fish food

In my bedroom I keep six fish, brazenly extracted from a creek 100 miles or so away -- more guppies than fish, really -- swimming in a squalid five gallon tank, encrusted with hard-water build-up that I have neglected to clean for at least 18 months now; and there you will find my soul.

I think they may grow up to be trout, but one never knows, and I don't want to keep them because, even though I have never once cleaned the tank or similarly put any effort into fishkeeping, six full-size trout seems to be a bit too much of a hassle, but, then again, I don't want to release them into the "wild" because if they die it will have been my fault -- not to mention the possibility of ecosystem contamination. Is this what responsibility feels like?

Mind you, there used to be more --exactly how many I am unsure, at least 11 I think -- but they may have eaten each other, for fish do not presume to be polite when they are hungry.

I keep them fed though, when I'm around, look into the tank pensively from time to time -- I put in one stick and one rock from their old creek, I like to think that they like them, or at least think that they like them, but maybe they just get homesick -- one fish is bigger than all the others, but that sort of thing is a statistical certainty with a set "F" of fish where the number of fish "f" is > 1. The fish don't do much. Are they happy?

In my soul/fishtank there is a filter that is so overworked that it can't possibly be of any use anymore; it sets on all night gurgling like a very small creek running over exactly one rock and one stick that remind me of homesick; in my soul/fishtank there are a number of little swimmy bits -- a number that seems to be shrinking -- a small bit of life, raw, living with questionable comfort in a small box that never changes and has a waxing shell of hard salts and minerals deposited on the walls; they swim and sometimes get fed and sometimes eat eachother for no reason and I don't know what to do with them.

The fish follow my fingers on the other side of their glass enclosure, and will nibble at them if I press them against the water's surface.

If I let my fish go they may die and I don't think I could handle that, but I'm not sure I can handle them growing large anyway.

This, I think, is the least-interesting, most-pedestrian catch-22 that has ever arisen. My soul doesn't do much besides keeping a smattering of small vertebrates alive, but I'm attached to it with this bland sentimentality -- nostalgia for an off-white and lightly chipped dinner plate off the 4.99$ rack at Ross.

The seventh fish was found shriveled and dead, mouth agape in bug-eyed and leering surprise, on the carpet, a full 4 inches -- a heroic leap for a small fish of questionable trout-hood -- from the safety of my soul/fishtank. Did he(?) understand the consequences of his actions? Do any of us?

I, of course, picked him(?) up and performed the generations-old ritual of toilet-bowl burial. If I continue to do nothing, or rather feed them and maybe clean the tank for once in my goddamned life, will all the inhabitants of my fishtank/soul kill themselves or die of natural causes or eat eachother? Can I solve this conundrum, this question of what to do with my occupied soul of questionable trout-hood, this question of scraping off mineral deposits from the walls of my eyes to see the world clearly, this question of giving or not giving a damn again, by doing nothing?

The filter stays on all night, thoughtlessly aerating the water, quietly gurgling, but the fish remain ungrateful as always.

You are what you eat

The things that you consume become you.

Of course, this can be taken literally; All the building blocks that you built your body with came from food eaten by either you, or your mother, mixed up, digested, and stuck together again in some sort of bizarre pastiche of meat and bones we call a human being.

But, I mean to imply mainly a figurative connotation to my earlier statement.

The things you consume become you.

The music, media, people, culture, clothing, house, car, movies, television, ideas, and beliefs you surround yourself with change you and mold you to fit them.

Example: You watch Jersey Shore. You like it, and want to talk about it. You find, or make, friends who also enjoy it. You talk about Jersey Shore. One of your friends who likes Jersey Shore listens to, say, 2 Chainz. You give it a listen and enjoy it. You look for new friends, &c ad nauseum. 

This doesn't seem like a big deal, most people would call it "culture".

But, look closer. First, the decision to watch one show led to a whole slew of acquaintances. You talk with them about the things you share. You reinforce these social bonds. You talk more about these things, and then think more about these things, until it's a big part of your life.

This isn't really a bad thing; we wouldn't have a society as we know today without it, and I picked examples that seem negative.

You see, our sense of who we are, our idea of "me" or "I", is definition by negation.

That is to say, we begin where everything else stops. Be that physically, mentally, emotionally, whatever.

We see all this stuff that is "not-me", and everything that isn't filled in by that "not-me", must then be me.

We define ourselves by our surroundings.

I mean, if someone asks you "Who are you?", where do you start?

You list things around you: I am a student, a Buddhist, a poet, &c. 

These are not things that ARE me, they are just ideas, actions, and places, that I have chosen to surround myself with.

The things we consume become us, become the way we think, and speak, and feel, and interact with and about everything and everyone else in the world.

The point of this is this: Be careful that the things you consume don't consume you.

You are the aggregate of everything you do, or watch, or listen to.

Make sure those things make you the person you want to be.

Don't just do things because everyone else is, because it's bigger than that.

If you listen to music because everyone else is listening to it, or the same with movies, or television;

If you let other people decide what you do, You no longer control who you are.

You are letting other people define WHO YOU ARE.

That is, maybe, why so many people are unhappy.

Because we have grown so used to letting other people influence us so much in our consumption, in the way we feel about things, our ideas.

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide" -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson, perhaps, went a bit too far; we imitate things all the time.

But when you let culture, or television, or anything else decide the things you surround yourself with, you are giving up control of your very "Self" to some other person.

You are what you eat;

Have some food for thought.

I AM AN INDIVIDUAL SCREAMED THE INDIVIDUAL

To be is to be together.

To be human is to be all humans, to be humankind.

Western cultures, our societies and economies and politics, value this idea of “rugged individualism”. We value the triumph of the workingman over the elite, we value the American dream, we see the smallest unit of existence as a single person, as an individual.

