Good in the World

Good in the World

Samuel Bird

There are two names I give myself in my head. The first is the great supposer. The second is the convincer. To the first, I have no idea what I am doing, but wanting to have done anything at all, I suppose. I suppose this, and I suppose that, all in an effort for you and me to do anything at all about this thing called existence. It takes me in circles and complicated nowheres that ruins any originating notion of a goal. I can’t say I am making you or myself happy, but I can say that I am moving toward something real and substantial, but it is only something I pass by its presence in the night. It has materially evaded me and I have failed you. I am so sorry my friend. You deserve more than someone to just suppose, but that is what I can offer. I give you a long list of ideas, but the sorting out of the doxis and living out the praxis is of such high cost, that maybe I am best ignored altogether. I am sorry my friend. It isn’t just that I suppose, but I convince. Not only do my ramblings come from thoughts that perhaps can’t even coincide with eachother, but I seek with great zeal to pull them into your mind. This makes me like an excited child offering more rocks than you could possibly hold because I liked their color. Can you take my wish for you to experience these same rocks that I love, as the fruition of my concern for you? I hope so, because I will convince all the same. I convince because there is an idea in my mind. I think it serves me well enough, that I wish it to be in yours as well. My whole life has been an effort to convince. If I could only convince my father to be at peace, I could be safe. If I could only share my ideas, I could make friends. If I could only convince people to participate with me, I could find security and friendship. Each of these has failed me. There is likely a way to convince, but I am increasingly aware that I don’t know what that is. I am not the great salesman, just someone who really needed to be, and failed. Still, I pick professions where I need to convince people of that one thing that I don’t believe, that I am of worth and worthy of being with them. I convince because I am trying to bring peace into the minds and circumstances around me. I try to tell people what new ideas they don’t have, but in doing so I can fail to affirm what ideas of substance they do have. Each pivotal philosophical work I have read, assumes that you already have certain insights and seek to augment or add to them. However, these secret assumptions are lost to their historicity and lose the contextual framework that is the other half of the story. When you read this, you will have forgotten about the social unrest, ideas, and misery of my age that these ideas are stewed in. How will they look alone, and will they do any good in another age? Still, I am here, convincing you. Maybe if I order my words right, I can make us all stop for a moment, and look at what we are doing. Maybe in that great pause, we can reassess and rather than creating new values, figure out how to bring about our values better. 

