OK, I probably should be doing something more productive with my time...not that writing these words for my child in the future isn't productive. But understand little gleam that Daddy is under the gun to do ALOT of stuff right now to bring one phase of his life, that that was before you, to a close before the next, which is you, opens. That way Daddy can bring all his considerable attention to bear on helping you to grow up and be the best you can be, because he wants that very, very much.
Awright, before I start sobbing quietly and/or drooling on myself (distinct possibilities for me at any point in my life) let me explain what I intend here. What I would like to do is have these entries form a sort of running commentary/interrogation of what I consider to be the proper moral and ethical ways by which to organize one's life. As such, they will be necessarily messy and subjective, full of all sorts of tortured and convoluted logic, to say nothing of gapping holes in what ever argument they happen to be making/attacking/pretending to posture as.
I say all this by way of introducing what is the first and perhaps most important of these, which is that you should always, ALWAYS, make up your own mind. Dad's a human being, which means he is a messy and slobbering beast as all human beings are (you might detect some of Daddy's misanthropic tendencies here...we'll talk about that another time). Being messy and slobbering beasts, that means Daddy, like the rest of the human race, is prone to error, occasionally. So you can't always trust that why I do what I do and say is so for the right reasons. So ask questions. Demand answers. Don't be satisfied with any that come to easily or that appear to neatly fit in with what you expect especially when they come from other people. I suppose this says, really, that your approach to life should be one of thoroughgoing skepticism. And that's an important observation to make because it means that you should include yourself under the reach of those things that you question. So lemme rephrase this:
BE SKEPTICAL OF EVERYONE, BUT MOST OF ALL OF YOURSELF.
No one can do the damage to you that you can do to yourself; believe me, it's a lesson that I've learned on more than one occasion. I've found that those times when I really hurt myself are most often also the times when I thought I knew exactly what I was doing/thinking/feeling/believing/etc. And the fact of the matter is that I didn't. Why? Well, I suppose it is easier to lie to yourself than it is to anyone. But I suppose that it is also that we spend so much time with ourselves (and this isn't true of everyone. For good or ill, Daddy is an intellectual and so lives in his head. Consciousness is being for Daddy, which i why he thinks he can write these things so as to make a difference in your life. That's because Daddy wants you to be an intellectual too. But that's another discussion...maybe I'll make up a category for that.) that we forget about the world outside of us. It is bound to time and we, because we live in the world, are likewise bound. But because we never see ourselves from the outside, we forget that. Further, there is a depth inside of us that we experience directly; that's what it means to be with ourselves. Because we don't always see the world around us and that we are in as something separate from us, we tend to elide our internal depth with external appearance. The world seems to have a depth and motivation that makes it three dimensional. We think we know more than what we see, that there is more than what we see. And that is true. But that reality is ever closed off to us because it is the realm of the other, of that which is inextricably other, Big 'O' Other. It is utterly and absolutely other and so by definition nothing we can ever know directly. Remember, consciousness is being for Daddy.
Now, this is not to say that we can never know anything about it or that we are all trapped in our own little worlds. What ever else it may seem to be, Daddy's injunction to you to be skeptical of everyone but most especially yourself is not meant to be in any way advocating any kind of solipsism. Rather, the point is that knowing anything about that which is radically other is a difficult process fraught with peril. One must recognize that one is fundamentally bound to something that one is not and never can be. One is caught up in a relationship with the other, a relationship that any understanding of must involve a radical departure from one's self. And you can't leave yourself behind if if you take yourself, or the world, at face value. Never. You have to be hard on the world and yourself if you ever wish to catch a glimpse of the truth. And when you do it will be like nothing else you've ever known. I know that when I meet your mother I had one of those moments. I think that perhaps that is what love is, the experience of truth revealed when one gives oneself up completely to the Other and so binds themselves to them...
Ok, I'm starting to get a bit misty so it's time to put this down for awhile.
Posted by Famous P at July 12, 2004 02:33 PM | TrackBack