Kitsch

Who is he to be blamed for that anxiety? After all, running is one of those socially effective opportunities to trade one’s time for a veritable panacea of identifiable benefits. But none of those benefits ever seems to account for the awkward feeling of trying too hard that accompanies it. And let us not forget, more machines would be available at night.

He proceeded forward, carefully shutting the door with one hand while his other grasped the shoe’s ankle. As his eyes scanned the darkened corridor for obstacles, his mind wandered to the incredible beauty he might have the opportunity to gaze at, even if at distance. His mind was alight with what were nearly pornagraphic fantasies--of those beautiful lycra pieces that ever so gently tugs upon the natural beauty of the feminine form, tenderly tightening her ass while still showing its alluring curve, intoxicating and invigorating. 

He turned and headed down the crepuscular hallway. The house he occupied at the present moment appeared mundane at first glance, but its imperfections revealed themselves over time. The small notches in the wood floor, preventing sweeping. The litter box, constantly awry with shit and piss smell that immediately reminded one of the almost inevitably raw deal domesticated animals had gotten. Tiny artifacts of life, pregnant with the memory of ennui.

He was halfway to the gym when the amphetamines kicked in. A smoothly scintillating vibrancy of color and sound alerted him to their affect. A dramatic up tick in mood, from tastelessly bored to immaculately concerned with the periodic oscillations of traffic lights and their gross effect on the lassiez-faire condition of ordinary traffic, instilled him with a quiet confidence. This was going to be a fun run, and he wanted to go very far.

He ran to stupid pop anthems that make the serious listener gag with embarrassment and pity. But he listened to them without contempt, and this lack of contempt made him proud. Those connoisseurs of musical contempt lacked an iota of appreciation for the beautiful mesh kitsch Ke$ha created. To him, kitsch wasn't such a bad thing--quite the opposite. Kitsch was the last artistic bastion of democracy, freeing the art form from the musical sobriety that acted as a sobriquet on enjoyment.

Supposing for the purposes of argument that there was a preeminent virtue within this world, it would be enjoyment. Not enjoyment as understood by the ascetics, for whom it is a matter of distraction from toting the line between life and death--for whom enjoyment was a rush, an ephemeral high created by one's proximity to death. And yet even less like the ancient Epicureans, for whom no sensations are purely mental, and therefore there is no need to pay attention to the morality of an act without considering some calculus of pleasure and pain.

If the characteristic mood applicable to that strange breed of malcontent specific to the 20th century was nausea, for the 21st it is ennui. This means that the ability of man to fullfill, or even compromise his destiny within the realm of the 21st century is moot.

Ennui denotes less a lack of choice than a surplus. It is the condition that governs those waking moments when we would rather be asleep; and, lulled into a sort of quasi dreamy state by the fantastic drudgery befitting the ennui(ed), it denotes even more our capacity to be awake.

We are awakened momentarily by the activity of the televisual media, which provides our prying hands with the ability to traverse and obfuscate the panoptic gaze of ennui, locking into place a system of unavoidable compromise.

Ennui is that most powerful of aromas--the stench of a dearth of opportunities, simultaneously realized and unrealizable, that postpone the ability of man to shape his coming into the presence of world. Ennui is Descartes malevolent demon reborn, now not inclined to decieve our senses but rather to inundate them with a spectacular array of impossible to fathom colors, each of them coloring a new thing in a new way, covering only the least prudent course of action--to do nothing.

To do nothing is to dance and enhance the all too devastating glance of that ennui which breeds infidelity--sappy spurs adorn the scathing snake that wraps its grip ever tighter around the only prey that can withstand its hold--the human doing something. To do something is to do anything, but not just anything. Dampining the allure of ennui's doing nothing-ness demands a cultivated passage of time, mendaciously savoring the odd chunks of now that we live for. 

The somehow oddly geometric glare of her computer momentarily elucidated our subject to the location of her running shoes, spryly ejected after her last jog. She always jogged at night, and the fear of alerting her roommates to her activities wound her mind with a cautious anxiety towards any emission of light. 

