Smoke and Bounce

4:42 am EST

"THE PIOUS NEPTUNE"

The middle of nowhere is somewhere; that's why it has a "middle". As such, my feeling of being nowhere and going nowhere in my life is indicative of remembering a past, expecting a future, and desiring all the time to discern my identity and purge the illusory from the essential. Maybe my life's purpose is to evaluate the inequalities of importance of the two sides of all paradoxes; the unequal purities of the dichotomies I come to appreciate with age. There are opposites of simple truths which are not themselves false -- however, they depend on qualifications (sometimes complex) derived from the same foundations of the simpler truth.

Suspend your incredulity a moment to consider water. Perhaps nothing in the universe could seem more deterministic than the activity of this wet thing we call inanimate; it submits itself to heat or lack of heat, the gravities of the earth and moon, the appetites of organic life, the chaos of its own cohesiveness, its own power to dissolve other substances; and who knows what else? Water submits to anything -- in theory you could even separate a single H2O molecule from all its brothers and throw it in a jail cell. But is the life of the aquatic really deterministic? Indeed; is it life? Is it animate? To put it poetically, is Neptune willful?

Compare Neptune to ourselves, our corporeal, mortal forms. Not once in eternity has Neptune ever bucked the natural order, or deviated from it; never put up the slightest resistance to the laws of the universe (the same laws granting water its remarkable qualities). Now look at yourself: an aerobic animal who would putrify if you jumped off a bridge to "prove" you had a "will". Neptune's amorphousness is infinite; mine is strictly limited to a wardrobe, hair-clipper, and cremation. The old try to bluff nature with hair-dye and the like -- in vain.

So getting back to the subject of unequal dichotomies... "inanimate" water obeys all -- but is free. The "highest" man obeys nothing but his own intentions supposedly -- but is helplessly imprisoned by the lusts, methods and habits of his involuntary bloodsucking. But man deliberates and calculates, and we call this "freedom". We know this is bullshit. We know we must obey something to liberate ourselves as agents surpassing in intentionality no intentionality at all.

What better place to start than the instinct of honesty?