Critique on Sartre

I just finished "L'Existentialisme est un humanisme" by Jean-Paul Sartre

Here's what I think:

First off, Sartre declares himself atheistic, but in reality it would seem that he fails to take any such leap of faith (or any such leap of no faith) simply because Sartre states faith is foolish; moreover, he speaks of a more comfortable agnosticism and bases all opinion and philosophy on tangible, concrete faculties and conditions. This, I believe, is base. In his view, which is quite self-glorifying, anything poetic is not accounted for, except perhaps his despair and abandonment. In the end he embraces safety and doubt and miss out, to quote Martel, "on the better story".

Sartre's lack of a priori conditions and his vehement responsibility of choice is precisely nothing more than a new, modern view of 18th century human naturalism, though it is in a more diluted form. He argues that each man is responsible to create his own existence, and that that is inherent at birth. This is nothing more than a translated, slanted stance on the revolutionary philosophies of the mid and late 18th century.

Sartre is very scientific and sterile.

Despite my rather harsh critique, I find something about this Frenchman to be endlessly fascinating and I can't quite stamp out a stance on existentialism.

Drive

Last night I was driving home at one in the morning with the windows rolled down on my shitty clunker of a car. I could hear all of creation stirring. It was amazing. The fields were purple oceans and the heat lighting was a lighthouse calling me home. My car was a little boat on the waves. Of course, I was a pirate, a romanticized pirate with a parrot that sings Damien Rice perfectly (Damien is new found treasure pqts [pa’que tu sepas]). I felt so alive, like for once that life was good and I was doing what I should be: driving home at one in the morning with all my windows rolled down, thinking I was a pirate.

It’s so easy for us to forget things like nature and simplicity. I try not to myself but last night reminded me that I do sometimes. I mean, the night was so…was so…alive! It was like everything was speaking to me and in that moment I knew everything. I know that that is hippie and infantile of me, but it’s how I really felt last night.

Life is good.

Sometimes I feel immortal.

Maybe I’m just really lucky…

…or twitterpated.

That tends to have effects like finding wonderful piracy in late night drive home.

Yo, this was Prom.

I fucking hate it when people use you. I fucking hate it.

Non Trovo Pace Notte Ni De, Ma Pur Mi Piace Languir Cosi

This is the story of my life:

Setting: The South, now

Scene 1: A scantily furnished room. There are two second hand arm-chairs with a moldy looking ottoman. In between the chairs sits a table with an equally dismal lamp. Everywhere books are stacked up hap-hazardly, disrupting the room. There is literally (no pun) a magnitude of books overwhelming the setting. The room is dark.

Enter LEWIS, wearing a white shirt and tie, black pants and boots. His boots are idiosyncratically untied, foiling his clean-cut appearance.

LEWIS is a boy rapidly approaching manhood with a deep brooding voice and a bit of a perpetual scowl on his face. Despite this, he has a very austere sense of manners and Southern gentry. Everything about him is on pens and needles, t’s crossed and i’s dotted. Waiting inside of him is a gruff, but sincere “good morning” and firm handshake for those who would cross his path. LEWIS is a photographer and a writer, quite good and well-received for it. He walks slowly and deliberately and is average height with a medium build.

Enter ROUSSEAU, wearing a blue button-down shirt, and khaki pants, soiled shoes. He has a “dusty” look about him.

ROUSSEAU is also a boy of eighteen or nineteen. He has a light, but sad face with a tenor voice. ROUSSEAU is LEWIS’s foil. Whereas LEWIS is every bit the Southern Ideal, ROUSSEAU finds only hypocrisy and ignorance from his homeland. ROUSSEAU is sloppy, lanky, and uninhibited in his movements. He speaks his mind and is predestined to both cynicism and Romanticism. Despite occasional boldness, ROUSSEAU is shy and self conscious. He is a poet, but unlike LEWIS, his art has not been well received, and he’s heavily bitter about it. Although he would never admit it.

ROUSSEAU and LEWIS are best friends. In their minds, they are the only two that can truly understand the complexities of each other. This is especially true for ROUSSEAU who doesn’t trust easily and fears crowds, while LEWIS considers himself a friend to everyone and is much more open. The two young men are devoted to one another.

LEWIS is generally Protestant (southern) and ROUSSEAU is a former atheist with a strong fascination for Catholicism. Both boys are naïve in their youth, but have already become disillusioned with the world. They think of themselves as special and different for realizing that the world around them is ultimately shit fragmented with brief, wonderful moments of beauty.

