Her laughter

I'm not worried. If there is a single change I would make in you, it simply does not occur to me in this moment because it is so joyously, raucously overwhelmed by everything about you that I could not imagine wanting to change. This would be a dimmer world without you. These words trail off into obscurity before you. I only hope my eyes, my touch, my life will convey this message.

The meaning of love

tl;dr: Love is saying yes.

In my post on significance, I mentioned love. This is an extremely important concept for me, and the will to think and express myself clearly about love has probably been the most important driving force behind this whole endeavor. More than anything, I want to show that love can and should serve as a source of meaning in life, and as an answer to the conditions of tragedy and finitude that cast doubt on life's value. Clearly, then, I have a lot to say about love, but in this first post on it, I'm just going to try to say what I mean by that word, and maybe include some trailing remarks. It's very important that I do this, because what I mean by "love" is something quite specific, though I expect it to continue defying exact definition, and it is very different from some of the things the word is often used to denote.

I think it will be easiest to begin by letting you know what I don't mean by "love". I'll start by giving a rapidfire list of negative influences that shouldn't go anywhere near love, gathered under three major headings. First of all, by "love", I do not mean possessiveness: love has no part in jealousy, suspicion, or the presumption of ownership or entitlement. Second, by "love", I do not mean pathological attachment: love also has no part in need, craving, desperation, obsession, or false idealization. Thirdly, by "love" I do not mean any attitude that could promote harm or manipulation of its object: love has no part in demands, obligations, expectations, resentment, or excuses, at least in the petty or self-serving senses of those words.

When love is forced to coexist with possessiveness, pathological attachment, and manipulation, it is muted and strained, and the good work it can do in our lives is suppressed and undervalued. It is unfortunate that such things are often considered unavoidable consequences of love, or even conditions of love or part of the essence of love itself. In the way in which I use the word "love", and recommend that it be used, love is quite simply opposed to this raucous din of pathological influences. When we find ourselves under their sway, we had best take therapeutic measures to free ourselves of them, as they will diminish the voice of love or drown it out entirely.

As a final word on what I don't mean by love, I want to point out some generally positive influences that are compatible and in many cases synergistic with love, but which I do not identify with it, singly or in any combination. These include infatuation and lust, which should be enjoyed but not taken too seriously, and can make good partners for love. Openness, good will, affection, sympathy, and compassion can promote love and be promoted by it in turn, but are not love itself. Respect, admiration, and pride of association get along well with love, but do not constitute it. Thankfulness and gratitude are unquestionably virtuous states and friends of love, but should not be mistaken for it. Finally, in all of these cases, intensity of feeling is often taken as an indicator of love, but it is not love, and it can be love's most fickle partner. A particular case of love might hold flourishing associations with all of these influences, and it's hardly conceivable that love would appear in isolation from all of them, but they do not constitute love in themselves.

There are, then, an awful lot of things that love isn't. So what is it? What is it that I think is worth calling by that name, and is supposedly distinct from everything I've listed above?

To put it poetically, love is saying yes. In my usage of the word, love is an attitude whose most essential attribute is affirmation of its object, for its own sake. The object of love is experienced as something that should be, and insofar as its being is understood to entail a standard of flourishing, it is experienced as something that should flourish as well. To love something is to host a desire- a positive motivation grounded in recognition of an opportunity rather than in privation or insecurity- for its flourishing, a desire which feeds the commitment underlying the feeling of rightness toward the object of love. With this affirmation there comes an openness toward the object of love: an intimate responsiveness to its states of flourishing or diminishing. When I love something, I take its interests as my own through this openness, and in this way I become vulnerable to the contingencies of its development as I am to those of my own. In a way, love is choosing to be vulnerable. Like trust, it is a risk we take for the sake of rewards that are intangible, and perhaps ineffable (though you know I'm still trying to find the words).

Love is patient; it is not born of insecurity or pathology, and so it knows how to wait. Love is enduring because commitment is part of its essence. Love is spontaneous; it is part of who I am to love what I love, and it cannot be forced if it is not forthcoming.

