The opposite of Love is not Hate.
You can never anticipate where a profound realization is going to come from. I was just watching Adam Neely discuss the Uncanny Valley in Music, that thing that we react to with visceral, automatic hate. And—
For me it's a bad live performance. If you can't play the songs you've written, write simpler songs. If your songs can't get any simpler and you still can't perform them, you desperately need to retire.
Whatever.
Anyway.
Someone (in this video) said something profound: “The opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference.”
He's right. Love falls into the broader category of Intense Emotion – alongside such feelings as hate and rage and despair and joy, et al.
The opposite of nothing that you can feel for something is something - anything.
There is an argument in the Esoteric tradition - I believe it's in the Hermetica - that hot is not really the opposite of cold. From my copy, the editor explaining the scripture, then the scripture:
"Hermes says that this Oneness [the Mind of Atum or GOD] contains all opposites. This paradox can be understood by once more looking at the nature of your own mind. some things you experience are hot and others cold; some are bright and others dark; some you call good and others bad. Nothing that you experience can be both cold and hot, because they are opposites. Yet both cold and hot are experiences which you have. Your mind is the one thing which contains all opposites.
"Hermes teaches that the mind of a human being is made in the image of God's Big Mind. If we can free our minds from the limitations imposed by the physical body, we can experience the Mind of GOD. We were created with the specific purpose of learning to do this. This is the spiritual goal of human life. To reach this destination we must expand our awareness. We must use the power of our little minds to reach out to God's Big Mind."
Then the scripture of Thoth-Hermes:
"The universal forms do not change,
just as the constellations remain the same.
But instant by instant,
the particular forms transform,
as the sphere of heaven
changes as it turns.
The sky is wet then dry,
cold then hot,
bright then dark.
But these rapidly alternating forms
are all subsumed
under the universal unchanging form
of the sky.
The Earth is ever-changing,
generating, producing,
yielding different crops —
yet it remains the Earth."
[I'm going to warn you now, this veers wildly after reading that. My thoughts got tangled up in my thinking about Demeter from yesterday – Demeter means something like Not- or But-Mother in the pre-Greek Mycenean language. And that's very close to some of the things Peitho and Rob are talking about right now in our work, and I tripped hard on staying on topic. But I'm not fixing it, either. Sorry, not sorry.]
What that means is that hot is hot and cold is cold and there are sliders for each, but where does the slider for Hot become the slider for Cold?
And how the hell did I fall all the way down here? Golly, I can veer wildly away from where I think I'm going to go when I start writing.
Let me scroll up....
Oh, shit. I forgot what I was talking about, entirely.
Love, hate, and indifference.
And what that made me realize.
Love had and lost is better than love never had at all. I'll give Billy Shakes that.
But what does it really mean to lose love?
I ask that fully believing that indifference is preferable to difference. Feeling nothing about a subject, a thing, a happening, or a person is so much better than feeling anything.
Because feelings change. Feelings that are good can become feelings that are exquisitely painful.
But nothing? Nothing never changes.
And that's a statement you can take to the bank.
I've been lying awake at night a lot lately. I think, maybe, where this comes from will help me get where I'm going. Because I'm resisting myself. I can feel it. I can read it. I do this when I don't want to say or don't want to address or don't want to think about what I'm actually thinking about.
Sometimes I can get thousands of words out of myself without ever even approaching the thing I wanted to be thinking about.
Maybe it's that I'm that good at distracting myself.
I've been asking myself a lot of difficult questions lately. Questions like: What sort of reasons could an omniscient Creator GOD have for distracting a person IT has called to Service? Or Why do our minds go to the worst moments in our lives rather than the best? And How does GOD create a self-regulating universe without the use of or before the invention of Time Travel?
According to the esoteric tradition we and our consciousnesses are something like an inferior version of GOD. So what kind of person distracts himself?
I don't like the answers I come to.
A lazy person? An afraid person? A coward.
But what is a coward? And when is being a coward a bad thing?