The world was collapsing and I was powerless. I had no capital in terms of things or people to protect myself or to help others. The world was on the brink of war with swords drawn, and all I had was my pen. I was weak before the world I had worked myself to the bone to find something solid to strike back at it with. Where are you, God? Did you forget about me? Did you look away? Be with me, I pray. I won’t pretend I deserve it, but I can say I need it. Rescue me from the ever-present distress and catch me up into a world where all is at rest. In this stillness of peace, there is no fact to collapse down to another fact. This would make the energies that made being and consciousness not, as there was no more room for verbs of any kind. Let the world’s probability states collapse down until there is nothing left and no one to see it. In the peace I ask for God, I realize it is death. My convincing in its hypocrisy is the effort to tell others that their lives are brim with reason inherent in the basic facts to be worth perpetuating. I have this case and that idea to back it up. Perhaps somewhere along proving it to you, I can convince myself. I would then forget about that place where the road quit going, that I daydream of going past. I would forget about the building high enough to build the needed philosophy. I would be able to leave out my revolver without concern if such a cheap gun could cost me all I had. Do you believe me? Did I trick you into believing life is worth living? I wish to God that I could have done so for myself. Around the corner, a new idea, a new belief, and then with it, I will want to be forever. I wish I was stoic enough to say that I am untouched by this world, but it is this world’s incessant denial of life that pushes me down. I reach for love and my hand is swatted away. I grasp at meaning and I am deconstructed and critiqued. I crave the food and shelter needed to let my mind be at ease, but I can’t grab hold. The world, myself, and anything else, is contaminated. The filth and denial of modernity has stolen away my wanting to be, the most vile of sins against life. So, I go on a drive. I go to that spot where the road stops and the sky meets it with the valley floor far below. Maybe this time I will have the courage and follow through, or else I will learn something that will make sure I never come back to that spot. Arrested deep into a pained part of my mind, my eyes stole me from such out to the world around me. In the road ahead, a sight to see and to see past myself. Four children were walking on the side of the world. An oldest sister, perhaps, around fourteen years old, two twin brothers around eight, and a littlest brother no older than five. In their hands they carried bags, which were half filled with trash. The youngest ran after the others to throw in his contribution. One of the twins reached down to grab another article of garbage. As I drew closer, my being locked into the moment, made me forgetto change my expression. At the exact moment I passed them, they waved at me with bright smiles and sparkling eyes while I forgot to stop scowling. I shot up my arm after I passed, hoping to affirm and incentivise the behavior that may have saved me. Certainly they must have known right? They were amongst the trash, seeing how modernity had spat upon the mystical world we were left here with. They lived in the same area I had grown up in. Food and fuel had far outpaced the growth of wages such that the average person had to resort to eating cheap poison. They lived in those same houses that were falling apart above them, because all decent housing had been purchased by wealthy people from far away. Didn’t they see it? Wasn’t it clear that there was no cause for those sparkling eyes? And yet, they did. When someone does something so at odds with what you understand, the surrealness of it can break you free of your habitual patterns of thought. I didn’t understand it at all. The fact not fitting into my mental model, became ever present at hand until it became sheer enough to be the new fact. Samuel, you are being disingenuous. The value of life is not what it gives you. It could deny every wish, want, or even need, and it wouldn’t touch the value of your life at large. The value of life Samuel, is one’s ever-present participation and even fighting with it. Perhaps just like a group of impoverished and poorly clothed children smiling with glee, as they fought back against at least the trash nearest to them. These children, they were wiser than I could ever be. They were the poets, the prophets, and the philosophers. In them was manifest the maximality of the human spirit. To be like them, in part ever so small, I would be someone great. I bowed my head and thanked God for perceiving me and sending me angels to light my way. 

If you go to an ancient museum, you will find plenty of pottery. One reason they have so much is because it stands up better to time than leather or wood. However, why is there so much to be had? Well, there was a lot of it to be made. Why do we care to look at it now? They invested time looking for insects and plants that gave the pottery dye, gave it patterns, and shaped it. Of all things, they made something to carry water or oil into something beautiful. The human soul spilled out even onto our cookware. Of all things, they made cookware and water storage into something more than it was. It was part of their value and creation they had bursting from their heart. No matter what bias or focus my mind has on accentuating those facts it wishes for me to refuse, there are still facts that exist outside of me that have value in me. What of all the children doing great things I don’t get to see? What about all the people who quietly did something loving? How about all the angles and positions to view a sunset I haven’t had a chance to view. I fight so hard to write and make beauty out of the ugliness I see within myself and all around, but perhaps I can forget my convincing for a movement and see that which I want to be in the world, is because I have it in my mind. And how did I get it in my mind? Because there was once a similar instance in the world. I can be ashamed that I am not a great person, because I have had the honor to know them. I can miss the wild forest because I was fortunate enough to be there. I can honestly hold the rest of society responsible, for not acting like these great children. Then, not a pause to convince you, but me. Perhaps then, I can look away for a minute. I don’t have to safe keep the world and make everything all right. Perhaps in my knowing nothing and my supposing, I can recall I don’t know that there is not something valuable. I don’t know that the abyss isn’t warm and welcoming. I don’t know there are not other children out there making their world better. In this was manifest wisdom of my own younger years that I had forgotten. I can be in the midst of the horrors in every quality and extent. However, I am ever more than it, as long as I have one transcendent item that rests above myself and the horrors. It is, has been, and will be, Esse Maxim. I am very harsh with the word good, but I am able to leave my pretension for a moment to have something that I need. This day, and perhaps more to come, I need to know there was something good in the world.