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Posted-Date: Sat, 7 Nov 92 12:10:19 EST
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.fnord-l
Date:         Sat, 7 Nov 1992 12:10:19 EST
From:         "(MM)" <mbm@PACSCL.UARC.UPENN.EDU>
Subject:      telos

	Any new way of thinking must begin with the inevitable fact that
human existence cannot be seen as the book that never really starts and
never really ends. Texts may indeed live on, but our biological reality
and our self-prizing (in whaterver shallow or deep, helpful or non-helpful
way) face extinction, as far as we know.

	Indeed, it may be that our acknowledged or unacknowledged or only
partially acknowledged relationship with this slippery, cloudy, face-changing
fact is the primary conditioner, if not exactly the determinant, of our ways
of thinking. For each relationship with this fact, there are no doubt cor-
responding ways of thinking which are made possible, and others which are
denied.

	If I had been raised to believe that when I went it was the greatest
adventure--awesome, sacred, immense, but lighted warm, not cold, with love
like love on earth distilled--sort of like some reports of near death ex-
perience, there would be a corresponding exhilaration in my life, a quality
of energy that would have a secret and wonderful pact with what was coming.
This particular future, dwelling in the present, would banish god knows how
many forms of pettiness, stinginess, resentment, and so on, which are ulti-
mately based on feeling that we have been cheated of fullness, that existence
is impoverished, that luck is the best you have before you're snuffed. Cer-
tainly there are few who can believe in a furnished heaven which they set
their heart on, but might there not be some other way to paint death as a
final, guranteed richness?

	I have never entirely shed my own religious upbringing, which involved
a secret immersion in apocalyptic fears which merged with fears of nuclear
wars (as these fears also merged in evangelist's ravings). An early, sudden
death of a member of my family gave to death a character of horror-strike,
nightmare you won't ever shake off by waking from. I thought I was  likely
damned to hell. This feeling of wrongness, guilt, etc. has been well enough
described, and it is obvious enough how much is weighting down any attempts
toward human freedoms and joy. Whatever is positive awakens the punisher,
who is Death's surrogate implanted in me by conditioning, aided and abetted
by Father. One such as this might lie low, play dead, expect nothing, court
disappointment, make friends, intimate friends, with disappointment and failure
in order not to be surprised by any bad turns, not to be surprised by death.

	Please excuse me for belaboring some obvious things. What may not be
so obvious is how crucial to any theorizing of New Ways of Thinking must be
New Ways of Thinking about death, not only accomplished in the mind but sup-
planting the deeply rooted version now deep in the mind substance.

	Reincarnation, for me personally, cannot enable new ways of thinking
because it presumes a letting go of self-prizing more absolute than I believe
we should have to go to be assuaged of our melancholy over the sad story of
our slow decline, decay, and frightful gasping at the end.

	For those who can see this passage as like unto a comet streak, or
the brief intense burning in the night sky then gone, I would ask how they
able to achieve a present, daily affirmation of life and other's lives and
all life when it's just a temporary thing. Can one not mourn things passing?
Is it wrong or impossible to attempt to bypass this mourning and melancholy?
Or is the point precisely to tell a new story? And if so, what story is that?
I do expereince my life as narrative to some degree, but I find I am locked
into conventional ideas of decline which inhabit the present and take from it.


What story can we believe in that will cure our afflictions of fear, melancholy
and senses of futility? Can New Ways of Thinking be valid if they merely
repress death? I take my anti-oxidants, but their efficacy is not unlimited.


I wish to thank all the members of fnord who did not delete this message for
their patience and understanding. I need answers to these questions and always
have. Many of you have already worked through this, perhaps, so that my
questions and pondering may seem old and lumbering. All the more reason to
aid a fellow traveler.

How shall the grisly morbidity of flesh be transcended?


Funcum on a quiet, chilly, Saturday, without explanation or excuse.
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