This post has been waiting for weeks for me to come and finish it. There's so much more I want to say, but my thoughts are in their usual state of disorganization now, and I'm tired of leaving my most important subject on the back burner. I'm posting this now unfinished, I may update it later, and I'll be writing more about love in the future.

Down to Earth

I've spent the last couple days going kind of insane. I'm over it. I'm thinking about my future, and how to make it a good one. I'm thinking about the best moments in my life, and how to live up to them.

By a very rough reckoning, I think I can make it back to California and start attending Mira Costa again in Spring 2012. I'd like to do that and I think it's a good goal. I'll need to work, save, and keep a certain amount of discipline. I'll need to make plans...

More later.

Transhuman space cadet

I want us to remember Earth, and that we are of Earth. I want us never to forget our history, what we've been, what we are. As long as we remember these things, we can go anywhere and become anything and our humanity won't be squandered.

In which your writer has a life. Not really though.

I'm going to try something different: I'm going to write about my life here. Maybe it won't add to what I'm trying to accomplish. Maybe I'll decide to take it down after a little while. Either way, it seems like a good way to shake things up, and maybe to shake loose some of the ideas I seem to be having such a hard time expressing.

Let it be known that I'm a bit of a scrub. Or a whole lot of a scrub. Or just all scrub. I'm sitting in front of my computer monitor on the floor of the room that my friends are letting me stay in, typing with the keyboard on my lap. I don't have a job, and lately I've very nearly stopped trying to find one because the project seems hopeless. I don't have a driver's license, and I'm not currently making any effort to get one because it seems pointless since it's going to be a very long time before I can afford any kind of vehicle. The owner of this house, who rarely visits, doesn't even know I'm living here, and if he found out then he'd probably either kick me out or raise the rent.

My two housemates are gracious friends who allowed me to move into their home here in Wichita, KS when I could no longer stay with my family in California. I didn't want to move with my family, so I moved in with them in stead. I failed training at the job we were all so sure I'd get when I came here, and I haven't been able to find another one. The situation is awkward, and I've been informed that I'll have to leave if I don't find work by the end of next month. If that eventually does come about, I'll have to choose between going to live with Dad in New Mexico, or going to live with another friend in my home town of Oceanside, CA. I prefer the latter option, but I'll only be able to manage it if Mom or someone provides me with the money to get there. My favorite option, of course, is getting a job, saving money, getting a license, getting a car, and finally starting to build a life for myself. I would like to move that life back to California, when I can.

This is a bad situation for me. It's the kind of situation in which I stop trying to make my life better, and occupy myself with the perpetual distractions provided by my computer, by books, by what goes on in my own head, and even by sleep. I badly need to stop letting myself waste time this way and make a stronger effort than I ever have before to dust off my resume, shine up my attitude, and apply for 10,000 jobs a day. Maybe I'll get an interview.

Death and significance

It has been far too long.

But here I am being brief.

If I start to make you sad, I promise there's a happy ending.

Death is a three-pronged thing: a possibility, an eventuality, an option, all three faces turned toward us at all times. It makes the conscious life of a humanbeast a disturbingly sealed-off thing, not only in the crowded space of the skull, but in the worryingly brief duration between birth (approximately) and death (which can also be an approximate sort of thing). It seems quite absurd that one's own consciousness should at some point be simply extinguished, but if the conclusions I've offered so far are accepted, everyone's will be, eventually. The first-hand memory of every joy and sorrow and every brilliant insight any of us ever experience will be purged from existence with no sensible trace. This hard little truth doesn't do this for everyone, but it does it for me: it makes me want to ask, what's it all for, if it all just goes away?

I've learned to channel such thoughts outward, to turn away from introspective reverie toward the larger world we all share and experience in our own special ways. The world is bigger than me; my life is bigger than me. The events captured in the perishable and imperfect record of my memory didn't just effect me, and my responses to them were not just ornaments in my personal perspective; everything I have ever experienced has effected my behavior, and continues to do so in some small way, and everything I do makes some kind of difference in the world. I move things around, and people move around me, talking, laughing, yelling, smoldering, wondering, wishing, loving, giving, accepting. This effect I necessarily have on the world around me, along with everything that can be inferred or interpreted from my sheer existence, is the significance of my life, my significance, the outpouring of my tragically delicate and preciously unique field of experience into the world beyond it, the mark of this organism's constitution and history upon the invincible memory of reality as a whole.