But who is she to be blamed for that anxiety? After all, running is one of those socially effective opportunities to trade one's time for a veritable panacea of identifiable benefits. But none of those benefits ever seems to account for the awkward feeling of trying too hard that accompanies it. And after all, more machines would be available at night.

She proceeded forward, carefully shutting her door with one hand while her other grasped the shoe's ankle.  She wore one of those beautiful lycra pieces that ever so gently accentuates the natural beauty of the feminine form, tightening her ass ever so tenderly, as intoxicating and invigorating a form as can be possibly imagined. 

Real love is a thing that is of interest to all of humanity. All love that accepts the challenge to endure, persevere and become the thing that it is embraces a truth deeply rooted in our beings: the truth that although all lovers are two, they can, in and through their love, experience the world as one.

I have told you before, in the hours of my deepest torment spent lamenting what felt like an insufferable seperateness from you, that in a way you are a goddess to me. This is because you have shown me, through the incredible closeness of your body, tucked gently asleep in my arms, or hiking ahead of me at a fiery pace I can only try to maintain, the existence of a world where where our truth is constituted together.

This world is altogether new, and created only through my being with you, and is therefore the province of your own creation. To me, you are a creator of worlds.

The challenge of love is always how to make a chance encounter between two beings become fated, destined to always achieve that genesis of world that it is finally capable of. Our challenge is to make the miracle of the world created through us, Allyson-Joe land, become a permanent feature on the landscape of humanity.

I know how difficult it was to affirm the persistence of our love to your parents and family, and I respect you tremendously for having the courage to do so. I have never had to deal with such an incredible situation, torn as you are between two great nexus of love within your life. In future, I can only hope that this tearing gap can be soothed. As I said before, I feel that at its most basic level real love is of interest to the whole of humanity: that process of world creation that we, as lovers, undergo each moment that comes to pass when we are together is unmistakenably tied to the destiny of humanity at large. We as people must learn to create the world, and we as lovers must show them how.

Our situation, then, is not without hope. I see a future where you and I together can demonstrate, through the persistent spirit of our love and the minute actions that come to actualize it, a world constituted in peaceful reconciliation of differences, embracing the final truth that perhaps not just you and I but also all those who love us are destined to be together.

Everything I do with you, to you or because of you has the taste of destiny. Our trip to Black Canyon of the Gunnison was literally a spiritual event for me. You have known that I profess not to believe in the possibility of the existence of a god. That fact is no longer important to the discussion of our spirituality. Where there is religion, there is mystery; and I cannot help but believe that whatever force came to possess us together as we ascended the steep edges of that cliff, and brought us singing back to the road, is the endearing power of the mystery itself, and therefore spirit.

And so I finally hope that the mystery behind our ability to create the world together, hope so strongly that it peers over the edge of the vertiginous cliff of spirited belief, and therefore believe, that we might never be alone. We are dealing with a physical distance now, but this is not a barrier to the presence of our love, residing as it does in an altogether different world where we are already and have always been together. You are forever and ever wrapped in the tightest embrace and squeeze of my love, and it follows you, like the silent specter of a spirit, wherever you go and whatever you do.

Love,

Failing the bar exam turned out to be a worse fate than I had expected. Going into the test, I repeatedly told myself that I really didn't care if I passed or failed, and even went so far as to schedule job interviews for non legal positions during my breaks at the exam center.

This was truly a mistake. Perhaps the way in which I prepared encouraged me to behave in such a spurious manner towards what is decidedly a monumental examination for anyone engaged in it.

Engaged. I am, but I do not feel as if I am. My entire summer, which should have been scrupulously devoted to studying for aforementioned bar exam, was instead spent in quiet reverence of the relationship I have with the most beautiful girl in the world. 

Was this mistake? Only time will tell if that summer, which resulted in my being able to propose to her, will have justified its rather high cost. I love her with all my heart, but we seem to grow distant by the hour. I can no longer bear the price of this tortuous endeavor when I do not see a light at the end of the tunnel.

