I think the tree is an element of regeneration which in itself is a concept of time
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I’m starting with the assumption that everyone is mad. I’m mad, you’re mad – we’re lunatics; living is lunacy. The madness supports itself and we are all a part of a war for reality. Of course we’re very good at our own madness; just as much as we’re all very good at being unaware that we each have a stake in The Reality Game.
In the box of living are a set of rules and, as we live in that box we better learn those rules so we can use them. Between two camps there is a calcification. There are the pragmatic thinkers and the lunatics. But it’s the relationship that is lunacy; perpetuated between one extreme and the other is the very box itself. Some of us think about it; that seems to be enough to grant the existence of madness in the game; others just get on with what the others are thinking about.
Madness is something people have. It’s not something that a group of people can have is it? At least not in relation to each other if they agree they’re not mad. They would have to be mad in relation to another group, maybe a bigger group. Maybe the madder you are the harder it is to be pragmatic about things? Maybe; just maybe that is, madness is a symptom of not wanting to play ‘The Game’. Maybe when we decide that the rules aren’t for us and we want a different kind of living we’re no longer in the group that defines the rules and so we’re mad? Maybe then, madness is in fact a symptom of pragmatism. Somewhere someday a bunch of people got together and decided that the way that they behaved was ‘normal’. Their decision ossified in their minds as a set or parameters that determine the legitimacy of someone’s sanity and the rules were written. Centuries later we don’t know why but; jaded, mad and confused we just get on with the lot of it.
But then there’s more to the madness then that isn’t there. I mean, in order to ask what we mean by madness we ought to ask what we mean by sanity. Who exactly is sane and why are they sane and anyone else mad? If those chaps that got together and decided that they were sane were sane, who were they sane in relation to? Were they sane in relation to their ability to survive? Maybe in relation to what they expected of each-other? One way or another the decision was made and madness was defined as something quite different to sanity; both of which are symptoms of complete and utter lunacy.
I spent the day yesterday watching movies. Each movie, like a dream was it’s own reality. And it was a long day. I watched about 6 movies, lived in six worlds. And then I read some of a book. Madness describes that break from reality represented by dream-state, a conflict with the agreements made with the world in our absence. Madness like a dream, movie or book is an uncomfortable cold war between factions fighting for reality. The winner lives and the looser dies a death of insignificance.
I am not alone in wondering about the loner; sometimes aspiring myself to a life of solitude. America, with huge expanse between cities is littered with solitude. Drive through any state and you find small towns populated by a few holding the front line of a gas station on a highway. It’s not uncommon to dream of a life in a town like these, with less stress than we think we have in a city. And then we come into contact and, like Pushkin’s Onegin or Hesse’s Steppenwolf, we are forced into our own conflict. But unlike these characters we are not romantic wanderers. We represent the side of the pragmatist; the ’sane’ because we have these dreams. Movies are largely the last bastion of the romantics who are forced into a life of solitary wondering, tired of life and secluded on the outskirts of civilization. But again these are broken people, often broken by their own morality or break from it. They are the aspirations of a world that is not romantic, that is not ready to be alone and not ready to do more than dream that they might be like the loner because in the city they are truly alone.
In the Reality Game there are few who make a true stake for reality. In a democracy reality is more of an agreement than a truth. In a tyranny reality is forced upon us. But in reality there are only people and objects. Nothing else. It is how we treat each other and the objects around us that truly determines reality. It maybe counter-intuitive to say there is nothing else in reality, or to say even that in reality there is only one thing and another (for where does reality sit in relation to these things?). However, reality is such that not much more can truly be said about it. Every other statement is nothing more than an elaboration on of a theme. There are paradigms of description but then they are descriptions that reduce to the same few propositions. They obfuscate our ability to comprehend reality as a whole for ourselves as individuals; as individuals caught up in a contract with one-another. Sure we can take sides, and we do. But we have to sit on some side, rule some side or be alone.
In the Western world there are only a few positions from which our conceptions stem. They reduce to views into the world, into sense and it’s meanings for us. On the one hand there are those who believe it is madness to question the nature of reality and the agreements we have made to pay homage to it. These people are the scientists, rationalists and pragmatists of our time. They beg that those who do question at least put their question to the test by maybe jumping off a building to test the reality of gravity. This insult is well designed to make it’s point; but it misses the crux of the argument it is designed to destroy and therefore wins for rhetoric alone. The point is missed because the arguments of those who beg the question are not made at either the legitimacy or consistency of science. The arguments are made at the legitimacy of the world we experience. Science; who holds her head up as the arbiter of experiences is of course offended by the question of her legitimacy. But the nuance is more subtle than that. Science is only the arbiter of consistency, not of reality or of experience like she wishes to believe she is.
The question is not one of Science’s consistency. Science has demonstrated consistency and worked towards arguments that validate it. The question is over our ability to find any relevance in this consistency. The argument is plaid out most strongly along the front-lines of the social sciences where discrepancies in the relationship between science and experience allow the waters to be muddied and the consequences deep.
Art describes the discrepancy well. Art, literature, philosophy and science tell us where we are and where we’ve been. Big black straight lines in a picture or a painting contrast with the gentle gray of sketch. Modernism in it’s bold color and outline contrasts directly with Romanticism. One (the former) looks at life as decided. It is a paradox of certainty and uncertainty of shapes and color. The other, certain about it’s mood is uncertain about society, the person and the structure within which it exists. One resembles the strength of industrial technology and it’s implications on our outlook on life, the other the consequences to the spirit; it is the perspective within.
And between extremes lies a balance. So much of the structure of thought comes back to the same questions about change, interpretation and reality. Heraclitus is at once contrasted with Parmenides, Plato with Aristotle and Hegel with Leibnitz. On the one hand we have flux and change; reality in relation to time the culture and history. On the other a static view; structured and layered with quantifiable and logical strictures. Each view clashing like the steel of our swords of thought against one another, each absently forgetting that one is the shore and the other the tide of our minds, confirming and dis-confirming one another in a tangible discourse that is the essence of Occidental tradition.
It is not that reality is myth; it is that the game that we play is an insanity. The agreement that the game will be played is a tradition that we have forgotten to understand except in the high vaults of our imaginations. And in the discourse we run the tangent of loosing sight of the relevance of why we began the game in the first place. Not just to further our thought but to understand better who and why we are in the short space of time between our birth and death. In forgetting we loose sight of the unity that transcends any one faction or camp. We loose sight of ourselves in order that we are entertained; less for the sake of truth and more for the masturbatory effect of seeming strength in a world where we would do well to remind ourselves that each in our own way we are all a little mad a little sane; both physical and mental, together and alone.
Tags: assumptions, Augmented reality, Companies, Concept of Time, Elements, existence, Greek, Joseph Beuys, madness, Occidental, Parameters, Philosophy, Philosphy, Pragmatism, Reality Game, Social Sciences, Television, Thinkers, time, Video game, Virtual reality
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