I don’t think that’s true.

From the very moment of out birth we are surrounded by the language of others, the ideas of others, the notions of others, the emotions of others, the prides and prejudices of others, their hidden motivations, their deepest held beliefs, the lies they tell every day to be more likable or powerful, their philosophies and religions and gods and demons and angels;

But that is not to say that “everyone else” is not a product of everyone else’s “everyone else”, just the same as we.

When I am feeling less (or perhaps rather much more) poetic than usual, I describe this concept as a “great self-referential clusterfuck of an existence”.

Or, otherwise, I see us all as an enso. The enso is a symbol very strongly rooted in Zen Buddhism, it is a circle drawn with a single brushstroke.

Although there are numerous meanings behind this, I will focus on one.

A circle has no beginning and no end. Any two points on a circle can be connected by a single line.

This, to me, is humanity.

A person, the individual, is but a single point.

Now, you can get close to a circle with single points, but there will always be space in between. A collection of humans is not humanity; humanity is something greater than us all, something that fills in those spaces and completes the enso.

You see, the individual, the free agent (in that I mean one who is capable of exerting free will), the consumer, the worker, the cog in the clock, is nothing of any value, really.

You did not invent the language you speak, you did not invent the clothes you wear, you did not invent the god(s) you believe in and the gods you don’t believe in, you did not invent the internet, you did not invent anything, and even the people who did invent those things did so with the help of others, and the influence of many thousands others, and many ineffable environmental factors.

No one is individual; no one is unique; we are all the same ideas recycling themselves.

This universe exhibits near infinite complexity at all levels. From the quarks and bosons, to the specks of mica in a pebble, to the spots of dead grass on a lawn, to the scarred cityscapes hemorrhaging the desert, to the continents in a bounded ocean, to the stars in an endless ocean, everything is intricate and interconnected. We are one part of this complexity, but we are not the only part, nor the largest part, nor the smallest.

But the point, I think is this.

There is no way to separate someone from anyone else. Where do our thoughts begin and the thoughts that we have learned from others end?

Where do I begin and you end? We always fall into a physical answer to his question; surely I end where my body does. But let’s face it; there is no part of my body that is mine. I am made of food, most recently, and stardust, most poetically.

So, I do adore Thoreau and Emerson, but I am not a rugged individual. I am as fragile as the world I live in, which is damned fragile indeed.

It’s a very universal kind of way to think; you are as fucked up as I am; when you succeed, I succeed; we will triumph together and fail together, all at the same time. We’re all in this together, I suppose.

We humans are funny little creatures.  

We take in and process information our entire lives, by touching and tasting and feeling &c; 

We form ideas and opinions about all or nearly all of this information; 

We decided that our own ideas are trustworthy and right and well-justified;

But most of all, we don't really consider most of this, most of the time.

I digress.

Hi, this is me; I've started a blog; this is a thing now.

I'll be posting words of all sorts, throwing a dictionary at a wall and hoping to see if anything will stick. 

Thank you for reading or not reading or whatever else it is you people do.

Now, let's get down to the real deep funky festering existential questions that linger in the heartbeats of many, because those are fun.

Are human beings good or bad? 

People have been arguing about this idea for hundreds and hundreds of years; I will not presume to tell you an answer, but try thinking about this.

Everything that you have ever perceived is human-centric. This may seem obvious, but think about it. Everything you've seen, you processed it as a human, everything you've ever thought you have processed as a human, every idea, emotion, thought, epiphany, pain and pleasure is distinctly and irreversibly human. 

Because we are humans.

The idea is a simple one, sure, but let us perhaps change its direction:

We CANNOT think, feel, or otherwise perceive anything in a way that is not human.

And so, every thought, idea, feeling or emotion, every perceived morality, reality or pattern, is a direct result of our humanity. 

Now, ideas can't come from nowhere. They have to be a result of some thing we have experienced, or someone else has experienced. 

The idea of "That man is a bad man" cannot happen if we have not, over the course of our lives, seen and learned about men, and "good" and "bad" and good things and bad things and good men and bad men.

Every idea is a sort of hodgepodgery of other ideas, we define these sorts of things by slowly narrowing down how specifically we categorize them. We can have "good" without "good man" but not vice versa. 

Moving on along, though, these ideas, these abstractions we have for everything we perceive (the ideas of God, the idea of humans, the idea of sky, the idea of evil, the idea of a tree, the idea of stealing, the idea of morality &c) are directly based on our collective experiences as humans.

We cannot have an idea of something without first having knowledge of some sort about that something.

Now, words are the tools we as humans use to manipulate and convey ideas. 

We cannot very easily pass the entire sensation of "the idea of a tree" non-verbally, so we invented language.

But every word is a result of one or many ideas that existed before it, and these ideas are results of the things we see and think and touch as human beings.

So, words are, carrying this whole thing through, a direct representation of who we are; of what it means to be human.

So when we have words like "good" and "bad", we must naturally be both good and bad.

Because if we had no experience with the idea of "good" or "bad"; if there had not been some person at some point in our ancestral past who had experienced a person being bad, or a person being good, the ideas that form the foundations of the words would not exist.

We are everything we have a word for (well nearly everything. We cannot very well be Killer Whales or Gravity).

Since we have a morality, an idea of what it means to be virtuous or villainous, to be a saint or sinner, to be good or evil, we must have experienced all of these things. 

Humans are naturally good, and virtuous, and saintly, and holy, 

-but-

Humans are naturally evil, and villainous, and sinners, and unholy.

There are some things that we are not,

But we will never experience these ideas, because we are not them,

So we can never have the words to describe these ideas.

We are stuck, you see. 

We cannot define ourselves properly, because we are ourselves;

You cannot use a mirror to see itself,

You can only hold it next to another mirror, and see infinity.