There are as many ways to live in this world as there are people in this world, and each one deserves a closer look.

this is something i've been thinking about for a while--is there just one question? i mean, whenever i get into debates with my friends, we eventually spin so far out of where we have the capacity to argue that we have to stop. usually, the questions we come to are those cliched questions like, "what is life?" "what is the responsibility of human beings?" "how did life come about?" "how should morality balance with practical needs?". what i think is that maybe these are all the same question. all of art, literature, and science is trying to answer the same question. and i know that you are probably sitting on the edge of your sea waiting for me to answer the question, but i'm afraid i can't express it in our language any more than i can answer it. the question is somewhat like those listed above, but those are only a sampling. the trouble it that we (humans) are the first race on our planet to have gotten past the survive-in-nature phase. there is no template for what we are supposed to do. that's why future races in science fiction books are so disgusted with us--we are the test run. we are trying to work out what it is we should be doing with ourselves, but it's not in our nature to answer the question. perhaps that's because it is an unanswerable question. well, not unanswerable. it's like the equation x=y. there are an infinite number of solutions, and therefore it is unsolvable. you can't even simplify or reduce it in any way. you just have to plug in some numbers and see if it works.




LINK

i wasn't intending for this to be as smite-y and biblical as it turned out.

his eyes opened slowly. they were crusty with plaster and dirt and unwillingness to awaken. he knew, even before they opened, what he was about to see. he was in that state of consciousness when the mind is awake, but the body is not. he could not feel his wounds. he could not hear the silence all around him.
even after his eyelids opened, his eyes refused to tell him. his eyes were sympathetic, parental. his eyes didn't want him to see.
the ceiling was gone. blocks of wood and plaster and tile lay about him in the harsh, unchanging daylight. he felt that his weirdly twisted body was being pressed on passively. he looked down, and saw that he was pinned under a layer of what was once his roof. he sighed and closed his eyes, trying to extend the moment before he had to fight with the debris.
he knew just what had happened. he knew that if he stood up and looked around, the other houses would be untouched. he knew that no matter how hard he fought, he was dying and would not ever get up. he knew that he had made a mistake. he knew that no one was coming to save him.

this is truly the greatest thing ever.

happy eostre, everybody!

which is

my mind has come full circle in an attempt to think of a title so i must leave you with this, a lame excuse for a joke.

what am i supposed to do? you know, most people who look at things like this are either just lying when they say that they like it, or they're comparing it to hundreds of other things they've seen and therefore not really looking at the thing itself. art has to be accessible in *some* way. most would sneer at that statement, and my response to that sneer is, if it is not accessible, what am i supposed to do? you can have as much intent and emotion as you want when you're *making* something, but if you don't communicate to me what it is that you're feeling or saying, then you haven't really made art, you've made tissues. if you look at a used tissue, you can't tell what it is that the person was feeling when they cried into it. its just refuse. and you can make up perhaps what they were trying to say, but you could just as easily do that with any object in the universe. i guess that's not true. i guess the difference is that you know that the creator was trying to say something, as opposed to what the creator of say, a stop sign was trying to say. i think that's the reason that nature is, and always will be, more impressive to me than art. art is the spillover of someone's mind, or better yet, the mind itself. nature is not. nature does not seek to express a single thought or even a group of thoughts. it does not have a purpose. it was an accident. i guess that's the point of some kinds of art--to try to make something that didn't come out of your brain but that just happened. however, most art is just trying to express what it is that is going on in the artist's mind. and i don't think i'm interested in that unless it is expressed to me in a way that changes my point of view.