LEWIS and ROUSSEAU sit opposite each other in the arm-chairs. They star intently at one another

Manos Abiertas

I don't know what I'm doing. I don't understand what's going on.

For so long now, I had been able to escape the perils of my own depression, but now, no matter how begrudgingly I resist, I can feel myself slipping slowing back into the sadness that I so shamefully admitted to last night.

I've been so happy. Mostly due to one person in my life, but now, not even that is turning me about. I feel like I did this fall when I was slipping in and out of apathy and funeral of the heart. I hate this. I hate it so much. The color is draining from my face for no apparent reason and I weigh my will again and again, and all I can fathom for my melancholy is vanity.

I am that selfish. I'm that fucking selfish.

How can I march in this parade of self-pity? What right do I have to take the world on my shoulders? I have none. I am no different than anyone else, and it is a vanity to think otherwise. Yet now, all I can think about is how hapless I'm becoming. Oh, and how wickedly fast these sentiments do their work too! They are like a poison in my system, and no matter how hard I try to fight them, when dusk arrives every evening, I'm bathed in this terror of whatever the hell is wrong with me.

Lord, what would you have me do?

I have turned my face over these past 4 months and yet I still cannot escape the realities of my own failings. All I ask is to be forgiven, and as I much as I know that you've forgiven me, I cannot escape this guilt. My soul has twisted around it and if it is a sin to say so then forgive me of that as well, but I cannot prostrate myself any lower.

I just want to escape this. I want to get over myself.

but I'm so fucking vain and so fucking sick of myself.

Prayer for the Weary

Dear God,

I have come to the conclusion that I'm a fucking cliche...

Even my imperfect bouts of melancholy, which I fancy poetic, are cliche. I do it for vanity, and it is my vanity that makes me sick. I'm such a terrible person. I cannot blind myself from it any longer and maybe writing it down here is the first step. Confession. I both love and hate confession. It's like picking my own scab and enjoying it bleed. But confession, like humility, is good for the soul.

I'm a fake.
I'm a liar (and I despise liars more than all the sin in this word).
I'm cheap at most.

I am irrevocably defeated. I am stabbed by the sharpest scalpel of self-evaluation and no inkling, but be it divine, can convince me of my worth.

But time goes on, and so must I. Tomorrow is another day, and our lives can change with each breath. So all I can do is hope for some change, and use it to make myself better.

I'll get better because simply put, I have to.

Amen

Rain Rain More More More On Rain Rain Rain

I know, I know. I have an obsession with memory and rain, but you'll just have to get over it. Superalo!

I have many, many good memories from the rain and it’s difficult to decide which one I should delve into first. Each memory is poking out of my neurons, begging me to describe it first, growing like weeds in the deep furrows of my brain. Maybe that’s all memory is really, weeds sprouting sporadically and randomly from the brain. Or is it the heart? It certainly is much more pleasing to think that memories stem from the heart and not the brain. I realize that that is a biological impossibility and the heart is not the center of intelligence. I just think that there’s something so vulgar and common about the brain, something too scientific, and as a rule I am suspicious and uncomfortable of anything that is scientific.

But my memories of the rain come flooding to my mind and it is hard to just pin-point one. It’s very difficult to weed out one memory and describe it here without being drawn down the path of another memory and divulging into that one as well. But I will try.

I remember about two years ago dancing wildly like an animal. I remember the mud smeared unceremoniously across my naked chest. And of course the rain, I remember the cold heavy rain, and the thunder of an unnaturally warm late November evening. I can see my friend, Jenny, and me spinning in savage, wide circles as we squeal and laugh like Maenads in the alleyway between the Chemistry lab and the theater. Jenny is soaked to the bone in her Beatles t-shirt and One-Fish-Two-Fish pajama pants. Jessica is there too, with paint all over her hands and a wide, almost drunken smile in her eyes. Sarah George is also there, her welcoming, doe eyes closed as she twisted and spun in her own world, her long wavy hair spinning like a veil around her, and looking (as usual) breath-takingly beautiful.

There’s something so ancient about Sarah. It’s like she knows some hidden mystery, but is forbidden to tell the rest of us what it is, and she is therefore condemned to merely hint at it through her piercing glances and song-like voice. I cannot describe how beautiful and unearthly Sarah looks when she dances. I can see the water beading on her skin, crystallizing its paleness. Her long, thin white arms cry out and spin as if she and she alone, were the only one who could correctly communicate with nature. Like she were the interpreter to it’s understanding, and the rest of just merely grapple for that archaic, wordless language which so speaks so fluently.

