Pipe Cherries (for lack of a better tittle)

The stem of a brilliant flower in bloom

emerges candidly from the lips.

The bowl of an oracle held between

the index and middle and thumb.

Provoking prophecy and vision,

inspiring poets and philosopher.

In company of dear fellows,

we shall birth springs with every idle sitting.

You Put the Seat Down

I just realized that this poem was a really fucked up old draft... I may put it up again when I find the right copy.

Unrequited Love

Try as I might I'm still in love with you. You probably know I love you, but the idea that I'm IN love with you may never have crossed your mind; and that's okay because it makes things easier.

I've written poetry about you, I know you'd find it beautiful (or at least that's what I tell myself on good days) but I can't bring my self to read it outside of my own empty bedroom for fear that somebody well catch a glimpse of my speak and report the findings. Passerby's never make good journalists.

So this is to my unnamed love, who I don't dare approach, but who has been in this position of prominence (I tell myself it's an honor) for quite sometime.

I hope someday to believe in love more than practicality or convenience or fear. I hope that someday I confess my love to you beautiful one, instead of subverting my feelings to relationships or attempted relationships or quick kisses or one night stands or the attempted quick kisses and one night stands that seems somehow more justifiable than coming clean with you.

You probably won't read this. If you do, you probably won't recognize yourself. But if you do both of the former maybe you'd like to confront me instead of waiting for my little game to end...

A Vow

I vow to pass over every romantic opportunity with every individual no matter how beautiful, inside and out.

I vow to keep my heart closed to exclusives and to love everybody.

I vow to tun you down for a date, for a kiss, for a fuck.

I vow to keep my mouth shut if my heart or my hormones seek to ruin these vows.

There is of course one exception, But an exception I feel convinced will never have the chance to be invoked.

P.s. I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at myself for letting it happen.

Dearest Friend

My friend, let us discuss the merits of deity or reminisce of our reactions to The Stranger. Let us mix conversations of Sartre and a game of chess over deliciously brewed coffee. Let us walk cold midnight trails with our pipes full and our hearts on the Dharma. Dearest friend I need you; you are my salvation from this monotony, and I am yours. You are my Sense and Sensibility; I am your Pride and your Prejudice. I, my friend, am your Being and Nothingness and you my Joyful Wisdom. I miss you and I love you. I am looking forward to the days of shared poetry between us. To Flat Earth chips and Vitamin Water. Please rescue me from here soon. I apologize, dear friend, if this sounds more like a love letter than a declaration of our friendship, it is just that I know of no one else with whom I better fulfill the imperative given in the Introduction to Nature, and I know of only a few who would understand this reference without great thought.

Your friendship truly is my most precious friendship. I do not know how our friendship started, how we went from polar opposites to "friend-soul-mates," but I am most grateful.

Life is Vapid (I am an existentialist not a nihilist)

Somebody at work commented on my "lack of lackluster." After a moments pause I told her about how I was struggling to stay "alive," that my life was vapid.

"Oh you would just love this guy at the Empyrean..." she says. Something about this immediately struck me as inaccurate. When I reflected I came to this understanding: I do not want somebody to agree with me. I do not need anybody to sympathize with my feelings. I am not a nihilist, I do not need company for my misery. All I want is for somebody to make this vapidness no longer true.

Like I have said, I am not a nihilist, I believe meaning is based on perception. The lack of substance in my life is not relative, it is objective. I am not despairing because: "oh woe is me, for I have no purpose." I despair because my life lacks the things I desire.

I desire brilliant conversation with brilliant souls. I desire intimacy and love. i desire midnight walks fogged by pipe tobacco. I desire brilliant books, fulfilling work and more than decent schooling. I desire enough energy and vitality in my life that I can go to sleep without anxiety and get out of bed without needing to coerce myself and get ready with anticipation and attend class with interest and sit down for homework that tires my brain more than my soul. If I could die from lack of substance, you would have attended my funeral quite some time ago. Thank god such a death is not immanent. I pray that (oh yes it has come to prayer), life comes to my rescue soon, for I do not know how to alleviate this problem.

I need something of substance; in an infinite number of ways.

-School
-Relationships
-Friends
-Work
-conversations
-Homework
-Books
-Sleep
-Consciousness
-Wisdom
-Talent
-Love
-Mindfullness

All laking.
I call myself an existentialist, yet how can I have a philosophy of life when I am but a walking corpse?

