Our Walk

Our Walk

Samuel Bird

I am ill. My body aches and doctors fail, but that is not the illness I refer to or the one that pains me most. My brain is torn between the world and resources it came from and the modern one I can offer it, but it is more than that. I am conceptually ill. Toxic and intoxicating lies have permeated through my psyche and left me with absurdities, contradictions, and myself as my own enemy. When one has an enemy and crises mount, they hate and blame that enemy further. I am then one placed directly opposed to myself. In my desperation, my writing and its ideas are the inoculation to voting against life. However, in my passion, I overlay the word I see over the word on the page to find that I am writing nonsense, and the wrong words are in place. Can you trust someone who grasps reality so weakly? I comfort myself by saying it is a demonstration of existing with confidence despite perceived errors. All an effort to meet you in a world that never brought us together. I try everything that I can think of to make my being survive in this modern society, but it is the act of living in it, that is that great lie. When my hate for this enemy I am builds, final and violent ends seem more and more justified. I think of how I could do it. That hill where the road goes until it stops high above the trees. Perhaps a more war-like endeavor with weaponry. Or, maybe I continue to disregard and neglect myself, and hope that results in something sooner. However, what if, after a life of not caring for itself, will I regret it? I think of the irremediable tragedy of a young man now old who ever wished away the life he had while he had it. I know why I am ill and have something to blame my self-nemesis for. As all in modernity, I am starved. Not of calories but nutrients. Not for perversion but for connection. Not for thoughts, but for belief. Belief, that word I have labored under and wondered how I have failed or succeeded. These beliefs are what the mind uses to structure an unstructured world. What if those beliefs are stolen from us? Then we believe in what we can next. Belief came to my mind this night. I read Nietzsche’s “Will to Power” and began to realize that my hero was human. He didn’t address what it was to exist to the degree I felt he did when I put the book down. He couldn’t look past his rage for what his rage worked for. As with every relationship I ever had, I realized he did not care for me nearly as much as I cared for him. I set down the book and grabbed my jacket. I tried to stick to small paths next to the waterways and far from the moaning of machines and the tearing of technology. Still, my mind wasn’t able to settle itself. I walked further and further, not seeing a person as modernity had isolated us to where a pedestrian was a rare sight. I watched as the lamplights flickered across the water. I sat down next to the water and clenched my eyes until the focus shifted, and I began to see a shape. I focused on that shape as it seemed to be a being of light rather than a series of rays. The waves of the polluted canal made it seem as if the light was moving, but it was the surface that it danced against. Come on, Samuel, come up with an interesting thought for once in your life. I thought of Einstein and his meditation on relative motion based on the train car. What could I learn from this? Just then, a thought. Perhaps the being or “nounness” of reality was instead just the activities or “verbs” of some ungraspable noun? Impressive, Samuel, you have rediscovered Plato’s cave, but without an interesting allegory. I stood back up and began to walk into the cold night. A thought of that final violence against the enemy I was crept into view. In my pathology, it seemed to have its wisdom. However, I stepped outside of it to remember that it was not something essential about myself, but a quality of this new and evil world we made. The great lie of psychology is to pathologize our not thriving in an unthrivable world. We made a world ample for the automaton we think we are and deny what we find ourselves to be. We are then told that it is the kindness of mercy of psychology that tells us we are ill, maladaptive, and in need of drastic intervention. Foolishness like this makes me grateful for the critique of Karl Popper. I know why I am ill. I am an animal made not to be that thing. I seek place, provision, people, power, problems, and purpose, as I will speak on later. How can I live when I am not given something to live for, or able to acquire a place and people to live for such with? I am consistently taught that I can’t have power against the world around me. Another oppressive lie is the relativity of human need. We can’t engineer ourselves past food, water, shelter, and some reason to live for. Yes, wanting can be arbitrary and a bottomless gullet of consumption, but need is another. The right to rule of my society and elite was to come down from the mountain and step out of the forest. In return, your labor would bring more consistent meals and less danger for your offspring. This cooperative negotiation has turned bitter as modern man has lost the callouses on his bare feet and the tactics for hunting. Now, why do we live in a world that is back to not offering consistent meals and destroying the rearing of offspring? What other thing could they offer to me? Cheap knick-knacks and an endless