A Song: “Icarus” by The Staves

I think that Icarus has an undeserved bad reputation. He really didn’t do anything wrong.

Well, he did a lot that was wrong, but it wasn’t his fault. He was just an idiot teenager.

Firstly, who makes wings out of wax? Who trusts wax to be a sturdy material for construction? It’s wax! Its main function is to melt. Why would you build something from wax?

Secondly, what kind of father gives his son a pair of wings? Of course he’s going to fly too close to the sun. What else did you expect? He wasn’t going to sit at home, treasure the wings for their value, maybe wash them on the weekends and be responsible.

Give a kid a pair of flashy wings and he’s going to show off.

Wow, we don’t learn much, do we? We have lots of stories about learning things, but we don’t actually take them to hear, it seems.

No Idea

What am I doing? I don’t know.

I mean, I know what I’m doing right now. I know what I’ve done and I have a rough idea of what I’m going to be doing in the immediate future.

But I have no idea why. I really have no idea what I’m doing.

Does anybody?

We make big decisions in life, and we make them all the time. We have no clue what kind of impact those decisions can have on our lives in two days, two months or two years.

I could start walking down a path that will lead me straight over a cliff. Or that path could bring to the gate of a magnificent castle filled with money and food and a pretty princess-type woman with whom I could fall in love.

But I don’t know. Right now, I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going.

Nobody really does, at least not until they get there.

Wouldn’t life be easier if we all just acknowledged that? “I’m making a big decision. I might be wrong, and that would be really terrible,” we could announce. “I’m going to the deli. Do you want salami or pastrami?”

But we have to make decisions, most of which will have consequences that our only future selves will have to deal with.

I guess we just have to trust them to figure it out, if it all goes wrong.

Or trust ourselves to make sure it doesn’t.

In fallibility

I’ve found it most helpful to operate the assumption that any determination I make about the world is incorrect.

I don’t know if this very intellectual determination is the cause or result of the anxiety and indecisiveness that pervades my existence.

I’ve been right a lot: math problems, essays and other related academic bullshit. I’ve been wrong a lot and mostly about the important things: love, careers, food preferences.

I used to dislike peppers, so I never ate them. Actually, once, when I was quite young, I ate a green bell pepper and nearly spat it out. I (back when I believed in permanence of life, self and the world) stamped onto my wrist: “Don’t eat peppers: gross.”

Do you know how good peppers are? They’re healthy, they’re flavorful. In many dishes they are necessary to balance out bland, unexciting foods. And I went nearly 15 years without understanding that. Because I thought I knew something. Because I thought I was right.

Then I wrote this, a piece in which – as I wrote about how I had been wrong about my own tastes in music, about how I thought I wouldn’t like something and then I gave it an honest chance – I said I didn’t like something.

I wrote that I didn’t like rap, pop and country music.

I’d listened to some of it, mostly in the way that I had eaten peppers as a child. Nibble apprehensively around the edges, gag and then reject.

Then I recently started listening to some of the music that I thought I knew I didn’t like.

And I liked it.

If you're going to be an idiot, at least be aware of it...

Dreaming and Striving

You see it before you. It’s perfection. It’s your dream, and it’s just over there. So you consider walking towards it, and in this consideration, with this simple thought, a path appears, clear and delineated.

You want to go down this path. You feel it pull you, and your torso leans forward. But your feet stay glued to the ground.

You want to go, but you can’t. You need to go, but you won’t.

Because you know.

The path is an illusion. The dream is pure fantasy, and even if you were to follow such a path, and find such a dream, you would be disappointed.

You would be wholly unsatisfied.

The grandiose becomes pitiful, once at your feet. You look down on it and wonder how you could ever have thought it to be possible, to be attainable.

For a moment, a tear comes to your eye. You mourn the death of a dream and the person who once dreamt it.

Then you look up. There is a new path, and a new goal.

Unfortunately, you know it to be as illusory as all the dreams previous. Fortunately, inside of you a speck of hope flickers. It entreats you with promises. It seduces you with lies.

You carry on.

Anchored

We never touch anything. It looks like we do, and it feels like we do, but we never actually come in contact with anything.

At that miniscule, microscopic level, we remain separated. Something about electrons and likely-charged particles that will always repel each other. Neat stuff, explained here.

Isn’t it terrible when the most solipsistic, depressing philosophies are supported by scientific experimentation?

We are always alone, always separated from each other, from the world.

