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Author: Bartleby

Next Steps: Now that we’ve agreed on the undoubtable values

Next Steps: Now that we’ve agreed on the undoubtable values

We agreed that any pattern of thought and action that refuses to ever sacrifice universal values like awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competence, kindness, shared joy, and equality within the Love; we agreed that any such sacrifice would steer human thought/feeling/actions into places that were not meaningful, interesting, understandable, or standable to human beings.

We agreed that corruption is a mistake and that it is the state of affairs in which impulses not guided by the universal values rule the moment, and that corruption can overtake an individual human being or a group of human beings, and that corruption–like all human things–is a thing of degree.

After that I don’t know: did we agree on anything more?

I guess we didn’t, because you sided with what I think is cruel and stupid.

So what now?

I’m asking you, because I can’t figure this out all alone.

Give me a real philosophy

Give me a real philosophy

Give me a real philosophy
Give me a philosophy that actually fucking helps
Give me a philosophy that helps
I’m sick of these ideas that twist and turn like leaves in the sunny wind.
What the use are they?
Where’s the philosophy that helps me to live for real?
Where’s the philosophy that helps my country stop falling apart?
Where’s the philosophy that knows how to help us all?
Where’s the philosophy that tells the Truth until Goodness reins?
I don’t see it; I don’t find it; I don’t hear it.
I just don’t.

There’s Nothing Left But Work

There’s Nothing Left But Work

The choices all made by you and not you
And Fate fat old self-satisfied horn beast,
A dragon twisting in mad whooshing flight–
Her little say also swirled in the tea.

So whatchya gonna do? It’s up to you.
You flee the scene? thin blue line winds you down
up into tidy red-shine ribbon bow
I’m sorry: you’re the scene now, my dear.

Take it or leave it; remember only please:
leave it and laughter drops always thud dead
from knowing it’s a lie

There’s nothing left but to work, nothing left
but throw your shoulder through the bulwark brace.

No,
Brute force won’t rescue the princess, won’t save
your soul, won’t change the tide, won’t help anyone.

How can I bury myself in my work when misdirected work is worse than worthless?
How can I bury myself in work when work needs insight to work and I’m just
some fool who wanted to bury himself in mindless work
and in that way beat the beat that can’t be beat?

Giving Up

Giving Up

So giving up anyway
done I quit I can’t
now you know
too much

I walk the edges and bound the lines
It carries the weight, it pulls the tide
I move the cartons, I squish the jugs
It carries the time, it swings us wide
Now I care not for this mistake which I cannot
unmake
whatever it was
whoever did it
wherever it took place
however its burrowed down deep
to where I cannot reach but cannot escape

Who’s fault?
Privileged asshole
Everyone thinks they have it rough
Twenty-five years of walking around talking about how you can’t take it anymore
A long time to talk to yourself, lonely and bored, unsure of your footsteps.
Twenty-five years of trying to find someone to talk to
when you won’t play the game
not because you’re too good for it
not because you’ve got principals
not because you can’t make out the rules
not because you don’t believe in the parameters
just because you can’t
you can’t do it
you just can’t do it
you have to go home
wherever you are
whatever you’re doing
whoever you’re with
need to go home
a place that isn’t
a nest not there

In the wrong for all your self-indulgence
Wasting time, wasting everything, letting everything fall apart
can’t help yourself, can’t help others, can’t help the collective, can’t help but drink two beers with gross thai food two days after having sworn off alcohol for the next three months
Hmmm

Giving up
I quit
For so many years talking of, fantasizing of, dreaming of quitting
sometimes you come close
but it’s never like you wished when you were young and eager,
when you wished you could lie your head on her stomach and melt away with her
And of course
Yeah
well that
Whoops
Everyone has there little ups and downs

Not Drinking Day 1

Not Drinking Day 1

How do you not on Friday when you are on Monday?

I know how to drink too much Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and to reach a point of internal chaos that borders on madness; that authors regrettable emails, posts, Missed Connections; that yells before it thinks or even feels; that would sell out the whole world for the privilege of collapsing into some pretty lady.

