Old Questions, Old Answers

Recently I’ve been possessed anew of an old question. In some ways it’s the question that all other human questions must reduce to, or at least should reduce to, because when the world snaps into focus it is ultimately the only thing that fills your field of vision. In classic American terms, what’s the good life and how do we live it? What do we have to do to get the most out of life? It’s such an often repeated phrase, ‘get the most out of life,’ recycled through the increasingly unreliable and various organs of cultural transmission so many times that it seems to have been infected or at least slimed over with a film of bullshit, but just because the question has been co-opted countless times to sell Oxy-Clean and nose jobs and Ab-Gliders doesn’t mean that the question itself has been corrupted..

What’s the good life and how do we live it? The reason it works as such an effective advertising strategy is because it's the question we're all looking for an answer to. It seems like QVC and Toys'R'Us don't have the right answers, but there are right one’s, there have to be, and if Hollister and Tommy Hilfiger have exploited the question for profit, a long line of thinkers leading back into the primordial mist affirm that it’s worth asking. I think a crucial component of the answers we’re actually looking for proceed from the simple question ‘why?’.

I’m proposing, of course, nothing complicated here. I’m rephrasing old questions in old terms, presenting nothing new and offering nothing revolutionary. How do we live a good life? Seek the foundations upon which life rests, and then when you understand why, maybe you can go from just life to something good. It's not terribly complicated, but I think in formulating my world view up to now I’ve neglected things that seemed simple because somehow I got the idea that they weren’t enough. No enough either in the sense that they weren’t sufficient or that they weren’t trendy enough, that the answers we’re all looking for are strung up in layers of neon tugged into hieroglyphs into postmodern oracular smoke, that a seemingly complicated world needs an equally complicated codex to read it. That a simple answer is a boring answer, a blasé answer. And yet, maybe there’s a little string we could pull somewhere that’ll bring the whole thing down, and maybe that’s pretty cool. Maybe there isn’t, and maybe it isn’t, but just maybe we can figure out what we’re supposed to be doing here.

The questions are old, the proposed answer is simple (or at least the algorithm for exploring it is), but there is nothing to reject in things that we have seen before or in things we can grasp. I am alive, sooner or later I’m going to die, I want to live in the best way I can. How do I do that? The most important, most pressing question we’ve got. And the most potent answer I can think of to that question is a simple injunction to think about why. About why things are the way they are. About why we do the things we do, why we want the things we want, why we react to things the way we do, why this is this way and why that is that. If you get that, then you can manipulate the matrix. If you don’t, then you’re drowning in it, casting around for the sort of life-preservers that keep you in the water with the same efficacy that they keep you afloat.

I try to live life to the fullest, I want to get the most out of life, I want to live every day like it’s my last, blah, blah, blah, blah. We’ve reached a strange impasse where the most important resolutions we can make have also become the most empty. It’s crucial to make the resolution, but the resolution itself, alone, without anything to back it up, is worthless. Why? Think about it I guess.

Sometimes You Need to Put it Somewhere

Some ass named John Barth once said that nothing ever lasts longer than a mood, and maybe I'm bipolar but I think that of any line of anything I've ever read this has resonated with me more than any. Nothing lasts longer than a mood and we flash from one to the next on the rise and fall of crashing and soaring and plummeting and flat lining chemical reactions in our heads, and for a while I couldn't handle that but who gives a fuck, we are what we are and what we are can't change that, doesn't change that, and if somewhere there are enzymes catalyzing the rush of whateveryouwantocallem's through our veins like so much water through so many canyons, if it's these little chemical process pulling the pulleys and booms behind the scenes of what we think of as our selves, what's to lament about that? I am a massive machine that's nothing more than molecular ups and downs but those molecular ups and downs are all that I am and why not fold them in rather than force them out?

Nothing lasts longer than a mood they say, which means that nothing lasts after the adrenaline fades away, resolution rides on receding streams of dopamine and we are (are we), as it were, at the whim of our brain chemistry, but sometimes, when a mood is real good, you need to put it somewhere. Somewhere you can get to.

Brain Chemistry. It moves the pulleys and booms but, can I tell it where to move them? A silly question, or perhaps the central question. Someone else said I'm never the same person when I go to sleep as when I wake up, as when I wake up, but when I go to sleep a figure of flame do I have to wake up a thing of stone? Can you bottle fire? Can you keep it? Can you put it somewhere secret and safe for the night and open it up in the dim, sputtering critically flawed 9mm film of the early morning and have it come rushing out, the only spear you ever need to meet the day, the only shield you ever need against whatever tribulations the world might send your way? Can you make a mood last forever? There are times when I'm as the ebb and flow of a steely gray sea; slow, incessant, largely irredeemable, a sullen stagnation with too much momentum to gain any. But there is a flame inside me to scorch that world in streaks of whatever it is for which light seems to be the readiest and most overused metaphor. I'mma find turn that shit into ink and write it on my bones.