Sarah is the only girl I’ve ever met that I thought that I could truly love, as a man is supposed to love a woman. As is intended both biologically and spiritually, but like always I failed miserably in my confused and lying pursuit of her. I know I hurt her in my lying, because that’s what it was, a lie. It was a pretense that would not blind her, or God, or myself to who I really was and what my heart really needed which has only now been revealed to me.

but back the memory…

Then there is me, barefoot and bare-chested covered from head to foot in mud because I, unlike the girls, cannot resist swimming in the giant, four inch deep puddles that have formed in the ancient gravel of the alley. I’ve become animalistic and Druid-like in my excitement. I want to become the earth. I want to return to the womb from which we all came and I want to become as clean as God’s fingers. In short, I want to lose my mind, and I do so.

Ah the release! The act of losing your mind is something that is so sweet and so unexpected that it’s like caressing the cheek of the Almighty when it finally happens. It’s the purest and most holy of ecstasies. It’s the first kiss of life before age and reason stamp out and purge the foolish idealism of youth. Something that even at my minuscule eighteen, I can begin to feel creeping in on my cherished innocence.

It’s that moment that I want to hold on to forever. It’s immortality.

Flowers in my hands. . .

I remember a funeral. My great-grandfather’s when I was ten, maybe eleven years old. I close my eyes and all I can see in my mind is the vibrant, almost violent burst of flowers. They bloom in the small church’s sanctuary which groans in agony as its simple white walls are filled mercilessly with those paying their respects. They come to pay their dues. They are obligated to weep so that in time someone will come and weep for them, turning the soil over, returning dust to dust and dirt to dirt.

I don’t mean to invoke cynicism or sarcasm. It’s just that’s purely how it is. The mind is driven by utterly human impulses, one of them the simple fear of death. This fear becomes a great web of heart-breaking gravity that catches us all and forces us to come stare at the dead. It forces us to break our backs and submit ourselves, unwillingly, to the bleak, stoic certain unknown that is blocked by a veil of superstition and faith. Only with our own passing will that veil be dropped, revealing the hidden secrets of the universe.

And so they come unwillingly. No one wants to confront death.

Even there as a child, I could tell the difference between those truthfully mourning and those only pretending to mourn because it was expected. They may have wanted to shout and laugh, be outside in the sunlight but their inexplicable reverence kept them silent. Their fear of death snipped their tongues from saying what they truly felt. They sat poised, hanging on every word of the eulogy, trying to do something to compensate for their apathy. As a child I was one of them, and only now as an adult can I say what I truly felt that day.

But back to the memory…

The sweet odor of late August heat and the unmistakable scent of lilies boiling in the afternoon sun is all I can smell. I think it is poetic, if not expected, that there is life bursting everywhere in a celebration of death. The flowers are nauseating, but for the life of me I cannot tear away their beauty. I cannot stop thinking that in a matter of time, they like all of us, will wilt and die.

Only a child could think of something so absolute.

My great-grandfather had died from complications of a stroke. It wasn’t a quick, seamless death, but one that was long and degrading; spanning what I think was 6 months. The type of death that was much more painful for those watching than the actual dying. The horrible, terrible sickening death of watching your husband, your father, your grandfather, your great-grandfather become someone else, someone foreign until finally he gives way to the final euphoric release of mortality.

Heavy, heavy shit, that no eleven year old wants to think about.

Pardon me

I've been rather neglecting of this little blog; be prepared for about 5 posts today...

I've also been extremely nostalgic and writing down every memory I can...well...remember.

the rain in spain stays mainly in the plain

I love the rain. It is the best type of precipitation. Heck, it’s my favorite weather period. I think I should move to someplace like Seattle where it rains all the time. The only catch is that would require me leaving Virginia, and good god, I love Virginia. We basically kick ass. We were the first colony. We’re named after Elizabeth the first. Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Monroe, Woodrow Wilson, and a lot of other really important Americans were Virginians. We also have the best dialect, hands down. It’s southern, but not ignorant sounding. It’s very smooth and elitist, rounded and drawn out like honey. It’s much better than that flat crap they speak further south. I don’t have that strong Virginian accent any more though; eight years of theater and studying Romantic vowels has pretty much killed any of the natural ease with which I used to speak. Now I speak in an almost untraceable Mid-Western, linear and proper like a newscaster with just the slightest hint of something British.