"Life is vapid." Me, feel free to quote.

Must We Not Become God's Ourselves Simply to Appear Worthy of it?

Preface:

I have recently undergone a change in my worldview, a change that has only been hinted at once before, for merely an afternoon. Now this truth is upon me in full; I am an atheist.
I have told a few people specifically to read this blog. I have done so 1) to reveal this new insight and 2) to have a chance to do so affectively, a space to which I can take my time and say what I see fit only when I have made it fit. I look forward to talking about this subject afterwards, person to person, but right now I merely want to articulate my ideas unpaced.
I will not delve into the various reasons for my unbelief here. Philosophical thought, if it is to be respected and internalized takes a great deal of thought and since I much prefer the Socratic method I hope to think through such philosophical dialogues with my friend in person. I will also take for granted the objective truth of science. Science is often the most popular argument for and against the existence of God and as such it is widely, if not near entirely, abused. I will not discuss science with anybody except a) it be completely void of propagation b) it is amongst my most open and cordial friends in whose minds I delight and c) we do it with the complete understanding that I am not a scientist and neither are you and that therefore we can not be expected to retain and then again transmute the entire concept of the Big Bang at “Planck Time” and how that accounts for the instability of nothingness resulting in somethingness.
If you are completely hug up on the origins of life I recommend two books- God, The Failed Hypothesis and what I believe was called The Counter-Creationism Handbook, both of whose authors escape me but can be easily searched or provided by me if asked.
The following is my insights upon atheism written within the last week. Some things should be widely known among my friends, but deserve keeping in mind. 1) I am an Existentialist; I believe that existence precedes essence and that therefore our lives and their meanings come down to the particular individual. 2) I am a poet, a humanist, a philosopher, and a dabbler in theology, thus I see great beauty n man. I always have and that shall not change. 3) related to (2), in my opinion, atheism IS NOT synonymous with scientific materialism. The author of God, The Failed Hypothesis makes an important point in distinguishing between methodological materialism and metaphysical materialism. Metaphysically I remain largely undeveloped and I would not be so presumptuous as to assert that the only thing that “is”, is this material world that we do not even fully comprehend yet.

I

When one gives up their God there is first a great liberation as if our chains have been lifted, then a great doubt and finally great despair. Liberation because we are freed from the shackles of a whole culture, an entire worldview. Doubt due to the seeming nothingness that remains and our desire for it to comfort us again. Despair because now we are disoriented and directionless.
We are thrown into despair as if all hope is lost, all goodness, all grace. It is in this moment that the proper nature of deity must be understood! God is our greatest ideal. Plato talks of the ‘Forms’ and though I do not believe in the reality of ‘forms’ metaphysically, I have often commented on how all the gods of mythologies and religions are like these forms, archetypes of our greatest ideals. When we overcome God we must realize that without God we are still left with our ideals, for just as we created God we have created these ideals. They come from us.
By removing God we have removed the wall between sinner and forgiver, subject and master, fallen and mighty. We have removed that which has always inhibited us from claiming moral greatness: the idea that we are merely the receiver, never the attainer. Too long we have been given an image of ‘original sin’ and told that we can never hope but be depraved; yet we are the creators of the savior God. All that comes from religion comes from the heart of mankind. All love and goodness, compassion and justice have their authorship in us. All evil, too, comes from us. We must overcome ourselves and thus rise into only the height of our greatness.
If God is removed nothing changes, for if God is not here, He never was and thus we have lost nothing. Life is not empty for it is being continually written. Let us move beyond despair; let us overcome nihilism. Let us be the generation no longer afraid to look in the mirror and come to terms with the fact that we are the only one’s looking back. We must examine ourselves and create again a new cosmology for a new age. A cosmology of greatness for man! A cosmology that no longer seeks to justify crusades, authoritarian power, holy war, killing of innocents, suicide bombing! Liberal interpretation is not enough, for it is treason to both the scripture and reason. Let us move beyond the God who told us the world was flat, a firmament encircled by everything else. We as humans have a chance to correct ourselves and shed that which is no longer life affirming.
I may be the madman but hear my words as hope, not despair.

