Friday, March 7, 2008

Literary Exercise # 18: How to Build a Civilization...Or Where to Put the Nuts and Bolts When the Instructions Have Gone Bad

So I'm back on this etch-a-sketch now--if you shake your computer seven times fast you might just create an enjoyable read--otherwise, I hope I can lead you along the tree villages and roped bridges of my mind without you thinking too badly of the view, or entertaining the act of jumping off. I've been thinking about civilization--partially because my school's addressing the topic at a conference--and I'm trying to get a bird's view down--flying over it, picking out the topography and the favorite tendencies of the landscape. You might say that just as mountains like to stay where they are, so do people like to establish settlements--and walk around them as if to secure the corner stones with a kick of their heel. In that sense topography is the dimpled soil that follows the stride and fancy of these man-walkers. You know, looking down from above is almost like watching someone speaking an unknown language right in front of you. Two young bronzed students sitting on lawn chairs by the edge of a small bluff--following the traces of the decline until it plunges downward and outwards of terra firma. A couple on a walk through a park mixed with cement and trees shedding their bark and meshed garbage-receptacles and benches and underpasses tagged with young ambition or ambivalent imaginations. Two humans standing 12 inches apart, where I could dive in and do four barrel rolls between them without them noticing my presence or critiquing my sophomoric movements. One human hunching around a soaked canopy, smoking a cigarette and wincing at its sting, leaning back a little too fast, feeling the natural liquids within him try to maintain their equilibrium against the introduction of another warm current.

These are all experiences that are common to man--are common to the nature that trod in his shadow and vanishes when we try to shed the light of reason upon it. They are all in nature, and if you will, we are all in nature, which we expose by stories, songs, architecture, art galleries, contemplation, exploration, takings walks, hunting (dare I say it? One nature asserted over the rest), ice fishing, four-wheeling, going to the mall, bowling, drinking, drinking games (and cards), frustration, boredom, restlessness, anger, strife, divorce, abortion, politics, policies, diplomacy, political correctness, passiveness, indifference, agnosticism, determinism, democracy, world orders, humanity, humanitarian efforts, sociology, anthropology, education. Really, the canon is only closed when we stop speaking. And speech is only stopped when we stop living--or when our thoughts are too utterly redundant and self-torturing that we have to stop them--if we are to continue existing. I will say this. I read a young writer named Brendan Case, and of his desire to explore the world by the stories it tells. And I have to plant my flag in the same soil, never imperialistically but listening--straining to hear beyond the world's conventions--how nicely they are determined by man--and to drink the distilled draughts, if to poison myself, at least to arrive at the essence.

So where can I begin? If the world didn't need politics it would be solely with story, and I can envision a world as such, where we present our ideas to each other and gape in astonishment that such a wonderful mystery would be revealed to us. And even if partially, that it would consider us in its thoughts to feel the subtext grazing against our chest--wading through it as fellow travelers, not conspirators. And here I see the utter breakdown of civilization--we have no choice but to claim to know the mystery, whether through our laws, our governments (and thus our nationalism), our knowledge, and our behavior (scratch this last point--it may not even be remotely connected--or perhaps directly). If we didn't have to know the knowledge of the universe, we wouldn't have to decide what is right. And if we didn't have to decide what is right, we wouldn't have to stand for it. And if we didn't stand for it, we could stand for whatever we wanted...but hang on, that would be for what is right.

Do you see this conundrum? Our whole existence requires us to slide down a funnel to a central opening, one that may or may not fit all preconceptions of a desirable ride or destination. Do you see that we are creatures of movement? We cannot help but be in space, and by our negation of static-ity, choose one place over another. And this leads to tension, argument, exclusion, fighting, and striving for dominance. It is something that every civilization has been fated to deal with, and that every civilization has been doomed to resolve. Our choice then--in being able to make such stories as delight the heart of man--is our damnation--to be right or to be wrong, to be included or to be left out.

Is determinism any better? Perhaps from the general drift of this essay, you would surmise that I have an opinion on that. And that may be correct, except that we have no terms of evaluation--our hosts are the scientists of skepticism--and we have to entertain them, to the last point. Thus the tragedy of human existence (oh what absolute terms!). To choose you have to suffer, and to not choose, you have to be unaware (or aware of your unawareness) of yourself and anything else.

Perhaps you find my efforts a bit feeble. Never mind that Plato and Aristotle were just men like me, men like us, men like the world. So they may have taken one of these for granted, and, it seems, so must I. Which I do not know--it is entirely possible that we live in such an advanced world that even determinism can critique itself. The "I" may critique the "I." The "what is" may question "what is." It seems though, that we have to do one or the other. Whatever the contradictions may suggest about our actions. So--the question is--if we have those who claim to know, and claim to do what is best--do we have those who claim that our bests may really not be the question? I do know...but I suspect.

 
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