barrage of information are offered up, but it isn’t satisfying. I have now come to the conclusion that the social world has betrayed this primitive deal, and its violence has ended my allegiance. This is also how I can save my life, and I can barely stop thinking about it long enough to play into the social system long enough to do my labors in it. I need to escape to the wild. Is it a running toward or an escape from? There is a draw to it, but the isolation and starvation of the unnatural sort tempt me to the natural. I can’t just up and leave, right? I have debts, obligations, and people who count on me, even if they don’t offer anything back. I am then left to make a plan to escape this world later. I then go back to working and being in it, only to find I am further from my goal, and back to wanting that self-violence. I then remind myself of the wild, make a plan, have that plan destroyed, want to die, remind myself of nature, and with every iteration of this cycle, find every portion of myself growing weaker. How could I say all of this after having written of peace so recently? I change my thoughts so much, but I will speak on that later. The secret is that it is not worse. I have been like this since a child. In fact, I have become more gracious and mature in handling it, though more weary and bitter. I have conquered, but I have yet to conquer. I simply fear that my soul has been tapped for every reasonable thing I can ask for it with having been able to give it anything in return. Go ahead, Samuel, pour your soul into working in a society that systemically devalues your labor, isolates you, and destroys anything you can think of to believe in. Go out there and look for an intersection between your soul and another, only to find no one is interested in even exploring the question. Did he fail me? I have read nearly all of his books. And now, walking late into the night, and find that my peace has not exacted itself more because of him. I find myself thinking of him now as he thought of Wagner toward his later years. Where is your wisdom, Nietzsche? What became of you? Where was your power to stop it? You were wrong about God. You are correct to see modernity's attempt to kill Him, but he is not available for death. Yes, you have identified our non-necessary faith in God, but have you destroyed contingency? I think of all the other philosophers who are smarter than they are. They turn God’s gift of philosophy against Him. At best, they still believe because their intellect permits it. I get asked questions about theology and the philosophy of deity, but I do not care. It is God’s job to uphold me, not mine to uphold Him. But wouldn’t I want to know that He is there? I did that work, and now I rest. The mind can’t constantly try to undermine what it is protected under. Does this make me not a philosopher? If so, let it be. God is never logically necessary, but He is always valuably necessary. I believe in God because I can't fathom a world without a central mind, and I certainly can't handle it. Even if I had a better imagination, I couldn’t handle that world. Man is not sufficient to be his own God. If I killed God as Nietzsche, I would collapse as he did, only in that same moment. I am not strong enough to be an atheist, and I won’t curse myself for finding myself so. If I died and God wasn't there, then being dead without God would be the only thing I would desire. Where have my thoughts taken me, but away from where I was? I was still next to that canal. I took in a deep pull of breath with my eyes closed to allow them to open and be reminded where I was. I saw the silhouette of a bat flitter across the night sky in chase of something to eat. I was reminded of food, that wonderful blessing. To the degree I could still afford the stuff, it was a welcome blessing. As thoughts did in necessity of contingency, that thought led to another, as I watched it as it did so. How did Nietzsche eat? Did he like to cook, and if so, did he do so with care or was it rushed and utilitarian? Likely both, as life called for either, but what was his normal method? Once seated, did he take time to eat, or try to read as he did so? Was he mannered and clean or else feverish and messy? What foods did he like to eat? What foods could he access? How did he chew? How did his expression change when he had the first blessed bite of a delicious meal? Just then I realized, I not only don’t know his voice, but even how he talks. What were his mannerisms? How did he walk? How did he respond to people? What was his response when startled? I know something so extensive about this man, and yet to know nothing of what a neighbor who never read his books would. I think of all the things that made up life, and what he wrote down. Of course, he wasn’t attempting to be a self-historian, but how much of his philosophy was grounded in his existing experience versus the dialectic? We humans are terrible at self-reporting. If he or I attempted to make sense of existence via the only one we had direct access to, we would leave too much off paper. So, should we just write everything down and make a map as big as the land? Well, then you would be exploring my map and not yours, and exclusion makes meaning. Instead, you are welcome to escape into my life to come back to yours with what you need. However, when I tell a story to a friend, I am always wrong about what