Transcribed and edited on
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
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Friday, February 21, 2014
Where Did I Learn That The Sad Hold Still And Die?
notes from the journals of lukas luctari
from Book 1 of 3
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It’s not tryin to do two things at once that freezes me up, it’s tryin to do two contrary and opposing things at once.
Simple if not perfect example: working, to make my life better, and talking, to see if life is worth making better.
Isolation = good creativity
good art = from wholistic vision
⁂ Unisolation = disruptive/contradictory visions.
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This is not my memory.
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In a shell of skin fill and gone, green fire.
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…I do not remember that I don’t have to do something else just cause he asks it. It is hard for me not to respond, it is instinctual, habitual. If he walks down the stairs {stars} and comes into the kitchen saying a greeting or asking a question and I don’t say anything or even look toward him but continue with what I mean to do then he will grow upset. I keep coming back to this. That I have to have other people upset at me if I want to be myself. Be myself + People being upset. Not being myself + Everyone being happy + liking me
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I want to note, before I disagree and grow and forget:
I was asked what the evils of our world today are. I thought long about it, (20 minutes but hard and pointed and answered:
The two great evils that I see now are
(1) We do not teach our children how to survive, how to feed and provide for themselves, apart from others, or at all. People don’t know how to get food, shelter, clothing, water, their basic needs.
And so we make our children dependent on the wishes of society for survival; more so, people don’t know how to do the most basic and first-of-all knowledge – keep themselves alive. (Not what we learn first? First learn to coddle and please in return for food as children? … But teach kids skills first, and watch them leave us if they don’t like us, for they are able.)
(2) Custom. (This is tricky. I tried to clarify it later saying {to myself}, rather, ‘a lack of defiance.’ Then yesterday I thought not all customs are bad. And what I was really trying to say the first time was ‘not being able to stop, say ‘no’, interact with people outside of, or envision existing as sane or at all outside of our customs and ways of interacting, and being.’
This may be my personal inability to say ‘no’, and instinct or habit to please, or choose pleasing others over thinking through what they are saying {and then choosing to act…}. I lived a childhood of interaction. {based on emotional needs.} I expected an adult world or interaction. {based on emotional needs.})
Lastly … My habit is to respond, to ‘talk back’, but this creates a loop of behavior and belief. Also, I don’t want to, almost every time, but custom does not say one who responds not at all is one who is polite. Because custom governs interactions?, thus interactive rules would evolve to favor the interactive? What of a culture that prized withheld reaction, or, observation absent of input? Is this that culture?
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Paraphrasing LeGuin: ‘If you even once attend to custom they will use the advantage and push in for more, causing you to have to snub them…’ humm…
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(Partly the reason our family growing apart is so scary is because we felt that health and goodness were based on a dependence, this was our belief and so now we see our chances of happiness dwindling as we drift apart.)
I was asked, not only to feel responsible for the degradation of my family, but for the ill of the kids I had befriended. I was the one who made my parents feel this way, hate their lives, be sad, miserable. I made my sister, my brother, feel these things. I made Nick do what he did and feel what he felt; I was responsible. Did such implication and responsibility go both ways? No. When I was hating my life, it was because I was troubled. When I was sad, my family did not accuse themselves. When I was miserable, it was up to me to feel better. When I took drugs and endangered my life it was my bad decisions. My life was my fault, everyone else’s life was my fault. Of course I felt all powerful. Of course I felt wicked.
If, when I was sad my parents accused themselves, it resulted in continued sadness. My sadness was their fault. Their sadness was my fault. But they rarely made me the core happy I needed; they thought of that which brought me peace as morally corrupt. I rarely made them the core happy they needed, (since I was the source of their upset I had to be other than myself to make them happy, but since I was the kind of thing which only brought misery why should I try to be better; I was wicked. I always would be wicked.), or, … (Most of the people I see found, in high school, an environment in which they thrived. And I wonder why I feel alienated?) … I’m not sure what would have done that, even today. Good grades, a smiling disposition, signs of a child’s affection, help with the toil of the house-hold, a sharing and easing of duties. These things I think would have made them happier. All of them are sources of joy dependent on someone else.
Do I even know how to be happy now? Do I only doubt it is possible, even independently arrived at, because I was never taught how to be happy as a child?
Did my parents make themselves happy people and remain that way? Did I watch them and see a peace and a inner glow and want to emulate them; not interact with them; emulate them. Did I try to talk to them, and overtime notice that whether I was sad or mad at them, or sullen or angry or afraid or excited or over-talkative or bored, whatever I was feeling, it did not change them and make them less or more happy, nominally? Did I then see that they had a peace within, and then know that the primary ground upon which to interact and engage happiness was in myself?