Because cowardice is also self-preservation. Cowardice is doing those things which lead the self to continue living into the morrow. In a foxhole, cowardice is not running into no-man's-land. in a religious context, cowardice is not finding a martyrdom. Cowardice is not being torn apart for the amusement of the greater community. Is cowardice really that bad – or is it worse to ask someone to be brave? Is bravery the opposite of cowardice, even?
I don't know.
Origen thought he was a coward for hiding from the mobs that were tromping through his city killing troublesome "Christians". He thought it was braver - more honorable - to die. He was also called a heretic in his life and occulted from Christian history for like a thousand years. So.... Would he have been remembered if he died before he was educated and started writing? More likely, actually.
Would I be considered something other than I am if I had killed myself in high school? Would someone have written a song like “Jeremy” about me? Or am I glorifying suicide again?
So what is bravery - what is honor?
Fuck, I don't want to talk about that!
But these are things that need definitions and which I need to define if I'm going to be cromulent.
But maybe I don't want to be cromulent.
I've been having trouble sleeping. The nightmares are back. And the long quarters of hours of waiting for sleep to surprise me.
And I think I know why my mind goes to the darkest, least comfortable places in my memory when I want it to go to the good places.
Because the good places all lead to the bad places.
That's a difficult thing to process.
I once had a woman ask me if I had no happy stories. I didn't have a good answer for her. My life has been tragic. But have there been no good moments? Of course there have. [Even in the original draft I had past-tense “were”, here; I wasn't even able to use the present tense to describe things as having been good at another time in my life. That's what depression is, I think, that indigo-colored glasses feeling.]
There were only good moments with my wife until there were only bad moments.
But it's the bad moments I remember. Not because I don't want to remember her fondly; indeed, not even because I don't think of her fondly. I prefer to remember her well. I hope she is well.
I don't think she is, though – and that makes me sad for her. So I think about how I could have done more to save her.
Maybe I do this in broader strokes because when I remember stories I remember them by how they end. Kind of like how when you remember a joke you don't remember the setup nearly as well as you remember the punchline. Or with a song, the verses aren't meant to be as catchy and powerfully memorable as the choruses.
Maybe that's just how life works. Maybe life is just cycles, beats per year or something like that.
It seems irrelevant, maybe. But I once heard that we are more likely to remember the wrong answer in a series of multiple choice questions once the correct one is revealed – even if we got the question right. Our brains are so wildly inefficient.
And yet we think we can hold ourselves above one another. It's... laughable.
I do prefer to be able to sleep without difficulty and terror, though.
And I don't have any real reason to be feeling the way I do. Not... Well.
I keep thinking about how the things that I have wanted over the last seven years have died in my hands. And the marijuana. Depressants are known to depress the brain.
And I watch my fish tank, and my fish are alive, and my plants are mostly thriving – the ones that aren't being eaten by my fish. But... that's one of those cycles I was talking about.
Some things are meant to die. All things are meant to die.
Some things are meant to die tragically and before their time.
I do not have a healthy relationship with death. I was only acquainted with him as a child once, in any sort of real way. And it left a scar, for sure.
My pleco is still really afraid of me. But he's getting so big.
I don't have a healthy relationship with loss, either. I lost a lot as a kid. My father never let me win anything we did together. Ever. I quite playing competitive games with him entirely, just piggy-backed off him in co-op mode. Which was boring. We didn't play together much after a while. I didn't beat him at anything until I was nearly 20 years old. Which... is kind of humiliating to admit. But that says more about my father than it is me.
Because he cheated a lot.
Like, a lot.
He very much took advantage of the 18-year difference in our experiences and skillsets.
But that leaves an indelible mark, all that losing. You come not only to believe that you're a loser, but to identify as such.
That same woman who asked me if I had no good stories used to hate it that I call myself a loser. I've written about that in this space at length. I don't need to go into it.
I shouldn't even be where I am at all.