My father though, still speaks with that old Virginian, at least amongst certain circles. He has the uncanny ability to unconsciously change his dialect to match whomever he’s speaking to. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I want him to speak his Virginian all the time.

But again, my linguistic inklings distract me. . .

Where was I? Oh, the rain.

I love the rain. So many poignant things have happened to me while being in it. I’ve found God and love in the rain (and yes, both DO exist, of that I’m sure). There’s something so primal and spiritual about the rain. It’s something that you really can’t experience in anything else: the feel of the water on your skin, the frigid but gentle beating of each drop as it rolls down your cheek and the backs of your hands, washing away everything, making you feel invisible as if you had become part of the rain and for that brief, wet moment you were something more than just flesh and blood. It’s like you’ve become fully human, you’ve crossed out of the roaring, screaming chaos that is this existence into the harmonic, perpetual peace of nature that like everything good, is so illusive and fickle with us.

Yeah, rain is great. . .

uh-oh

Tomorrow is off-book day for Crucible, basically I'm going to be murdered by my director...

Thatcherisms

In my last post I refered to Margaret Thatcher in the past tense. Obviously, I realize she is still alive. I was refering to her administration, not her personally.

Thanks, and (like always) covering my ass!
Jake

a Schroeder you are not...

We all have our own bêtes noires petites, non? Our pet peeves, we all have those little things that drive us up the wall of our wits for rather irrational reasons. Well, I have a few of my own, each as weird as the other like the incorrect use of the subjunctive "were" or Jude Law's accent in Cold Mountain (well,what the hell, Jude Law in general is as annoying as a Hardee's commercial).

But perhaps the most poignant, most vexing peeve of all, is when someone who clearly has no musical training whats-so-ever, tries to play the piano. I detest it. I despise it; and nothing else can make me as mad or as jittery or as nervous as having to sit there and listen to it. I hate for someone to just blindly bang away at the keys incessantly, and yes, I am talking about you, Justin Schultz.

I cannot stand it; I really don't know why, Justin. Perhaps it is because my mother plays the piano quite well and I was raised in a household listening to her humbly immaculate command of the ivory. She programed into me at an early age that there is no sin worse than to "bang on a piano". I cannot play the piano but I still hate for someone to bang on it. I don't do it and I think it should be illegal for anyone else to.

So, Justin, please listen to my plight. You're a great guy but you've got to stop letting your fingers play a game of drunk rugby on the fucking keyboard before I rip my hair out. I promise it's not you. Margaret Thatcher could sit there and do it and I would still become infuriated, bite my nails and turn my ipod up so loudly my ears bleed. And we all now that I adore Margaret Thatcher, that saucy fox, even if she was a dirty conservative.

So, Justin (and Zack Jones, because you too have been known to do it ) please take from this blog that I really really REALLY hate it when you engage your hands into painful musical entropy on the piano. In fact, don't even touch the piano anymore. Next rehearsal I'm making the piano COMPLETELY OFF LIMITS. I can't take it anymore.

Unless of course, you're Natalie George, you play beautifully, and may do so as much as you like.

Bread and Circi (cause I know my proper Latin plurals)

Today at Rustburg, which is steadily becoming a thorn in my side, we had a pep rally.

I used to love pep rallies, and if this one would have been in more capable hands, I probably would have liked it too. Unfortunately a group of rather useless individuals was in charge of this said rally and it went nowhere and I was again reminded of the idiocy of my generation.

A side note: I hate the word rally. There's something too Nuremburg about it.

Back to the post...

I don't want to imply arrogance, I really don't. I just hate those that refuse to live up to their potential. Half the people in that gym watching that rally have no idea or plan for the future, which is imminent for us seniors. We are going to be graduating in four months and the majority of students in my class yet to have formulated some type of post-secondary education or job plan. It seems sad to me that they really have no idea as to what they're planning on doing.

It makes me want to help them, but I know that I couldn't say anything that hasn't already been said or avised. But, my god, there they are, standing on the brink of something great, something new, something utterly maelable to those who would just put their hands down in it, and yet they still hee and haw like a great multitude of Caesarian asses, only for them there is no bread and circuses.

I feel helpless for my fellow second-semester seniors. I have no place to pity or judge them, but still I cannot help but feel the utmost sincere helplessness for them. I just want to help them, but I don't think I can.

y ahora voy a estar feliz

gracias a dios por amigos

sobre todo ese amigo en quien pienso...