I know how to then wake up on Monday with my stomach torn up, my eyes puffy and tired, my brain groggy and sad; and to then say, “I am done drinking! I am done with this bullshit! I am done wasting my life!”

But that’s Monday morning. How can Monday morning reach Friday evening?

The trick–and let me for jocular cabbie-cap, knickers, big-eyed and buck-toothed jocularity snap my gray shoe-shine rag on your shiny, square-toed, black patent leathers–my friend, the trick is easy: every day you gotta do what you really want to do with your life, make your life full of real life. That way, come Friday: you’re ready for ‘er! Come Friday, you say to yourself: Oh, great, now I have some time to finish that essay, catch up with that friend, read that novel, make that delicious dinner, arrange my apartment just so, do that yoga class I’d been meaning to try … – you see? The trick is to work at enjoying wholesome fun, which you deep down really prefer anyway.

Hmm, yeah, OK.

Temporary Insanity

Temporary Insanity

We plea temporary, alcohol-induced madness for the span of this weekend and half last weekend.

You can plead like that, but insofar as you are sane, you have a duty to preserve and expand that sanity.

But what about courting a little crazy for the sake of new artistic angles, or just to escape the pressure of the day-to-day? Don’t we all benefit from sanity breaks?

Maybe, but you are going to have to pursue other, safer departures from standard consciousness. You could meditate, pray, freewrite, exercise.

Hmmm, OK

The Myth of Sisyphus & Something Deeperism – While Drinking

The Myth of Sisyphus & Something Deeperism – While Drinking

Hey party people!

This one goes out to everybody who obsessed over The Myth of Sisyphus in their early 20s, at least partially motivated by a rumor about Albert Camus’s Bodhisattva status, and who then evolved their own philosophical notions partially from this reading and rereading, and who now 20ish later is trying to put everything together into some kind of coherent path while alcohol and other give-ups continue to beat them!

The Myth of Sisyphus starts out with a little note from the author explaining that he’s not claiming that the intellectual parameters within which the essay takes place are the Final Truth; rather, he’s examining these parameters and following them to their own conclusions, while still remembering that they may very well be nothing more than the errors of one time and place within the human-flow.

Something Deeperism agrees with some of the points Camus made in his youthful essay, but Something Deeperism also says: “Yes, this essay is in part predicated upon the errors of specific time and place, and the Truth won’t be caged therein: ENTER SOMETHING DEEPERISM.”

[A note to scholars: Please footnote this for us; we’re operating from decades old memories; please footnote this for us and forgive us this further indulgence.)

What we agree with:

First Thing We Agree On
There is no progress without awareness of where one is within one’s own thought and feelings. If you lie to yourself about what you understand and believe, you are not present in your own thinking/feeling and cannot really travel with your own thoughts to your own conclusions. You pretend to understand, believe in and care about your own ideas, but what you are really doing is confusing yourself while desperately clutching ideas that make no sense to your mind/heart. You make no real progress, but wander instead within a desperate grab for a SENSE OF REAL MEANING you feelingly smush your dogmas (be they religious, secular, and/or skeptical) onto.
Therefore, one must first admit where within one’s thoughts and feelings one finds oneself (apparently Nietzsche disagreed, but this was part and parcel of his ultimate nihilism: the sacrifice of a coherent search after meaning for grand feelings about fearless revolutionarism).

Second Thing We Agree On
Humans long for a salvation that they can understand. They cannot stand to live without a Meaning to Life that they know is True and that they know is there’s.

What We Disagree On
The notion that humans cannot have that salvation that they can understand. What, 20th Century Continental Thought, we humans cannot have is a literal/definite/mathematical understanding of our salvation.

I am so lonely.
I am just so lonely.
And for so long now.
It is too much.
And tomorrow I have to get to work at 8AM so I can have an hour of quiet while I work on payroll.
I am just so tired and lonely.
And the worldhistoric midterms are coming as US detention centers are keeping applicants caged like criminals–worse than criminals, since at least criminals are allowed to go outside.
I know because my friend who is married with children and working 50 hours a week volunteers his time to try to help some poor guy from Nigeria whose family is in hiding because he’s a crazy Christian and some crazy Muslims have it in for him and who just lost his first go because the judge has gut feelings about which countries are dangerous and which aren’t so bad.
I know because I waste all my free time in Brooklyn while twenty miles away in New Jersey this guy hasn’t felt the sunlight in over a year while his family hides in Nigeria and I drink.

