strangereality147
12 March was the third birthday of StrangeReality.
In many ways, it's fitting that I completely failed to realise until just now that the anniversary had come and gone.
It's fitting because of the way I've treated, or mistreated, this blog. The great nineteen-months hiatus from January 2005 to August 2006 shook off what few regular readers I had picked up back in the day. And now that it's back, now that I am blogging again, I can't seem to make up my mind what kind of blog I want StrangeReality to be. I lurch from one ghastly failed experiment to the next, and they all involve pictures for some reason. There's a cheap amusing parallel to be drawn here with my actual life, but I won't draw it.
There's also the fact that I disbelieve in time and calendric systems and anniversaries. Anybody who ever mentions the year 2000 and that whole faux Millennium to me had better be ready for an argument that they will lose. Because the year 2001 was the start of the 21st Century and of the 3rd Millennium and that's just a fact and nothing can contradict it. I don't believe in the calendar anyway – I don't believe that there ever is, was, or can be any such things as years, months, or even days of the week outside of the collective human agreement to believe that such things exist. You don't think that there really is such a thing as a Monday, do you?
It's possible to disbelieve in everything. You wouldn't believe some of the things I disbelieve in. I disbelieve that time is real. Yes. I touched on it in the last paragraph, and I'm giving it major attention in this paragraph. Let me clarify: I disbelieve in time as a dimensional property of reality. That there are observable changes in external phenomena is one thing, one substantive fact; that there is this whole thing called 'time' in which said phenomena are held to exist and have their coming-to-be, their existing-now, and their passing-away phases, is quite another. Is the past real? Yes and no. I can remember yesterday: I went into town, I paid a bill, I came home; I remember with particular satisfaction the appearance of a large field near my house in the warm evening sunshine. But where is this memory? It is in the present moment – in this moment, I should say. Calling this moment the present moment is being partial. There is an eternal present within which everything exists in persistent mutability. What it is and how it is and so forth is unknown. What is certain – to me, anyway – is that the category of 'time' is a bogus interpolation. A papering over of the crack in human understanding of reality, which is not so much a crack as a gaping fissure, or maw - a giant elephant in the room, that isn't wearing any clothes. We give things names, dress them in concepts, so that we don't have to understand them.
I also disbelieve in myself. I'll clarify: I disbelieve in a self. When I examine the category of phenomena that I am socio-culturally conditioned to call my mind, I can find no agent that produces this phenomena. There is no little homunculus called 'I' anywhere to be found. My persistent sense of self, or 'I', is rooted in the very phenomena that I can find no cause for. I no more produce my thoughts than I am personally in charge of my digestion. Thought, emotion, the whole shebang – they all just happen. That the whole constellation taken together represents a self or 'I' is another one of those socio-cultural delusions that I love so much.
I'm enjoying this - this is a way to spend a birthday celebration. Onto my next thing. Identity. I disbelieve in identity – racial, national, cultural. They're all bollocks. There is no such thing in reality as any nation you care to mention. There are just people who believe in them. There is no such thing as (for example) a Norwegian; there is just a man or woman who believes that he or she is Norwegian, and has a supporting cast of billions who are prepared to share the belief and expect him or her to reciprocate in turn for all of their beliefs about their own national identities. “The man of knowledge has no country,” someone once said. I forget who.
Thus the world goes on, and the human story continues. Like giant ants in a giant colony, fetching, carrying, building, reproducing, going who knows where and to what end.
Now this is the way to attract and keep readers.