GROSS

I'm not one to write out of emotion. In fact, I think it's deplorable and should be avoided at all costs; but for the sake of my own perpetual contradiction, let me let loose here...

I hate high schoolers. That is truth that I have so recently unturned. Ever since being accepted into college I've felt myself being pulled further and further away from the culture, but nothing has so cut those ties as the current rumor that has spread about me.

I normally don't really pay any heed to rumors, especially if they're about myself. If I do notice them, however, I usually find them to be humorous. But this latest rumor has both offended and infuriated me beyond my normal clairvoyance.

I DO NOT HAVE PROMISCUOUS SEX IN THE BOY'S BATHROOM.

That's so fucking disgusting to suggest that. I hate it. I mean I could take all the other things that were said about me at Rustburg High School, but this is one thing that I will not tolerate. It just shows the idiocy and vulgarity of High Schoolers.

God, when the hell is June gonna be here?

La Mattinata

Mi sto qui dolente a cantar!
Metti tu anche la veste bianca,
E schiudi l'uscio al tuo cantor!

That's a line a from a popular Italian song called La Mattinata. It says "I stand here dying to sing! Put on your white dress and open you door to your minstrel!". The song is about this wooer crying up to his wooee. He compares her to the sun and asks her to throw open her door and greet him like the dawn.

Ah, that's amore, no? I really am a sucker for that kinda thing.

So I want to warn here anyone that I may fall in love with. I warn you that I'm going to do that to you at least once. I'm going to obnoxiously stand beneath your window and serenade you in classic Italian. I point out that my Italian is not exactly...shall we say... very Andrea Bocelli so it may not be pretty. Also some people may not even like Italian. I mean it's basically Spanish's free-spirited, living-with-parents-still, really slutty brother. It's, if you will, the alcoholic member of the Romance language family (I wouldn't call it the black sheep. That's Romanian. Romanian is the creepy, possibly pedophile uncle of the family, but I digress).

Anyway I intend on doing that because how could I pass up the chance to not do that? It's La Mattinata.

bleh

I bet we've all shared moments where we feel like true martyrs...

Well I am in such a moment but I feel extremely guilty for it. I could never be saint I guess. Not for my lack of faith or desire to be religious, but for my overall cowardess and fear of conflict. I've had something done to me, and I must take the proper steps to take care of it.

But I don't want to, I don't want the conflict. I feel guilty for wanting to take care of it when everyone is telling me it's right thing to do...

Oh, and also...
Have you ever met someone that you want to spend all your waking time with but you know it's impossible for simple reasons?

that sucks too.

Thoughts of Motivation

I suppose I'll just jump into this feet first...

I've noticed that most bloggers occupy their cyberworld sanctuaries with witty tales of everyday occurrences such as a witnessing a Mormon Jew trying to convert a Jehovah witness to Catholicism that often mask deeper philosophical impulses that reek of Postmodernism and often ironic C.S. Lewis influences.

Unfortunately, I have no such anecdotes or even such deep philosophical impulses to really recount here. So I must beg the questions: What exactly am I to write here on this blog? What am I to do with this Internet real-estate that has in the last 30 minutes become part of my terribly hum-drum, yet tragically some-what Romantic life?

Maybe I should write about my resolutions for this year.

Only I have none.

It's not that I think they're stupid or that they're over-rated because we Americans rarely commit to them. I've just never made an effort to make one.

I don't think like that. I don't evaluate my life as a whole ever. Rather I find individual concerns and problems with myself and mope over them quite Byronically for unspecified periods of time (much to the chagrin of my friends who avoid me during my most contemplative moments for fear of being trapped and coerced into listening to me lecture myself about myself). I've never thought to begin a new year with some optimistic goal in mind. Maybe I should. After all, optimism is good for the soul, along with Chicken Noodle Soup.

Maybe that is what I need in my life: resolutions.

That's exactly it. I've found something in all my rambling: I do in fact have a resolution this year...

to make a resolution in the coming years!

Yes, that's right, folks. Jake has his sincere resolution for 2007. He's going to make an effort to find a resolution for 2008. Heck, if I find one, which I am most certain I will, I will begin work on it immediately.

Well, there we go, maybe this blog thing will work out after all.

First post

Well, I just made one of these because everyone seems to have some form of one. We'll see how it goes...


If I keep this up, I shall be genuinely surprised.