02/04/13

Yesterday, being April 1^st, I was reluctant to write anything, from fear that I would end-up making a fool of myself. So I wisely resisted the temptation and kept my thoughts, such as they were, to myself.

Today, however, is another day, as they say, and I feel the need to unleash my inner demons, as it were, by putting pen (biro) to paper (lined notebook) and penning these autobiographical lines, which I trust will not prove too boring to any prospective or actual reader – should I be fortunate enough to have any readers in the months or years to-come.

Conservatism is inherently reactionary; it resists change, as, up to a point, do we all, especially when it would not be to our spiritual, financial, social, or material advantage.

Sometimes I feel like K in The Castle, hemmed-in and restricted by all manner of social and bureaucratic constraints, which have the effect of limiting one's course of action and effectively precluding one from actually getting anywhere. By the way, does not K stand for Kafka, the novel's author? I read him years ago, including his other novels, America and The Trial, but latterly I have had the pleasure, or perhaps I should say privilege, of seeing the film version featuring the late, great Ulrich Mühe in the lead role of the land surveyor, or land vermesser, as they say in German, who cannot make any headway against the social and bureaucratic obstacles placed in his way by the castle authorities, all of which is aptly symbolized by the prevailing blizzard that forms a continuous backdrop to the narrative and constantly blows snow back into the trudging, even faltering, figure of K as he tramps dutifully but with an impending sense of futility towards das Schloss, forever out-of-reach and seemingly out-of-bounds to him. Susanne Lothar, Frank Giering, and Martin Brambach are just some of the other well-known and respected actors in this estimable adaptation by Austrian director Michael Haneke, whose films include the somewhat newsreel-prone 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, the rather unpleasant Funny Games and, more recently, The White Ribbon, also featuring Susanne Lothar.

Conservatism (to return to that subject from another angle) is, it seems to me, an inherently female tendency to resist male-oriented change, especially of a religious or moral order. But putting constraints upon females is not the same as advancing beyond them, even if it is impossible to do so without having, in some degree, constrained them or otherwise managed to circumvent and/or ignore their efforts – spirit warring upon ego, will upon soul – to constrain one from advancing via ego or soul towards some degree of male independence and – devil forbid! - some form of self-sufficiency. For what use to females could males who are self-sufficient possibly be? But the female doesn't have to ask such a rhetorical question. She simply acts according to her nature and opposes both ego and soul from her respective objective points-of-view in spirit and will, depending on the context. And if you can ignore her, that is to say 'turn the other cheek', your reward is … what? Either the earth or heaven, depending on your bent. For, even though they differ, as the corporeal from the ethereal, subjectivity is common to both, and subjectivity is beyond both the spirit and the will of female imposition.

Fiction, poetry, and drama are effectively 'beneath my pale', so to speak, and therefore not something I would want, at the ripe old age of sixty, to return to, even though I had, in my youth, to pass through them in order to get to where I am today and where I have generally been, in original philosophical terms, for the past twenty-five or more years, that is, since at least the mid-1980s. Poetry I could conceivably slide back to, but fiction and drama would, if done properly, require a change of axis (state-hegemonic) and, to my mind, an effective change of gender which, these days, I wouldn't wish to psychologically undergo.

Suffice it to say that one who evolves towards and even into metaphysics … will not be too partial to disciplines owing more, one way or another, to physics, chemistry, or metachemistry, quite apart from the subordinate gender options of pseudo-metachemistry (under metaphysics), pseudo-chemistry (under physics), pseudo-physics (under chemistry), and pseudo-metaphysics (under metachemistry). Once one has burnt one's literary bridges, as it were, one has no option but to press on to the end of one's road and eventually achieve one's goal as an independent and original artist or writer.

Not having seen, never mind known, my father, I had a pressing desire, brought up as a single child outside the land of my birth (Ireland), to discover who the heck I was and, by and by, I turned this quest for self-discovery, beginning with books and study, into philosophy, my life's vocation, only to discover that I am more, as we all are, than the sum of one's parts, having more than one ancestor and an altogether different set of environmental influences and conditioning experiences than could be attributable to any given source.

For me, the paternal aspect of my ancestry must remain an enigma, since not only do I not know very much about it, but I have no time for that which failed me as a father and to which, in consequence, I can owe neither allegiance nor respect. This fact also underlies my attitude to conventional religion, since any type of 'father', or so-called 'father', is effectively 'beneath my pale' and therefore taboo. Fortunately, the Baptist church I attended in Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, compliments of the children's home to which my mother had sent me at the age of ten, did not have 'fathers', at least not in the religious sense, but only ministers or vicars or parsons or whatever, for whom I had, in spite of my Catholic antecedents, a degree of respect, even if I had no loyalty whatsoever to the Baptist or Protestant faith.

I've heard it said, not least by my mother, that the educated are generally lacking in common sense, and, to be sure, there would seem to be some truth in that opinion, insofar as what could be called common sensibility tends to exclude common sensuality, as physics excludes chemistry, and Puritans, or nonconformists, tend to maintain their distance from the generality of Roman Catholics.

But there are also what could be called uncommon sense, or sensuality, and uncommon sensibility, both of which would not only be mutually exclusive but above the common mass of humanity, holding noumenally antithetical positions in metachemistry and metaphysics. Axially considered, common sensibility would be ruled, as in England, by uncommon sensuality, physics by metachemistry, whereas common sense (or sensuality) tends to be led, as in Ireland traditionally, by uncommon sensibility, where a degree of metaphysics in the celibate Catholic clergy has tended to preside over the sinful commonness (dominated by chemistry) of the Catholic masses, who would have been expected to 'come clean', as it were, and confess their sins in the expectation of verbal absolution, however temporary such a forgiveness - ostensibly through the representatives of Christ - might be in a society characterized, as Western societies have increasingly become, by worldly criteria and, hence, the domination, willy-nilly, of the masses at the expense of both autocratic and theocratic elites.

However that may be, one can go beyond that to a truly uncommon sensibility which owes nothing to Catholicism and still less to the Confessional; a sensibility, I mean, that is only possible to those who, having repudiated metachemistry, are alone capable of taking uncommon sensibility all the way to paradise, the paradise of metaphysical heaven.

What other people think about you counts for nothing compared with what you think about yourself. People may hold you in high or in low esteem, but if you don't hold yourself in high esteem … for who you are and what you do … no amount of adulation from others can compensate you for the lack of it. Contrariwise, no amount of denigrative abuse by persons who choose to hold you in low esteem can make any inroads into or detract from your self-esteem, if you are truly proud of who you are and what you do.

Actually, those with the most self-esteem usually do least, while, conversely, the ones who do the most, who are most active and sociable, usually have little or no self-esteem because their estimation of themselves is largely dependent upon others. This is especially so, I believe, of women.