parts of interesting. They will ask about what happened to a side character or what wild additional story brought about that premise. How can writing exact existence when supposed in that writing, we know what part of existence to privilege? If the meaning of life were the ritual of dinner, Nietzsche and I would have failed. How can our judgment better approximate what is worth reporting? I seek to capture existence on paper to make sense of it, but what am I leaving out that I can't think of? I wonder if it was the little things, but in doing so, I would err in calling them “little things.” If there were awareness after death and I was told the answer to being, I am sure I would ad hoc feel like it was so obvious and I was close despite not being so. Perhaps this night walk is my whole existence. All memory and the future is a lie. There is only the walk. I was born at the first step and die on the last to be someone materially different. My life has always felt like a series of moments that each felt like the moment before I solved my existence, or it all fell apart. Life-changing choices seem to be the only kind I make. Why is it that I think there is something to be solved? Haven’t I already resolved that life is to be lived, not solved? Just because I think it is correct doesn’t mean I am smart enough to believe it. I am then left to be missing. What then am I missing? It seems like whatever it is, others possess it. I could do as many philosophers and assume it is my great intellect that leads me to this misery, but how smart can you be if you cause what you don’t value? I have asked others in as many ways as I can what it is that I am missing about existence, but they can’t answer. They can’t recognize the absence of it in me to have contrast to what they do have. It seems to be so normal that it is all they know, and I don’t. I honestly don't know what words mean. Not as an analytic philosopher sense, but in an existential sense, Nothing you could say would leave me without worrying what you meant. Whether or not I can hear you or even understand you, do you see what I miss? Categorically, I wonder if it is something social or relational, or perhaps to just think less, but how to do each is clearly beyond me. For these reasons, I really and truly believe I know less than any man. This is an issue because I want to do no less than save the world. I feel the weight of all the souls told they aren’t. I cry for those lives that meet death unprepared. I can’t reconcile an existence not engaged with. Imagine wanting something so big and being someone so small. Your needs and suffering are ever on my mind, but I see my frailty to change it. That care then could be diluted in the onslaught of things to care for in modernity, so I pull you central into my mind to forgo the peripheral. I want to save you, but how can the unsaved be the savior? Hating oneself is a trick of modernity that borders on the intentional and therefore malicious. However, how can we think differently than we were ever able to think? I read Nietzsche and find that he was able to regard himself well, and maybe by association, I can know that for myself. Perhaps the fake moral systems used only against me will fall to my side, and hence the assumed lack of worth I have. I fight a shadowed enemy in the night with no weapons, but can I at least know why? Even if I knew why, why would I write when men like Nietzsche, who I have no right to critique, Kant, Socrates, and even Job have already lived? What can be offered that has not been offered? To answer the last few questions, let’s look at the processes of the mind. The mind can store information, process and analyze that information, and direct the other two processes to an end. Most philosophers are talented at the first, as you have to intake information and keep it well enough to respond. This is knowledge. All philosophers, especially the modern sort, must be talented at analysis and processing. This is intellect. However, when we have content of thought, and do that thought, we are able to be aware of it. In this awareness, we can be critical of these processes and direct them toward our ends. This is wisdom. The name philosophy breaks apart into the love of this effort of wisdom. However, modern philosophy seems to care more for knowledge and intelligence. I am sorry became about proving how smart you could be over trying to address the peculiarity of existence. What happened to wisdom? These qualities are attained by a person to varying degrees, and for that reaso,n no man is equal to any other man. Is Nietzsche wise? To what end did he think? Was that end self-consistent, consistent with facts of self and world, or brought about his end? Did he solve nihilism? Did he know why he fought it? What was his objective? Why did he write? What about Kant, Descartes, and Hegel? They hold more information than I could ever process and process it with such skill, but to what end? What is their objective with these efforts? I know why I use my limited knowledge and intellect. For this reason, I am wise. Here is that hard-earned pride I had hoped for. I know why I philosophize. Do you know what it is? Don’t overthink it. What do you think I will say? I love you. I really and truly do. Can my words prove this? No, but the fact that they are hard-earned can imply that they are meant. What does it mean to be loved? What