To recognize my own significance in this way is to take a step outside of that worried, self-absorbed world of introspection, and to understand that my doomed (maybe not dramatically so at the moment) consciousness is not all there is to me. Though all of my cherished learning and the sound of her laughter and the touch of her skin and the Milky Way seen from a dark mountain and Boingo and Cohen and the Femmes and the Scissor Sisters will eventually be forgotten by me, they have touched a thousand lives, in ways I'll never know, through the ways that they have moved me.

But I don't care about every little effect I have on the world. No number of changes I make in circumstances that I do not value can make it seem any less ridiculous that I am here now, when I consider that I'll be gone tomorrow. When confronted with the tragedy and cruelty and waste and misfortune that the human condition seems to make inevitable, the slice of of my significance that stands up to every evil, that keeps the light of life burning, is that which I have with respect to the people, places, things, practices, the members of every ontological kind, that I love.

Enough for now. I'll go on about love in future entries. It'll rock your face.

Engagement

In my previous entry I wrote about a concept, commitment, that's very important to both the moral and spiritual sides of my philosophy. Today I want to say a little bit more about the similarly important concept of engagement.

I originally began scrutinizing this concept because I wanted to give the clearest possible expression to my idea of appreciation. The more I am openly engaged with my situation, the better able I am to appreciate what I have. To the extent that I am accepting of the realities that I am faced with, that I am ready to let go of old ideas and assumptions, and that I can really let things be what they are without casting about for rationalizations and excuses, I am openly engaged with my whole situation, and able to appreciate what I have within it. To the extent that I cling to an image of myself or my future, that I refuse to accept the realities I am facing, or that I flee from circumstances that I know I'll have to deal with eventually, I fail to engage openly with my situation, I neglect and abuse what I have, and I thereby generally fail to appreciate it.

If this sketch of the relationship between engagement and appreciation seems more poetic than philosophical, it is because engagement is most easily expressed metaphorically, depicting relatively abstract attitudes toward perceived circumstances and possibilities as though they were physical interactions with concrete objects. I don't think this is a coincidence; I think that engagement in general is understood and experienced through metaphor, because we begin to internalize these gross physical behaviors at a very early age, and build our understanding of and inclination toward abstract concepts through a kind of imaginative interaction based upon them. I'm currently working on a speculative developmental account of engagement that can give a more solid sense to the concept, and to the essential roles it plays in motivation, appreciation, and love.

In the broadest sense, my engagement with a state of affairs is just the totality of my behavior toward it. This is an extremely general sort of relation that straddles the divide between the subjective and objective, as it encompasses perception, attention, construal, appraisal, and deliberation, as well as physical and social interaction. My innermost subconscious behavior toward the most abstract conceptions and my strenuous efforts toward concrete goals are both kinds of engagement. Engagement can be said to take place at many levels; a useful classification might label them sensory, perceptual, evaluative, imaginative, deliberative, verbal, physical, social, institutional, economical, and ecological. While I am awake, I am constantly engaged with concepts, memories, possibilities, expectations, my own self-image, my immediate physical environment, and all of the circumstances that constitute my total situation. For the purposes of this blog, I'll usually be writing about more subjective levels of engagement with persons, possibilities, or situations. At that level, it is almost always better to be more openly engaged than less so.

An attitude, in this context, is a pattern of engagement.

In all honesty, I don't know if all of this terminology is helping or hurting me, and I'll be a little surprised if anyone has read this far. Much of what I've said here may ultimately be a kind of scaffolding that I can safely cast off once I've found my way to a message that need not be expressed so tortuously. Until then, I'll be trudging along with these ideas in tow.

I really need to go to bed.

Parts of this account are based, however crudely, on the theory of conceptual metaphor, which falls within the very successful paradigm of embodied cognition that characterizes much of contemporary cognitive science.