere, a slow encrustation and sloughing off on the surface of the earth - civilization - primitive - civilization - primitive.

Of course, it is only from the perspective of a modern post-prehistoric mind that such thoughts can be had, but then I wouldn't need their solace if I was out worrying a wildebeest.