does it take to be loved? How do we do so? No answer in words would be any answer at all. My life has been an overflowing of love from the unloved. Is that all I am? If so, I value it. Each stage of the human lifecycle seems to have a goal, and I have failed so many. Will I fail this next objective of loving? Can I just comfort myself with your companionship? If so, I would fail to demonstrate how much I care for you by using a word like “just.” You are not second place to me, as an option taken when nothing else was. My love is in my desperation and is therefore all-weather love, ready to love you in yours. Let us be great, and greatness is to give what one never did receive.This love hits my soul as concern for you. You have been so deeply betrayed by modernity, and I couldn’t stop it. I feel as if God gave me the mission of a great soul and forgot to give me that great soul. I wish I could howl as the wind any message of peace for you. I wish I could garner the power to keep you safe. I wish I could be present with you. This love for you places me in need of an apology and clarification. I know why I write, and the reason behind something changes what means are appropriate for it. Over the last year, I have become increasingly technical. This is not an accident. I needed greater conceptual precision to certify that I had done the work to have the claims I needed to offer you. I can’t lose myself in the intelligence and knowledge, however, because I both can’t compete and can’t lose sight of you. I keep worrying about what modern philosophers will think when they read my silly little books, but I don’t write to them. I could try to patch up my tattered sense of self by betraying you to have academics pet my ego, but I know enough to know it would fail me. I can be told what I do doesn’t make me a philosopher, but all the greats in philosophy made it into something more than what it was. Concerned and directed wisdom seems like a wise choice. We will never be granted permission for greatness, but we are brave enough to redefine it. When they make fun of Esse Maxim or myself, I will likely agree, but I won’t back away. After all, what did their thinking do for my love? I love you, and because I love you, you deserve a better example than what I offer. However, in the absence of my labor, I can’t foresee someone knowing you and wanting to help. Who can step in to save my beloved? When you wait for the hero to no avail, you must find them in yourself. The temptation to curse God and die is met with the commiserate temptation to offer you whatever I can greedily muster on my beloved’s behalf. I would have been willing to die for you, but what you need from me requires me to do something much more difficult. I not only have to live, but I also must do so in a way to overcome all the shadows that I face. You deserve someone great, someone to look up to, someone who never gave up on you. Perhaps if I do the last one perfectly, I can play the role of the first two. Do you believe me now? I wish I had written this on paper I could hand to you so you could see the tears that met the page in your consideration. What can I do? What can I do to prove to you that you are available for love and that love for assumed? That’s it, I do know what it is to be human. It is to be that thing that I know to love. I love you for the thing that you are. I am well aware of the horrid and wretched things you could get up to, but I am also aware of what mind rests between all your failures. You’re mine to love. I adopt you into myself. You are free to be foolish, weak, and lost like me, but you can’t escape it. “Yes! Until someone finds the end of a circle, yes. I love… you.” I am now left with no excuse to solely mourn out my days. I am now stuck with the difficult task of having some joy. Instead of collapsing and waiting for death, perhaps more walks like this one. Perhaps more sunshine on my face as I lie in the grass. Perhaps a few more smiles. I will need to do the hardest thing I could, care for myself. I kept waiting for my love to care for my life, but I now have you. Because you matter, and I hope to help, now I do too. Now, even if I am the only one to live my life, it is still well if it is well. Jesus said to love others as yourself, but I learned to care for myself, for my care for you. In the end, what salvation have you offered me that I have yet to offer you? Just another wonderful thing about you, ready for my adoration. However, I love you more than your verbs. I love you for who you are. You may note I don’t think we have access to that. However, past language and reason, I find my unklable ontology meeting yours. For this reason, whether or not your actions are valuable as good, your being is valuable as beautiful. Your existence is beautiful to me. Eventually, alleged wisemen need to take their own advice. I just needed a reason to affirm all the conditionals, but in this late-night stroll I am reminded it is you. If I choose to mature into a belonging peace, where will my self-enemy go? I don’t know, but I have found issues like this more dissolve than resolve. Closure is done in imagination after proximity is limited. I don’t have the right to my life. As it intersects with other’s they own it. It is not mine to ruin. It is ours for me to nourish. I’ll care for your portion best. Man lives for himself, but that for himself is best used