Doing long distance is very difficult, and makes my move to a new city more pronouncedly lonely. This is an exacerbating spot that I seem to have placed myself in. I have turned 2 high paying jobs for a legal career that does not seem to be existent except as a remote possibility.

Religion is comprised of that domain of human existence in which mystery predominates over the unity of ordinary causal progression. This means that when man is confronted by the religious domain, he is confronted by a decay in the perceptual unity of experience--by the destruction of the phenomenon of unified consciousness which engenders the ability to construct objects to represent things as such.

Religion confronts man: it is solely by the vain and narcissistic quest for religious truth and divine providence that man is led astray from the ultimate object of the religious experience, which must predate the division between subject and object, self and other that allows for the numeric precision of articulated language. Religion confronts man because man cannot escape the question of the religious experience, but merely place it aside. The ephemeral character of the moment of consciousness bears tribute to this eternal confrontation as seconds slip slowly into the past.

Religion confronts man in a way that is thoroughly mysterious. Mystery is that which can not be spoken of; mystery is a silent shiver of ephemeral joy erupting through that pervasive melancholy which remains as tribute to it's memory. Mystery is at the same time perfectly relatable in it's indefatigable obscurity, and forever constituted by the experiential gap between you and me that is itself the wellspring of difference whose mending is the sysiphisian task of language.

There is an aesthetic dimension that strives to answer the call into confrontation existing between the self, always constituted in difference, and the religious domain. Religious experience always results in the demise of experiential unity that gives rise to the ability of the consciousness to create it's object. By bringing into presence the momentary recognition of the failure of teleologically oriented conscious experience, the religious domain gives rise to an altogether primordial chaos. It is this chaos which bears the final hallmark of the possibility of aesthetic appreciation of the religious domain; because by nature the experience remains outside the gamut of ordered phenomena, all that remains of the experience is a residue that has the smell of chaos.

The appreciation of beauty is still but one manifestation of the multifaceted confrontation with the religious domain. The residue of an experienced but not comprehended pre-perceptual unity arising from ordinarily mundane sensory experience cannot help but be compartmentalized by the ordering of consciousness into a categorical appreciation that has phenomonal existence, but lacks the intentionality associated with the purely emotive domain. 

But this residue is not only nor chiefly comprised of the beautiful. Our time confronts us with the death of a certain idea that had for centuries begotten religious truth--that this truth exists in a manner which can be named and understood and forsaken. Religion as mystery persistently confronts man, and ignoring this confrontation by hiding behind the truth is as ignoble a sin as man has ever invented.

Modern man must be prepared to adopt religion as mystery in order to rejuvenate the spiritual decay that characterizes life within the world understood as causal machine. World as machine, and world view as the technological mechanism of it's operation, divides man in a manner which predisposes a conceptual understanding comprised upon difference. This division results as the technology begins to run man, and man can no longer control the technology which he has created.

Union with a world that may have nothing whatsoever to do with this technology absent it's human invention is not possible, but is rather inevitable. It can not be achieved, but rather engenders the possibility of achievement by articulating man into a persistent manifestation of the spirit.

Accomplishing a modern understanding of the religious domain can certainly never be achieved by partitioning off a particular domain of communal experience as being that area in which the spirit thrives, for it is only in becoming victim to the spiritual animus of all activity that the domain of the religious can execute it's confrontation.

Identity is finally an aesthetic question. Perhaps uniquely, the idea that we possess a set of behaviors whose trace marks us as who or what we are is riddled with semiotic unsteadiness. The question of identity begs numerous interrelated inquiries of decidedly unsure import--the selection of these questions, and the answers they might begin to beg, is an aesthetic judgement at bottom.

There exists a set of monikers that can be habitually ascribed to me as the mind retroactively posits those core dimensions of my humanity that mark me as unique (at least within my own mind). These monikers are nicknames for the being from which they follow--they are traces of myself, becoming myself, in front of myself, but never actually constituting my-self, in the moment as such.