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.