metonymy4u

When I was a child, the world tried to kill me for my weirdness. I learned to conceal myself as a matter of survival. Recently I learned how to not to live that way any longer. And if the world comes after me again, so be it. They can only kill me once.

The word delusion simply identifies heterogeneity of thinking and speaking. And it requires a definitional context to be accurately understood. The notion that time and space are malleable was probably seen as delusional by many in the early days of Einstein’s relativity theory. Now we accept it in all of its weirdness. Depend on it even for so many aspects of our daily lives. Are we all then delusional? Or are we simply living in an ever shifting verbal context, with no position of absolute rest from which to measure the world or ourselves?

One might ask the question: why be radically genuine if so much is at risk? My answer, my own personal answer, is that learning is worth the risk. If I am not radically genuine, I will not gain access to information I truly need. To be a more effective person in the future.

“…all spring the woman with the habits rattles around my head, extant,
worrying a cotton ball, trying to get the last bit of red paint off her left
thumbnail like goddamn Lady Macbeth.”

-Jennifer Michael Hecht


The result of radical genuineness is often emotional distress. When we put ourselves out there in the world, expose our warts and imperfections, stop our people pleasing behaviors, often people will not be pleased. They will be upset. They will be angry and disappointed. And their emotions are real. As real as the computer I write this on. As the real as the hurt I caused them. As real as the regret I feel for having done so. And yet at the same time I understand that I am not the sole cause of these events. I fear a world that teaches others to only see me as the sexist white guy, that teaches me to see others as the way they seem, rather than how they are. The unfortunate fact is that we live in a horrible world that does horrible things to people. I wish I knew why.

In the long history of humanity’s struggle for good vs. evil, we have repeatedly asked the question “what shall we do?” At times it is not even clear what we mean. Several hundred years prior, Immanuel Kant attempted to clarify the situation. He proposed that what moral questions aim at is the notion of an autonomous choice – one subject to the rules of reason rather than circumstance. How contingent beings such as ourselves (torn between logic and feeling) achieve this, however, remained a mystery. His intellectual heir, Soren Kierkegaard, took up the challenge and pointed out that such struggles can only be fully captured in poetry. The so called “knight of infinite faith” who risks everything against the odds of caprice and fortune can only be sought in dreams and rare moments of terrible sorrow, such as when Abraham and Isaac made their memorable journey. Our problem is that we remember only the outcome, and forget how the people, themselves, must have suffered along the way. What great images such as Sophocles’ Antigone, Shakespeare’s Edgar, Morrison’s Sethe, or Piercy’s woman on the edge of time therefore embody are the demands of wisdom over reason. A wisdom to risk everything and everyone we love and admire on this strange chance in the dark of space, that we are not alone.

Humanity seems to prefer an intense level of cultural homogeneity, and apparently will halt at nothing to achieve it. Ethnic cleansings along lines of speech, behavior, color, race, gender, emotion, explanation, preference or identity continue to sweep the world in all manner of trials and inquisition. When will we evolve?