kī́nēsis

The Life of Brian

The connotation of the city center as a place of refuse and one that is particularly degraded compared to its surrounding say suburban or metropolitan districts is no good.

As one gets nearer to the crowning promenade of a city one should feel a growing sense of grandeur surrounding oneself. One should notice streets particularly kept; not just cleaner but better paved with more luscious plant-life lining the road, brighter flowers in more beautiful pots that hang from more superfluously adorned street lamps, power washed sidewalks that lack breaks and obstacles, metal used always for fencing; no plastic.

As one begins to look up and find oneself engulfed in monstrous buildings stretching high up into the heavens, one should feel a weightlessness on the ground. One should feel there is at ground level something of a kinder gravitational field, which gives more easily to the skyward pull of these brick & mortar Giants.

The flow of a river is an easy companion to a flight into the stars. A garden of green is an easy companion to a river of blue. A church built in many a years past is an easy companion to a string of vines. A string of diamonds hanging in a show window is an easy companion to a cathedral spire. The twirling of neon lettering is an easy companion to an intricately machined engagement ring. The shimmer of an Aston Martin badge through a showroom window is an easy companion to the blinding brightness of the Marquee. The lights of the arena are an easy companion to the shine of the Spirit of Ecstasy. The aroma of delicious food is an easy companion to the microcosm of the sports stadium. The sound of a street performer is an easy companion to any kindness of the senses. The crude look on the face of a bureaucrat leaving a building is an easy companion of the street performer and their crowd. The elegant dress of a lady is an easy companion to the worn out businessman.

The centre of a civilization ought be its most stupendous place to be. As such the visitors from the providences are provided a hearty sense of nationalism and purpose. They feel their work in the fields in the factories is not so in vain but for the sake of the empire. prosperity throughout the land is vital but without the hallmark of idealism and comradery that is the Capital City there is no real relationship between the outer and the inner districts.

City centers should be the best place not for the sake of being the only good place but because we must put our focus somewhere and that somewhere ought to be in the thick of the population which a good capital city is already. Civilization ought spread outward from the great city as an emanation, like a great light shining bright over humanity and the human endeavor.

There is a belief held by some that what you are in life is determined at birth– it’s all in the blood.

And yet, evolution. And yet the diversity of humanity we see every day. How could that be if it’s all in the blood?

A response to such might be well it’s the genetic lottery it’s DNA. Or one may concede that such diversity is of course possible to achieve but it takes eons for any substantial change to take place.

I am unqualified to speak on the genetic lottery and the prevalence of recessive and dominant traits, randomization, etc.

I would say I sense environment is major to much, but such is a tertiary point in regard to this essay.

I am intent mainly to pontificate on the paradoxical logic of one who holds the belief that’s it’s all in the blood but will also likely allow that indeed yes there are changes that take place over a large expanse of time.

What I say is, if these changes are possible at all even at the most infinitesimal levels then there must be something causing these changes that can only be accounted for by looking at how generation upon generation lived.

Setting aside the generic lottery dynamic and setting aside of course much else that I’m not cognizant of and that I would rather not consider, we must see we must own that the way a life is lived affects one’s posterity, even if the posterity we speak of won’t actually inherit any markably advantageous traits for countless generations into the future.

Perhaps this whole line of reasoning is phooey. Perhaps there’s a quarter of a half of a grain of truth in it.

Where I’ve been attempting to reach via this string of words is this exclamation:

If there’s even 1% about what makes you you that can be altered or bettered in a lifetime, I say fight like hell for it. If it’s .1% of your constitution that you can metamorphize while you’ve air in your lungs, fight like hell for that. What are the stakes anyways?

Glen Powell is a star. Adria Arjona is a star. This movie is super entertaining. It just ends up being weird I guess. 

It’s because of the whole diatribe he goes on while teaching his class at the end about “identity.” It was this weird thing given the movie opens with Mr. Gary giving a lesson on Nietzche and a student says she finds Nietzche is talking about risk taking and trying new things and stuff. And it’s lit you gotta love that kind of nod to Nietzche in a modern film. And then, as the opening scene sets the stage for the rest of the film, and while there is experimentation, in the end there is a theme and there’s a “thing” to really accept as base.

I suppose that identity is of great importance to people. It just like doesn’t end up actually working in the story. When the narration concludes with “I found a happy balance of Ron and Gary” my reaction is ‘boo.’

Most likely because of the fact that the movie did feature what could be called “Nietzchean” elements, what with the undercover work and the building of the characters out of passion for the task, the aggression of Ron, and the sort of crossing over the line with the flippin murders. But just cause they were goin’ Zarathustra Mode the whole movie doesn’t mean you get to proselytize at the end. 

Identity is a circus act. It’s a shade of blue that never was and I know I stole that line but shit it’s so weird to end a movie like that by going this lame route emphasizing identity. The proper ending is going over and beyond the concept of being one thing or another, or even some kind of in between person.

Nah, children of light. Breathing in the air as the breath and the breather. Yahweh mothafucka. 

p.s. that quote that I appropriated, “the missing shade of blue,” belongs to Hume. It’s kind of a trip because it I guess (according to Wikipedia) is hinting at the way the human mind can conceive of that which is beyond the sensory, like identity for example, so shit.