The Problem Camus Wasn’t Allowed To Go Beyond
Albert Camus, sainted smoker (I quit, thank you!) and hallowed ecrivian, was not allowed to make this true statement:
Human beings cannot have literal insight into their own salvation, but they can still have adequate insight into their own salvation.
We can’t capture all our experiences with words and ideas, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have whole-being (ideas, feelings, and the Light shining through each conscious moment–all working imperfectly but still adequately together) insight into the meaning of our lives.

When I knew Camus, when we wound together around a foggy undersea peninsula, holding our gin, lighting our fags, and admitting that we weren’t all we meant to be: at that time I said to him: we’ve no reason to suppose that the intellectual and emotional aspects of a human cannot relate adequately well to a TRUE GOOD that shines through each conscious moment and shouts that and in what way human life is MEANINGFUL: obviously, the True Good is wider and deeper and more certain and perfect than our ideas and feelings, so they’ll never be a literal/definitive/1:1 intellectual and/or emotional understanding of the True Good, but all that means is that human life is not math, which, I mean, come on: of course it isn’t.

And he said to me: True that, but the real question is how are you going to help that poor man stranded in your defunct justice system?

Author: DL Hopeless, famous theoretical problem-solver

Intro Essay: Something Deeperism Institute

Intro Essay: Something Deeperism Institute

Welcome to the Institute for Theoretical & Applied Something Deeperism!

We’re here to advance the theoretical and practical knowledge of, love for, and engagement with the general worldview that: “Yes!, there is something like an Absolute Truth, and we humans can and should relate meaningfully to that Absolute Standard For Thought & Action–just not literally.”

Something Deeperism is not some weird, esoteric, marginal worldview. On the contrary: We are all already Something Deeperists: None of us can escape either the insight that without an Absolute Standard For Truth & Action our thoughts and actions flounder hopelessly and dangerously about, or the insight that attempting to claim literal understanding of the Absolute Truth makes no sense to any of us. Both these realizations are burned indelibly into every human conscious moment.

Sometimes we look away from these fundamental, inescapable insights; but all that accomplishes is confusing our own thought and actions: we slip away from awareness of our own place within our own feelings, ideas, and actions; to the degree we do that, we make less sense to ourselves, believe in and care our own thoughts and actions less, and generally lose agency and control over own thoughts and actions. When one’s awareness thus abandon its post at the helm of one’s thoughts and action, all the silly impulses that think they should rule grab at the wheel, and madness, chaos, and evil invariably ensue.

The question, then, is not whether or not we are Something Deeperists. The task is not convincing people to become Something Deeperists. The work of the Something Deeperist Institute is, rather, simply this: to together discover how to be better individual Something Deeperists, and how our organizations, systems, cultures, entertainments, and so on can help both individuals and groups get better and better at finding the sweet spot between (common error 1:) doubting away the only possible firm foundation for thought and action (aka: the Absolute Truth) and (common error 2:) confusing ideas and/or feelings about the Absolute Truth for the Absolute Truth.

Human beings being things of degrees, our Institute does not indulge in daydreams of perfection, but merely looks to push ourselves and our world a little more towards the gentle, the wise, the Good.

So far, the ITASD is only a pile of essays written by Bartleby Willard and Andy Watson. So far, these essays are a mixed bag, and it is far from clear even to their authors/only-readers what use they could ever be. So far, the goal is far off and hazy, the riders slump parched and clammy-exhausted, their mounts gallop with the stumbling sorrow of dying beasts, and worry sits high in the night sky, twinkling like the only star such hopeless hopes deserve.

