October 12, 2005
Carry the things I love
Physics says that everything is made of smaller parts, atoms are the building blocks of life. For me, it is much more than protons and neutrons that make life worth living. I carry the things I love not by choice but by necessity. They help me get closer and closer to a point of realization that helps me understand that when I look at a sunset, instead of seeing the sun move below the horizon I am actually seeing the earth turn. As an artist I carry my tools, tangible and intangible, in order to bridge the separateness not only between each human being but also between each person and their potential for contemplative thought.
One time in the past the relationship between tangible and intangible things somewhat reversed. My Mom and I were sitting in her car at night discussing the universe, with sporadic screams of delights or revelations, when the car light suddenly blacked-out. This is when I noticed that the words, the ooh’s, and the ah’s seemed to exist separately from the mouths they were coming from. Abandoning the bodies they were being emitted from, as if the sounds were separate beings, totally original forms that did not acknowledge our presence. The core of the conversation suddenly had its own heart beat, and was pounding out invisible ponderings. I felt as though two voices were present in the car, yet neither she nor I were talking; we were listening to heated sounds that rang out in revealing silence. It was the first, and perhaps the last time that I could feel my intangibles, those things that I carry inside secure in my cage. For those few minutes my body was one with time and space, it had exchanged positions with my inner thoughts and heartaches, therefore creating a juxtaposition with physical and metaphysical existence. A confusion that for once in my life was comforting. A divine discussion with specters of truth.
Sometimes existential thoughts become too overwhelming, and then I have no idea about anything. This usually happens very late at night. To ground my self I think about what I know for sure. I am a brunette, I do like mathematics, and I like the rain when I’m not in it, a windy day in the summer is my favorite though. I always ask too many questions, which gets me into trouble with everyone, especially myself. I try not to use clichés too much, they irk me. I like all sorts of regular t-shirts, all colors. I am very indecisive, and very quixotic, which can be good or bad. I like love, all the forms it comes in. I am pretty superstitious. And I have a fear of crossing busy streets. I don’t like the light, and I can’t sleep at night.
I really try to only carry things that I love. I carry the love for that feeling when my body melts away after staring at one object too long and my vision goes hazy. I carry the secret love for the feeling right before I sneeze. I carry the love for feeling my feet burn when I walk barefoot on hot white sand. And I carry the love for my pair of molded and old pungent sneakers. These things, though simple, help me put my existence in a context that I can understand.
Do I need to convert tangibles into intangibles to be worth carrying? Which come first, the question or the answer? Most people would say the question obviously came first; but would a question exist in the first place if there had not already been an answer? Philosophy is the love of wisdom, but the root to that wisdom is the question of one’s existence. Repeatedly breaking down the answers to find the true eternal essence of the question is how reason is applied to abstract thoughts on life, death, right, and wrong. For me, the best way to look at life is through “high eyes,” what I call an objective philosophical view.
Before one ever asked the first question, there was a need for answers. What invisible force brought out the questions? If humans did not possess innate “ideas,” a question about anything would never have been raised. It is so difficult to distinguish between what is society induced and what is natural in a human, for one can never study the thoughts of the soul before it has a body. Once a baby is born, the child is overwhelmed with a world of established answers. These answers are so plentiful that one barely has a chance to search one’s own ideas before the answer of another is supplied. Due to scientific advancements, the mysteries and infinitesimal elements that make up all things, are in fact atoms. I often wonder hot my ideas about the concrete world would have differed if I had not been told what “reality” was made of.
What is death? Simply an ending that no one truly knows what is beyond it. Unlike the questions about wisdom, knowledge, or life, death is something that one must experience to really know what it is, and since it is a “once in a lifetime experience,” it remains the most perplexing question. Obviously, when a person dies, it is because his body ceases to operate. The real question is, however, what happens to the person’s soul? I do not believe that once the body dies the soul follows suit, for that would deny the natural flow of the ecosystem. In nature when one thing dies, another is born from the molecules of the deceased. Death is the transformation of a soul within a body to a soul within itself, a change from the physical to the metaphysical.
Perception is reality, and reality is how one perceives it: The idea of reality does not change, and if it appears to, that is simply because one’s perception has changed. However, there may be many different realities throughout one’s existence. Internal and external forces affect the perception one develops during life. One is born with the innate sensation that boundaries exist in nature, a “gut feeling” known as ethics. One, however, is also affected by the contemporary societal beliefs, known as morals, even when induced by popular conviction. In general, people are afraid of ultimately being alone, as they also know murder is wrong. Society tells people at different times in history, how they should conduct themselves. With all the input from different sources, it becomes a giant task to find the true idea of reality.
Although murdering another human being is widely accepted to a heinous act, what is the base of “wrongness” that makes it bad? Murder is the forced death upon another person. However, isn’t any death forced upon a person? This reasonably shows that death is innately thought of as wrong. Essentially, murder is the premature death of a person, which leads to the conclusion that there is a specific time for one to die, meaning that humans feel that there is predestination, or at least that one must find one’s place in life before leaving. But how are we to say that a person was not meant to die yet? Fate is the ultimate agency that predestines the course of events. To connect time and space, and the flow between the two, fate governs all cause and effect, action and reaction. However, the random nature of things, and the spontaneous occurrence of things, leads me to believe that it is not only predetermined but also determined at that point in time. In a sense, the is randomly floating down a certain path.
Philosophy asks questions like, “who am I?”, “where did we come from?”, and “what is the world made of?” On the other hand, what is the point of asking questions that can never really be answered? In order to answer that, another question is required: Does one still live life, even though one does not know why one is alive? These questions are the line drawn in the sand of ideas between the eternal abstract and the physical concrete of reality. If a number, although it is just a picture, is drawn, which is most real: the number or the pen that drew the symbol? The picture that was drawn by the pen, is simply lines that come together at certain points. It cannot be denied that the picture is real, as well as the pen, but the idea of the number is abstract, for we have only been programmed to recognize it as an amount. The picture itself is nothing, one cannot hold, touch, or taste a number, the only thing that makes a number real is the idea. The pen, however, holds its own tangible existence without any human recognition, it will always be an ink-filled pen that takes up space.
As I write this essay, the chair when I sit in begins to fade into the background of my consciousness while my ideas fill the room, the ideas feeling the most real. The chair’s touch changes as I get warmer and more involved with my thoughts. However, the idea or presence of the chair is the only thing that remains unchanged in my subconscious. Therefore, the answers came before the question.
I carry these things because I exist, and in turn because I exist I must carry these things. It is innate to have attachments, humans are social creatures that require a connection with something to survive. I carry my soul while my body carries me, the epistemological relationship between my thoughts and the embodiment of those thoughts in the tangible things that I carry guide me to understanding the origin to not only my thoughts but also to my possessions.