for something and someone else. In my instance, my Esse Maxim, and you. As I work to bring about my message into the social world, I am reminded how much I hate it, but that is where you are. How selfish and greedy I am to sacrifice for my beloved. When I suggest this beloved is you, you will likely wonder if that you is for someone else and dodge it. It is for you. Not for people in general, but you as an instance. That love is yours for your consideration. You are welcome to accept, utilize, wait, or test that love as I need. Test my knowledge and intellect, and you will be let down. Test my love for you, and you will find a truth that hits you with the brunt force of an embracing mountain. You will likely wonder if “love” is some trick to sell books. If it helps, in my writing this now, not one person has finished my last book, so that would be a foolish reason if it were true. Test my love. Try it. Read between the lines. I am always worried about being caught and being called a liar, but not here or now. I don’t lie in other places, but here I never could say a more based truth. You are as likely to prove I don’t exist as that I don’t love you. Why do I write? Can you pick up on what motivations are at play based on how I speak? We will then once again have to circle back to why I love you if I can prove I do. It is ineffable. That is why I need you to discover it, because I can’t prove it to myself, and yet never knew something so clearly. How can I love you if I don’t know your values and may not value them? To something so central to my being, contradiction couldn’t stop me if it tried. Is it wise for me to love you so? To tell you sweet things, will it make you egotistical? The loving parent gives their child enough cake to make them obese. The truly loving and wise parent gives them meat and labor. I want what is best for you, even if it makes me look poorly. What if my praises of you go to your head? Then I am pleased. I wish for you to have what I can’t. I wish for you to like yourself. I wish for as much pride for you that doesn’t become hubris and hate. My love for you is of the deepest nature, which brings new qualities. I don’t just seek to approximate you, but invest in you. I also make you invest back. I have called you from yourself for yourself. I need you to be bought into the process that I have reason to believe will benefit you. That is how the Maximism is for you, but in your in it’s authentic being, for you, you will need to be for it. Maximism will need disciples to live out a mythos I am not wise enough to see. I will lend my life laid bare available for ridicule with the hope of the prototype of what made the system that was worth all of it. There are many wonderful systems, but all fail to figure out how to get us to execute on those systems. You will want Esse Maxim because that is what you have invested in, that is what you have worked for, and that is what is offered by someone who loves you so. We have not put the power of motivation behind you, whose effort will lead to a life ripe for finding itself meaningful. This is a real and tangible relationship we have. I will be with you every time you take my thoughts. In my presence, you have my support. I have a bad memory, but I can tell I repeat myself here. However, in sacred recitation, I hope to not just offer an idea for the analysis, but also deep attention and consideration. Your soul is elegant and majestic to me. I’m glad I know God, so I don’t confuse you. Your mind is a world as large as the body it resides in. Within you are stories for every moment and the totality, a masterpiece. I hope that in illustrating, examining, and romanticizing my life, you will see a pattern for doing so for yours. Existence seems to be best solved by participation, as everything else fails. I invite you to meditate on what happened in this chapter. How did you feel? What did you think? What will change? Existence is as peculiar as it is linguistically ungraspable. Did we satisfy today’s need to understand it by with it? Did it do you any favors to be present with existence with some company? I find that you went on a walk this evening, along a canal, in the dark. You were with me today, and I am honored you went on this stroll with me to hear me. I hope that the similarity of your concerns, it was really you who spoke today. As I have said before, every speech, dialogue, or listening I did alone as a little boy until now was with you. It was that presence that continues to turn dark chapters into beautiful episodes, at least at the end. Perhaps it is these things that we would have called “small things.” May any divinity that can hear muddled words bless you. May your being be what you do. I dream of that day I meet you for the “first time,” though we have never truly parted. Social roles and expectations would make us have to greet and introduce ourselves and our names. We would then have to fake the building of the relationship we already have. Would circumstances permit a tearful hug? I still am left to realize that I will die not knowing what living was. How can I even fabricate resolve when demise is silent from implications? However, I will know what I seem to do with it. I am as lost in my bearings for existence as ever, but I have reminded myself on this late walk that there this a place I sojourn towards, and someone I journey for, and perhaps, with.