We’ll now round up and organize essays already extant. Pray for us. We know our insides shattered, our fingers slipped, our adventures splattered and ineffective like the cool-drying muds that pinch our skin and mascara our eyelashes. We know! But we want to grow stronger, to get better, to somehow help ourselves and others. So pray for us, for our efforts. And join us as we pray: “Help us, That within and shining through Which Alone Knows, Cares, & Can!: Help us to all together grow in wise kind compassionate effective joy, and have fun together.”

Hey! Let me just say one thing: I think we should divide this project into two main categories: Something Deeperism in the individual spiritual path & Something Deeperism as a common reality for groups of people. The first category’s way chill; the second a little more circumspect, worried, peevish. Individuals can debate among themselves the pros and cons of various metaphysical positions and there’s no harm and some fun in a little jocular cajolery between metaphysicians. However, there are certain core values that all humanly-meaningful/practicable worldviews doggedly refuse to abandon, and this fact needs to be solemnly, earnestly, painstakingly, and repetitively acknowledged by all of us. Because when we forget how much we are all in this together and how much we all deep within know and are that Truth, we treat our fellow shipmates as pirates; they return the unsavory sabery (we made an adjective out of “saber” here; is it confusing?; we’re worried it might be confusing; we’d remove it, but, well, we just can’t, just can’t remove it right now) favor; the ship drifts cross-hull across the reef.

AMW/BW

Still it’s only wishing

Still it’s only wishing

A man sits alone a month before midterms that there’s good reason to worry will be stolen by Russia or some other entity that wants to spread panicked-sick dysfunction and squelch competent shared joy.

A man sits alone in his spacious one bedroom apartment of a Sunday morning, gazing down at the sidewalk below where another man uses an orange-bristled push-broom to move some kind of sandy dirt (?or is it sawdust?) all over the wide sidewalk, near the corrugated bent broke and bending wall painted a rusty red, defaced by bubbly graffiti and topped with petering-out barbwire-loops.

A man gets older dreading another Monday that he’ll have to go to work since he’s not managed to find his way into:

Sunlit freetime reading writing creating moving playing living
while somehow magically also being well-enough-to-do and being adequately helpful
as also somehow magically Democracy, decency, wisdom, and real kindness prevail
and move everything gently away from scary boring precipices and towards a sustainable platform
where we can all find our way into and with the Light–both as individuals and together.

A man sits there with a crink in his shoulder, and some sleepiness around his eyes, having drank too much Friday and Saturday.
He sits there, hoping to somehow magically pull it together on this late-riser Sunday. Hopes to somehow pull it together and find the win-win that springs him from the workaday and the country and world from corruption.
Yes, corruption is the problem–both for individuals and collectives.

A man desires a woman
A man wants the means to live well
and to take his woman on nice trips
where they can just the two of them
sink into foreign places and faces
and into each other, two souls that have agreed to be happy together

A man desires every hot young curvature that crosses his bored-stiff field of vision.
A man wants the means to fuck around all day long day after sunny easy, wander-wide, dine/sleep-high-end day.
And to take some impossible explosion of bosom hip and joyous femininity on trips where they get along and go alone and together a little deeper into life and love.

A man desires a political reality that is stable and just; and an economic one that gives everyone wealth, health, and time to explore and grow; and a cultural one that supports open-hearted/-minded spirituality, thought, and art–that believes most fundamentally in awareness, clarity, honesty, accuracy, competent effective kindness, mutual respect and consideration, and the shared joy of knowing we are all in this together and are equal in what is most important: our place in God’s heart.

A man can desire such collective goods while still longing for the privilege to sneak off with some compatible young lady, sneak off with her into the boundless youth of a quiet, healthy, ancient life along yon sparkling sea, with fresh vegetables, clean air, and varied hikes. The secret, private, out-of-the-way happiness of a lucky blue-zone villager or–and this is much more what we’re here confessing to–a rich self-indulger.

Wouldn’t it be nice
if we had a system
where everyone was held up high

Wouldn’t it be nice
if we could all chill
without letting it all fall down

Still it’s only wishing
for flowers without toil
Here I’m still wishing
as the cold vipers uncoil

for a life both pleasant and decent

Author: PD Leon, still sea-sick from the exuberances of my most embarrassing century