They did not teach me, maybe, how to be a person as much as they taught me how to be with people.
Our happiness and lives are our responsibilities, and so… if one wants to be happy and recognizes that it is their choice and responsibility, to make another the source of one’s joy (unless that source is completely dependable), is to choose, in full understanding and freedom, to be sad and unhappy. One is, in that sense, responsible for the hurt that another does to them (?). If one does not understand this choice and responsibility one is heading for a life of hurt, pain, and of blame.
Of an also: Some people want to live in these interdependent relationships and communities. It is their choice and joy, the highest goal and reason for all freedom. This is possible and happening, for lack of a better word, – allowed. If one, though, does not like this network, and leaves, not able to, as the others are readily able to do, finding joy in the persons of other people, and so goes to seek it elsewhere, it is unescapable that one should be hated for doing this, and be a pain-causer all the rest of one’s life. One cannot leave such a situation, to abandon it, without breaking the dependency code. Ones who adhere are fully able to blame the deserter for their pain. Can the deserter do anything to stop that pain and anger without taking responsibility for their feelings and joy? (Their choices? Their joy…)
J. once told me they believed in absolute responsibility. Maybe they weren’t but I felt they were telling me I needed to take more responsibility for their happiness. I heard them and thought how they did not do the same. If they did, they would help me build treehouses and initiate and follow through stuff like pressing records. These things would have made me happy. But they didn’t do them. Perhaps they didn’t know? “If they didn’t know I was unhappy or how to make me happy they can’t be blamed.” That is not relevant to me. Blaming or not blaming. It was not my duty to inform them or theirs to seek out the knowledge (in some lifestyles, yes, but not mine, and maybe theirs; just different worlds trying to coexist without room for the others’ existence.) It wasn’t their lack of action I blame for my unhappiness. It is mine. I blame myself, and in doing so incur guilt upon the party, not that is guilty, (cause either could have done it), but upon the party that, once made responsible for the pain, I can control. If I caused my pain I can stop feeling pain, by stopping its initiation. I choose to be guilty, because along with guilt I also bare the ability to be my own deliverance.
The cause of the problem is always the solution?
The pompousness of all who ‘finally know’.
It’s my fault that I’m unhappy. (hardcore shit) Old motivation? : if I was responsible for J.’s unhappiness then I would have to choose to do the right thing, which would mean to hurt, suffer, for: what they wanted of me that would make them happy would make me hurt. I did not want to hurt, and so I made us both responsible for our own pain.
fuckin hardcore
This thought pattern (leads to) makes us both evil, but at least evil together?… It’s very disturbing and I hate feeling the guilt of its possible correctness. In passing, and instinctively brought up to my mind, a memory. Horrible feelings I don’t want to feel so I’ll write a while longer. The memory was of being at a public library the mother worked at and seeing a show of young actors, an acting troop doing a circuit of performances, all of them my age, graduating high school or just starting college, and vivid, healthy, vibrant, fragrantly successful and talented, doing something, all together, that they could do with excellence. I watched the performance, desperately lonely, on the outside looking in, these kids having everything, and each one of them, everything, and then having that everything infinitely multiplied by being together with a troop who all had everything separately, individually, and had each other who had it…had so much. I went, after the show, outside to watch them leave and look with envy, bitter hurt and sadness. (At this time in my life I often sat atop cars and sang…) Out they came, and as I watched, they flitted to and fro amongst themselves, giving roses out, single red long stem roses, and hugging each other, a meaningful hard wrap, a short telling pat on the back; they didn’t look into each other’s eyes, they gave and received the tokens, the movements, like people shook hands leaving a good party, like all was well, all was one, of a whole. (This is hard to hold – imagined now.) I think this was not for an end of season. I think this was a show, a ritual, a social-tion just for that one performance. I was disappointed. There was so much congratulations going all through, and all dressed in black uniform and all groomed, skin well, clean and not turn off-ing, and I saw this thing outside and that it probably happened after every thirty minute performance and I was saddened even more. I wondered, looking a tall strait green and red in clear catch thin crisp piece long tube wet light crinkle hand, where they got the money for all those roses.
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From a poster: “If cities go up in flames will you know why?”
Government: “Pretense of power over other humyns.”
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“To feel sane is to be able to choose. To be around people is to be ruled by custom. So, go from people, and to choice. (Then come back free.)”
“I turn my eyes away. I have nothing to offer. This is not why I am here, to do this, to be part of this. This is not what I came here for. Even if I am doing nothing else I am not doing this. And I go. Go. Go, be free. Go.”
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