You think you’re walking on solid ground, that down is down and that you’ve got it all figured out. You’ve got your bearings and your reference points. You’ve staked your claim and you feel stable and sturdy. But you aren’t. You aren’t grounded in anything because, unbeknownst to you, you’re hovering, slightly, above the earth. All of your ideas, which you always thought had a direct relation to reality, are baseless. They come from you; they stay in your mind and there is no way, no matter how hard you try, to make them real, substantiated and factual.

That’s depressing, so you drop the philosophy, stop trying to come up with answers to the questions and look for another distraction. And you see a beautiful person that you think you can get lost in. So you run to them (technically, you hover) and you throw yourselves at each other. And you feel warm and safe and protected, but – gnawing in the back of your mind is this thought. You feel uncomfortable. You feel rejected, here on the threshold of acceptance. You’re not connected to anything.

You can’t be.

It’s impossible.

Fuck you science.

Ruminating

I re-watched a favorite episode of Mad Men recently. Season 2, Episode 2, Fight One. A plane crashes; Pete Campbell’s father was on it. We have a great exchange between Draper and Campbell, which ends with this exchange. Then Pete and his family have to prepare for the funeral. They sit in a stuffy parlor and passive-aggressively snipe at each other.

So many of the tasks necessary and vital for survival have been made obsolete or trivial or redundant in Western society. You don’t have to hunt for food. You don’t have to protect yourself from wild animals. You’ve got a grocery store down the street. You’ve got four walls and a high-powered shotgun in case any of them get knocked down.

Most Americans barely have to work. I mean, you have to work, if you define work as involving sitting in an office chair and typing.

All the small things are taken care of. All that’s left are the big and unanswerable questions, the ones that previous generations of human beings never dealt with until their minds were numb with exhaustion from working so desperately hard to survive.

But we’ve got so much more excess energy and so much free time, only some of which can be filled with going to the gym or watching Oprah or playing Halo. So we dwell.

And then something like death happens. Humans used to dig a hole, throw in the body, perform a quick ritual, cover the corpse and then move on. They were tired and they knew they had to do something important and mentally and physically demanding the next day, like trail the herd of buffalo that was their food source.

So what do we do now? We have nothing so vital to distract us, nothing so simple and mundane to engage our minds. We dwell. We dwell and dwell and we sit in our parlors and we simmer in the depths of the thick fog of our anxiety and fear. We smoke cigarettes and shoot heroin and write pathetic online blogs just to take the edge off, but it doesn’t work.

Our consciousness has evolved to the point where it is persistently aware of our mortality. Our society has advanced to the point where the only question left for humans to answer is death.

And there are no more distractions.

So we ruminate and stew.

Death and Meaning

People used to die while they did things. People used to die a lot. Sometimes they still do.

Like when human beings built massive bridges and skyscrapers, hundreds of people would die. When human beings would try to travel around the world by navigating the oceans, half the crew wouldn’t make it home. When early Homo sapiens went down the road to pick up some food, they might get gored by a caribou or pounced on by a massive saber-toothed cat.

Imagine the adventure that would bring! Life would be absolutely harrowing. Daredevils, now a dying breed of irrational entertainer, used to fill the human population.

Imagine how much better your life would be if, whenever you drove to the grocery store, there was a huge chance that you would be ambushed by some animal and mortally wounded. Sure, you might get killed at a young age or the fear of such an attack would deter you to leave the safety of your home too often, but whenever you stepped off of your front stoop, you’d know you would be about to encounter some kind of excitement.

Now, whenever you need to stock up on your cheesy puffs, you get in your 5-star, crash tested Subaru, crank the Bon Jovi and drive at a safe, rational speed. It’s now just a thing you do.

Hundreds of boats, massive and towering ships, cut through the open ocean like they’re floating on Lake Placid. Thousands of people (maybe more, I don’t know) get on these nigh-indestructible behemoths and bob around in the sea. Sailors used to get on creaky, wooden tubs, sealed with tree sap and plunge into the unknown. They had to rig sails and swab decks and hunt whales, knowing that one slip, one mistake, would really suck. Imagine the tension. Imagine the exhilaration that success would bring, success at such high stakes, success that literally any human being in society could access. Just get on a ship and try to survive.

Where does that adventure exist in today’s world?

Now, most of us pay thousands of dollars to get on our cruise liners, sip daiquiris and wait for the end.

Death is no longer a challenging obstacle to be grappled with and conquered; now it’s just an inevitable destination that fills our lives with dread.