narrate your own life

yes!  everyone just posted on their blogs.  jake, phil, rachel.  i haven't read them yet.  because i was so excited to see them there that i felt like writing something.  i can't tell you how wonderful it's been for me to read the stuff that you guys post.  and that goes to all of the blogs that i read, but its particularly delightful with the people i know.  

ok so here's some commentary on something:

one time, sitting around a campfire with some friends who were not close friends someone brought up what i have since come to think of as "jesus christ syndrome."

i read this article once about this sociological phenomenon where people think that they are christ.  and they become obsessed with writing down all of their thoughts.  and so they write obsessively and believe that their thoughts are vitally important and will be remembered by history.  they think that they are going to save humanity.

something to that effect.  it was years ago so i'm no doubt exaggerating the details that made the strongest impression on me, but thats the gist.  i remember sitting there, looking at the fire, thinking 

"that's kind of how i think about myself.  don't say anything or they'll think you're crazy."

beyond my own identification with this archetype, it seems that every bit of useful knowledge that has been preserved into the present was produced and recorded by someone who could fall into this profile.  it's a sloppy connection of symbols to lived experience.  

in all fairness this was only a passing comment in a conversation and maybe its unfit to hold it up and comment on it.  but, i've thought about it several times and so now that it has become my own mental object, i feel it's fair game.

the bothersome question:  why does the desire to record one's thoughts get connected to a notion of a delusional, arrogant, bloated sense of self?

it seems that one of the main traits that makes humans distinct from all other life is the capacity to record and transmit the accumulation of knowledge.  we communicate with a lexicon of concepts that is ever expanding, and the articulation of which can be stunningly complex and beautiful.  but what's more shocking than our ability to make sense out of the vast symbolic systems that we encounter in bunches and with every second of our live, we can become aware of it.  

so if we came into this world members of a species that trained us to articulate the world around us in reference to a historically preserved lexicon of concepts, then we ought to take our powers of articulation seriously.  and if we are going to become more aware, or more fully functioning human beings, then we ought to articulate the structure of power that provides us with the particular ways that we think about the world.  

the full articulation of hegemony is a collective effort.  think of it like constructing some kind of massive monument by individual people adding one thing on top of whatever the last person brought.  it would be a myriad collage of things.  toothbrushes and computers and matchbox cars.  but if the intent was to build a monument and people kept adding things then eventually you would have some kind of structure that everyone could stand back and look at and try to figure out what it is.  is it beautiful?  ugly?  how does it work? what is it made out of?

and so i believe this is a profound instinct/gift of being human.  we can articulate and reflect.  it's a shame that our ability to does not usually translate into our compulsion to.  and i don't mean it's a shame like not being able to make it to a friend's birthday party.  i mean it's shameful.  it ought to haunt us that all human beings do not have equal access and do not feel equally empowered to represent their minds, to articulate their own humanness.  how sad that we (i) so often abuse the miraculous relationship between the way we feel and the way we feel about the way we feel.  

as far as we know, we are the only life form that can think, i want to eat ice cream.  then feel ashamed.  be emotionally, chemically, physiologically altered by nothing more than momentum of a thought.  then think, shame on me for thinking that.  and then we feel ashamed about feeling ashamed.  we could also feel spiteful about being ashamed or vindictive or self-loathsome.  the point is, when we consciously transcribe our thoughts into the objective world (write, draw, sing, garden, orate, or otherwise articulate our minds into an objective form), this allows us to take control of the way that we feel.  it gives us the space to view it.  and in this space we can question why we feel certain ways about certain feelings.  so in this it seems there is hope of gaining some perspective on the symbolic systems that we are suspended in. 

now, if we, a people, a species are to discover a way to transcend the destructive tendency of human history, we first need to articulate human history in an unprecedentedly holistic and vigorous collectivity.  we need every voice to join the din of collective consciousness.  we need everyone to drop something on the monument.  the sacred reality of information technology is that we now have the highest potential of accomplishing this than we have had at any previous point in our history.  

and know one knows what will happen, no more than you could know what it would look like if a hundred people brought a hundred random things and piled them in a field.  but one thing is for certain, it will give us something to look at.  when every human being has the means to articulate the history of their own thoughts, we will finally have a conceptual lexicon powerful enough to understand the structure of the power that keeps us locked in the cycle of fear and suffering and unkindness.  

this is how we trump the hegemonic oppression that would have us to be timid, to be less than we feel we want to be.  

its a big group effort but its starts feeling good right away.