All things pass. And yet, at the same time, the whole enterprise of life is living. In our lives we are born, age and die, all of us. A fine meditation, but not really ultra compelling in all ways, to me. That is to say, in a moment of tranquil sitting meditation if a loved one should start hooting and hollering in pain from the other room, would not “this too will pass” be the wrong way to respond? Would not the proper loving response be to go to them in a bit of a panic to figure out what has gone awry and how it may be remedied, even if in the end the passing of both the pain and the healing is inevitable?

Essentially, both realities are such simultaneously. And in a life torn between eastern philosophy and western philosophy it is only the meeting of non-attachment and pragmatism that will suffice for me, at least at the moment. 

For a thing to be true at the same time is for there to be room for our assumptions to be incomplete. Two things being true at once is the allowance of the depths of reality’s beauty to pervade. It is to recognize the poetry of Buddhism in Christianity and vice versa. It is to taste the oneness of the heavenly places. 

Comparing and contrasting are both worthy endeavors. Because one thing is like another, or, very much not like another, is not cause to say that one is ultimately good or the other ultimately bad. It is a matter of relativity. For the council of “shoulder your cross” to be true and also “pay attention to the turnings of mind” to be true is not to say that one is inferior or proper but to say that both are boldly important and empowering. Both are invitations to a better way of living. 

We ought to be responsible. We ought to keep our backs upright and our ways just. We ought also be attentive. We ought to see plainly the colors of the rainbow in their majesty and the way that only through hunger is there reason to eat is there satiation. All is a divine mystery and one that ought be accepted and submitted to with a fullness of heart and a discernment of mind. 

At the same time is the persuasion of conservatism valid that it is liberalism valid. Both are open for dissection. And again, this is not to say wholly that one is better or that they are equal or that they really hold water at all, either of them. 

At the same time does the war in Ukraine rage that I drift through my pool in the early sunlight. At the very same time all is. What’s to be done about that is not perfectly clear but it perfectly is so. 

At the very same time is it incumbent upon a busy household to make sure that they take out the trash and wash the dishes it is that the plastics in the ocean stack and the rivers dry up. Are not both legitimate realities? Is not the myopia of modern first world living not a legitimate impediment to the tackling of huge globe stretching existential crises?

Is not a trip to McDonald’s both detrimental to the human body’s health and simultaneously kind to a person’s wallet? Is not the amount of USD in circulation ever expanding while the need for money to feed oneself and one’s family ever present? 

This experiment of not leaving anything out is a daunting one. It’s also an imperative one. Is it even something that the human mind is capable of? Possibly not but that’s where the notion of “God” comes in. The notion holds that our limited humanity is not all that is; that there is a certain karma which supersedes human existence while encompassing it. 

There is a new phenomena, which was initially introduced to me via a lovely documentary, called “wilding.” It is the deliberate human act of taking a parcel of land and creating the conditions for plant & wild life to begin to, again, thrive. It is an act of human submission and responsibility. It is an act of faith in both what can be done by an individual and what can be done by the divine all. At the same time does human action count that a human is not as a function of their own existence the great Yahweh. 

Essentially here the proposition is that in life it’s not so much this way or that way it is all of the ways. Not because all ways or edicts or philosophies or spiritual practices will produce the same results, but that all of human action is to some degree or another futile in lue of the grandness of the cosmos. No amount of wilding will ever change the fact that a comet could— well I guess NASA just proved that we are capable of blowing up comets so that analogy doesn’t work… let me try again. No amount of wilding will ever change the fact that the whole of our solar system could be swept up in a black hole at a moment’s notice. 

And yet the spectre of the black hole does not change the fact that I still need to visit the bathroom when I wake up in the morning. It doesn’t change the fact that when I stub my toe I feel a great coarsing pain. Both the black hole and the toe stubbing compose reality. And how wonderful is that?

It is not the life of the solitary that is the life of most esteem. It is not the life of the socialite that remains after the fire of eternity has burned away all else. Both are of life and of humanity. The outdoor cat and the indoor cat are one in the same, distinquished from one another by the thin veil of a roof and a few walls. 

The real tough thing to grasp in regards to this whole everything is everything thing is the sheer is-ness of it. And here we revisit the solitary for a moment and conceive of a question fitting for a true fool on a hill. How do you do it? As a bit of person-who-enjoys-sitting-alone-and-listening-to-the-wind myself, I would posit this response. It cannot be me who does the “grasping” of the “is-ness.”

Besides, what are words in the face of this great art? What is a “me” anyways? But that is for another time. But then what’s time?

Nondual, heaven, yoga, nirvana, union, ecstasy, God. These are words used to poke at this sense of “not me but also me but sort of something living through me but then maybe being the thing that’s doing the living through but also being none of it and also…” 

Where Thomas Merton was fond of the legalistic in thing whole domain, I am less so. I don’t care what you call it. I don’t care if you claim it to be you or god or allah or jehovah or lady gaga, it is what it is. 

Of course to borrow from biblical tongue, the person too caught up in the “it’s me” aspect is apt to fall from the lofty places down to the pit of endless suffering. And in this it goes back to the insufficiency of words to describe the indescribable. And again here the essence is the sentiment of “at the same time.”