So, I've been struggling with sleeping and I'm having nightmares and my days are filled with this half-malaise where I feel like I should be further along with Rob, or I should be spending more brute force hours editing, or there's something I could be doing on my bass that I'm not... and I'm taking those habits I learned in my employment experience, that feeling like I have to be productive all eight hours and fifteen minutes I'm on the clock because the camera is literally watching... and I'm applying them to my desire for self-.... I really wanted to type immolation there to be funny. Like I'd done it by accident.
Self-improvement.
I think it's because I have so many writers in my Twitter feed.
Writers seem to be pathological about proving that writing is the same amount of effort as building roads. I've grown bored with it.
Jimmy says it better than I can: It's all writing.
It's all writing.
Even just trying to find that quote from Thoth-Hermes about hot and cold, I stumbled across answers to what I'm experiencing in my life and in my relationship with Rob that will help me understand and translate what's coming next in his life. I mean, that's the point of Scripture – but it's more than that. It's what I've been talking about in so many of these pages: It's keeping your eyes open and your ears clear and being aware for the messages your life is sending you. This life is all about you.
Rob's insistence that these conversations aren't important or going anywhere is killing me. I want to know. I want to know who he was and how he got here. I care so much less about everything else. So that's what I'm going to get out of him if it kills the both of us.
Everything that comes across the screen of my TV or that I engage with in a day, it's all writing. Even if words don't make it onto the page... what's the hurry? It's not like anyone else cares.
...
I've lost the thread so badly I don't even remember what I'm supposed to be talking about again. And if this were sex, this would be a second failed attempt at penetration and time to do something else. you're not into it, Vincent.
Not true. I am.
I'm just also shielding myself from something. And maybe if I write it down, someone else will see it and they can point out for me where I'm going so damn wrong. That's one of the functions the Eleusinian Cult served, after all.
Even my sleep period is writing.
That's what I wanted to say. The dreams and the inability to sleep and the obsessive thoughts and the feeling like I'm a completely open conduit for an energy that is too great to comprehend, and like I am too inadequate to contain it is.... It's all writing.
This psychic turmoil I feel is how a Universe can self-regulate itself without the need for time travel or direct intervention. Not necessarily mine – but this same thing happens to people whom others actually do listen to. People who know how to be cromulent long enough to get published. People who aren't so drastically broken and so dramatically disadvantaged.
People hate it when I call myself that, too. Because all they see is a white boy. A white boy with no last name and who was born to desperate poverty.
That desperate poverty part – you can overcome not having a last name by making connections to people who do; but desperate poverty – that part is inescapable. It gets in you and it affects you. It makes you strange.
It made me intolerant of meanness.
And angry enough to punch out at the world.
Which is something I should harness. Because anger isn't purely destructive. There are plenty of people who use their anger to do creative, healthy things. I just swallow it. And that means I shit it out as... what? My self-loathing, if I had to figure. Irritable bowl syndrome, indeed.
I'm afraid of my anger.
That's as honest a statement as I'll make. I'm afraid of very little – but I am afraid of my anger. There are consequences – even for the righteous – for acting out of anger.
So I don't know anymore – what this is about, why I'm still doing this.
We've eclipsed 2000 words. That's the length I said I wanted for a PLog.
I guess that's good enough then, isn't it?
Hey, thanks for reading this. I'm sorry it's— Well, no, I'm not, actually. I need to get back in the habit of doing these, and sometimes this is just what they'll be. Because sometimes I'm going through what I like to term a biological depression – some might call it a chemical depression – and there's nothing I can do about that other than try to eat when I don't want to and to remember my Zen techniques for not dwelling on my suffering, and to actually write, too.
Some of the things I'm feeling are probably just the constipation version of writer's block. Not that it's not there - that it's impacted somehow.
Like a breach birth.
I just need to reach my hands up in that horse vagina and pull that colt out, don't I?
Fuckin gross.
Thanks for sticking around. I'll talk at you later.
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