II

I am not saying that there IS no God. I am saying that arguments for the existence of God are philosophically inadequate, scientifically falsifiable, and entirely unneeded.
There are some who would question my recent decision. They say that without God the world doesn’t make sense, life hold no purpose. To this I would firstly assert my humanism and my existentialism; these things come from man not God. I would also point once again to the books suggested in my preface. And lastly I would say that fact does not bow to our fancy.
There are yet others, whom I am presently more concerned with, who would make the objection that I very much sympathize with: that along with God I may have done away with a great portion of beauty, imagination, creativity. Understand me here, I agree, and this is the one thing I wish to preserve from religion, it’s spirituality, God as metaphor. God is a poem, the impetus of social movement, the beauty of Love. Atheism does not do away with this; I will sustain such poetic pantheism. Just as we may invoke dragons and fairies, we may still invoke the gods. Atheism ceases to invoke God as tape measure, moral arbiter, and king. I assert that God can continue to be a literary device, a psychological reality, but we must recognize Him as such. No longer can we view God as an external fact, an objective entity. God is a failed hypothesis. We carry God on from a day when it was not scientifically falsifiable, but that day ha passed and we must deal with the fact that God is largely inconsistent with reality. In fact I ask of any believer, what do we need God for? What function of any system, bodily, mentally, metaphysically, can’t be done without God?

III

What do we do after being thrown into the abyss of godlessness?
It was my goal to show that without deity we still have great hope. That beauty is not lost.
Others have proclaimed that we must overcome all our old values for they too are dead, the product of a past age. This is absurd! Those values, under whatever context, ultimately come from us. They may evolve yes, but we should not create a blank slate of human nature, in fact it’s futile for I believe it would prove impossible.
We must reassess our values. Our moralities may have become stale; rejuvenate them. Our purpose may seem non-existent; create it. Humanity has always created it’s own laws, morals and duties. Some have been profound and rational while others have been catastrophic, but in this day and age we are in just as good, if not better, a position than ever before to create and give life to ethical systems.
I seem to be saying don’t kill our past values and create new ones at the same time, by this I mean that we should properly respect our inheritance and yet improve upon this inheritance in order to offer something of worth to proceeding generations. We should not abolish our past and hope to create an entirely new and original culture from nothing.
Others are overcome with the sense of purposelessness. That is, they are caught in despair and it infects them and those surrounding with a sickness. Their only combater seems to be those who would impose a false and decayed value system upon our population; namely they are the religious fundamentalists.
Thus our age is caught in a war between two sides while the populace stands on the sidelines away from the battle, joining neither side yet remaining confused by the dichotomy. In this war they tell us of only two views, both inadequate, yet it is the void that looks most appealing. It is the void that presents the most danger. Humanity has been stripped of all beauty- they proclaim that life is about some life hereafter or that in fact life is meaningless- I tell you; the Existentialist’s have not yet overcome nihilism. I tell you, ‘Shall be’ is the highest virtue; while the nihilist’s tell you there is no value anywhere.
Suppose a gold-digger leaves his city in search of his treasure. Years and years he searches and yet has fond no gold, does this mean that he can place no value in all the simple treasures of his life? Yet rather this is his duty! What great, ultimate purpose is there to life? I have not yet found one, but again I find purpose in every action of my being! It is up to us to live, to uphold the virtue of ‘shall be.’
We must simultaneously live life within the present, the only moment we have, and exercise our will upon the future. You must not let life merely happen to you, because it will and you will have had no say. Nor should you seek the ultimate say in anybody else’s life. I assert (asartre, lol) that when we realize that we are in charge of our existence that yes, we are condemned to be free, it is up to each of us to be an Existentialist and reconcile our beings with this freedom. It is inexcusable to promote the idea that humanity has no value; such a person is not alive.

Epilogue:

One day our descendents will look back at us like we look back at the ape; will we have helped them do so?
This is no prophecy, this is not a panic; Human beings are an animal destined for extinction just like everything else, with the sole difference that we are expediting our own demise as no being has done before. Like a cow refusing to chew grass, we refuse to exercise our minds and our lives are starving as a result.
I hope that someday a generation, a species far greater than our own has the chance to thrive.

Note: I encourage anybody who reads this to comment. Point out errors I have made in my logic or affirm your position. Pass this link on to others so that i may benefit from the advice and opinions of many.