[994] Speak To What You Spoke

Let’s do some synthesizing.

I went to a Jack White concert. He had a DJ playing 80s and 90s hits before the opener and between sets. He has everyone seal their phone in these magnetically locked bags. It was refreshing to feel like I was at a concert from yesteryear, but I noticed that people didn’t necessarily pay more attention than they would have otherwise, they just talked louder. There was, interesting to me, a significantly larger proportion of single men in attendance. I don’t know what that means, it just contrasts with what I’ve noticed everywhere else. I brought a book.

The book was called The Sovereignty of Good by Iris Murdoch. It’s one of the few books I decided to order after John Vervaeke’s fawning over it during his Awakening From the Meaning Crisis lectures. He recommends half a dozen books in each of his 52 lectures, and how he talked about this one stood out. Like many philosophical works, it’s dense, references a lot of literature and arguments from its time, and I got about 25 pages in before my focus decided it couldn’t try to digest more quasi abstractions on “of” “goings on” or “happening.”

What the book did seem to indicate for me what that Murdoch is a reasonable person who sees how we are not apart from the world. Whatever we are to make of our thoughts, the nature of decision-making or a “conscious decision” not to do something is a certain kind of happening in the world with world-stuff. While our concepts can’t really manifest, and therefore exist, without something external to reference, that we’re able to name and share a reference point does not dictate whether or how that internal world might exist. We all stop at red lights. How you experience red maybe doesn’t matter, but that we all have a means of generating, sharing, and acting upon the experience does. I pray no real philosopher ever gets ahold of how I interpret the few pages of one essay of dense reading I semi-focused on.

My takeaway was the importance of movement and action in the world. The infinite abstract of potential and opaque interpretation of what’s-a-washing in your brain are of little to no use to us mere mortals struggling to understand your version of red. It also felt like the perfect argument for never trusting the simple and probably incorrect words you or anyone else comes up with to describe where you’re coming from or what you should “believe” about yourself. Liberating indeed.

You don’t have to know what I believe or think about you, despite my readiness to share it. You can look at my setup. You can point to my roles. You can see what I’ve moved in service to against what I haven’t. What I may “believe” in any given moment is an infinite sea of words and blogs briefly captured in each syllable. You may or may not hear what’s enunciated. I may or may not have a clue the implications of the song I’m singing. At the end of the day, where are you, where am I, what have we done about it?

This guy tapped my shoulder and asked if his, maybe special needs, nephew could stand in front of me as he was 16 and it was his first concert. I stepped aside. The guy thanked me, too much. Before the kid occupied that space, for only 2 songs before returning, it was a woman with I assumed her grandchild. She spent 4 songs looking back over the crowd trying to get the attention of someone in her party. That was considerably more annoying and distracting than the kid enthusiastically cheering and, you know, doing the concert-thing at a concert.

I believe you should more-or-less go to a concert to listen to the concert. Even when you’re managing to take away from my attention, it’s going to take the loud, drunk, 9-deep social club forming around my precious rock to make me tell you to get away from me. I have to hear you from 3 rows away for multiple songs before I turn around and inquire about what a good fucking time you’re having. My internal world is constantly asking whether to say something, what to do next, looking, planning, and debating. I know how important to me it is my actions mostly speak to what I might otherwise say or write. I can be the meanest person you’ve ever met; I don’t behave that way until you beg for it. It may look like I should be contented and appreciative of whatever comfy work situation or cashflow, but my actions form this giant mockery and betrayal of what I could otherwise be putting effort towards.