So about a year and a half ago, I wrote this essay on coffee and coffee houses. And then I sat on it. For all that time, I only ever showed it to a small handful of close friends. Now at last I show it here, just for you.
I like desk calendars that you pull off one page each day. Being, cheap, I will wait to get one after the beginning of the year when the price has dropped significantly. Yesterday I finally got my calendar for the year. I ended up with a Zen one that has “surprising sayings, parables, koans, and Haiku. While catching up I found some pages that can easily be brought into SL.
“The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.” (Zen saying)
Second Life is considered a game and some people wonder how you “win.” How about this as an answer? The game of Second Life is not a problem to be solved, but a virtual reality to be experienced.
“Without leaving my house, I know the whole universe.” (Lao-Tsu)
Second Life: Without leaving my house I have friends from all over the world.
Rat
When a boy talks to his mother, he wears a mask. He doesn’t always reveal everything about himself if he is smart. Certainly, he doesn’t talk in the same way as when he talks to his friends in the playground. And his mother certainly doesn’t talk to him in the same way she does when she talks to her husband. She wears yet a third mask when she talks as a member of the PTA group. In our daily life, we wear a mask. Sometimes several masks in the same day. But always, we wear a mask. No one reveals everything about themselves without a mask to filter it.
Well, a few do, but they are generally regarded as weird, crazy, dangerous, subversive, or some combination of those.
So, I’m writing this here to be frank about something. I wear a mask. And unlike most people, I am not only aware that I wear a mask, but I revel in it (Send in the court jesters!). I am me. The character I play in SL is me. The character I play in RL is me. They are two very different people; they are, in a sense, masks I wear. But even though they are different people, they are both me.
We imagine the world is a WYSIWYG world. As one philosopher once put it, “This is a hand,” proving once and for all that he did, indeed, have a hand. This demonstration of truth was followed up with a proof that he had two hands. Your homework is to name this philosopher.
He was of course trying to argue against a different set of philosophers, a group who questioned their very own senses. The most notable example of such a philosophy is “I think, therefore I am”. No homework this time - it’s Descartes.
But what if, one day, you woke up, and the sky was green? Just that one day mind you. And you remember it being blue the previous day. And the next day, you look out the window and it is back to it’s usual azure hue. Was it really green that day? Or was it a vivid imagination, or temporary insanity? What if one day you heard geese calling from outside your local supermarket? What if you saw everyone having black skin, regardless of their real ethnicity? Or white? Or green, even?
What if you grew up and lived your entire life seeing a different misperception every day, and you thought it was normal?
And what if, one day, you casually mention aspects of this to a friend, thinking it the most natural thing in the world, and they question your sanity for it?
If you take seriously the notion of radical contingency, that your experience of reality is potentially wrong, you know what true existential horror is, and that madness lies just around the corner.
I like to think I am consciously non-society. That is to say, I march to my own drummer. I don’t choose to follow the fashions and norms of society, but neither am I anti-society; I do not deliberately look at society and choose the opposite. I try to choose “me”, not “society”, and not “not society”.
But what if my attitude to society is simply a manipulation? Of course, that is ascribing conscious thought to a collective, which isn’t true. But it is fair to say that the collective unconsciousness of society has certain long term goals. And what if my attitude to mainstream society is just a part of a greater plan? That would make my “non-society” identification at best a hollow joke, and at worst meaningless. or possibly vice versa.
A friend noted once, “this reminds me of a talk I had with a marketing dude once. I told him that I wasn’t influenced by marketing schemes. You know what he told me? “well, we know how to reach people like you, too.”
Creepy, huh? Your thoughts are not your own. They have been implanted by advertising executives. Even though you may try to ignore the hype, adverts will reach you and influence your thought. I am not me. I am the results of countless manipulations by advertisers. I have enough awareness of self to realise that this is happening, but not enough to escape from it, and not enough to recognise what I would have been if I had not been exposed to this virus.
So I seek to find what I might have been. But it is an impossible task, because nowhere has escaped. It’s part of why I refuse to wear any clothes that are ‘branded’. Then along comes mujin with its ‘no brand’ hype. It’s part of why I like to travel. But multi-nationals ensure I cannot escape the global reach. Much as I want to avoid being shaped by society, I cannot escape being shaped by it.
Sometimes I wish I were a moron. Not in the clinical “can’t live without a full-time carer” sense, but in the sheeple sense. Content to be one of the crowd. Ignorance is bliss. Life would be a lot less complicated and far easier if I didn’t care about what is affecting my mind.
My life is inherently ridiculous. It’s a motto of mine. Sometimes, in the darkest hours before dawn, when I truly believe I have gone crazy, I look at my life. It’s like, you can look at most people, and summarize their personality in a sentence or two. The best most people manage with me is “strange”, or “weird”. And I agree. People look at me, and say, “you’re weird”. And I look at me, and say, “you’re weird”. I’ve snapped, and my perception of reality is suspect. But is it society manipulating me that way? Or is it simply a natural result of my fighting against society? Or is there just a basic chemical imbalance, or too many knocks on the head?
I guess what I’m kinda saying is, I know what existential horror is. I think I want to say it scares me, but I don’t know if that would be the real me speaking or not.
This blog is an experiment in (un)creative writing. At times, it will be nothing more than a catalogue of what I had for lunch. Boring huh? Other times, I get my creative juices running. Sometimes I’ll write fiction, sometimes philosophy, sometimes I’ll get all emo, sometimes it’ll be purple prose. But it isn’t the real me. Just because I write from a happy, or a depressed, or a whatever point of view, it doesn’t necessarily mean I am happy, or depressed, or whatever.
It’s a mask.
To say a writer takes on the characteristics of their characters when they write is ridiculous. It is equally ridiculous to assign those same emotions to a writer when intentionally writing from a chosen mindset.
ijou desu.