The Experience

THE EXPERIENCE

The appearance, on the surface, at the very least, must be reckoned with. But then, it cannot appear as surface without the under-current, always hidden, begetting the short-lived surface, like waves on a great lake. The under-current must be reckoned with as well, it appears.

What is this experience I experience? It's always two simultaneous questions, for me, forcing every question to seek where the answer is, while seeking how the question arose. Split in two, I am. Always.

Maybe the two questions are "what" and "why". There is me, with something else, so I ask “what” of these things, as I ask “how asking?” or just "why?" And not a day passes that I don’t have to say “I” or “me” and say “am” and “is” just to cross the street. Everyday.

But these things are invisible to us. All of us. We ignore the two questions at once, and live, instead, with one answer alone. The visible is enough to grapple with. Appearance cloaks everything. Life is life. Could I be wrong to say that?

There must be parts that work together in wholes, because there seem to be differences, everywhere I look, differences, allowing change to become change, and motion to be motion, and newness simply to be. I can even make my own differences, seeing “me” as different from the entire rest of "the world," as I say “No!” or even “Yes,” everyday, necessarily, yes or no to simply be a human being, and crossing the street without being hit. And relationships, between and among these many different things, forming new wholes, becoming new things. Becoming different again. Beings being.

Or do I bury the very beings I seek to uncover, building an illusion so that I can call it “knowledge of…” alone in a desert? Certainly if I can question at all, I must be in the dark, with not even the brightness of the desert; there must be the illusory, that which evades, the appearances, the waves on the surface of the lake, washing the differences away again, and again. Everyday. Always. All of us.

But still, is this the appearance of “truth” in this becoming?

Part 1.

I grab my text, the Portable Nietzsche on this occasion, grab a cigarette and sit down in my nice, comfortable chair on the porch and set out to reading. As I continue reading, really studying the text, I reach to light the cigarette and as I draw, I smell and taste burnt plastic and realize I lit the cigarette on the wrong end.

Annoyed, I walk back inside, up my stairs, sit on the stool in my office to reach the drawer where I keep the cigarettes and I grab another one. Back down the stairs I sit back in the chair on the porch. I look for my place in my book (because I put it down without marking my page). When I find it, I grab the cigarette, double-check that I will be lighting the right side, and then I light it and draw and turn back to my reading. I taste burnt plastic again! Turning in shock I see I lit the cigarette wrong! Again! How could I have done this?!!

So I go back upstairs, sit on the stool, grab the whole pack, get back on the porch and into my comfortable chair. This time I do not just check, I make an infallible demonstration of proper cigarette lighting; I hold the cigarette in the light, turning the cigarette around in my hand to see the filter side and check the tobacco side; I place it properly in my left hand, watching the filter side until the instant it is in my mouth and without turning away, so as to know the cigarette hasn’t moved, I light the clearly-visible-to-myself tobacco end immediately and …. again! Like evil witchcraft, the taste of burnt, chemical plastic!! I see that I lit the filter end again!

Something isn’t working!

I remember that I have a security camera on my porch. A third party, non-biased, objective verification - has to show whatever is really happening. So I run inside to watch the recording.

The first cigarette, I clearly just wasn’t paying attention and lit the wrong side. The camera shows exactly how I recall it.

The second time, in the video, I lit the cigarette properly, burning the tobacco end. Hmm? I remembered burning the filter, at least I thought. And I tasted filter that second time. I see myself looking at the second cigarette in disgust on the video and saying, “You gotta be kidding me,” just as I recall it; but I can also see on the video that the tobacco end was burning. What is on the video looks nothing like I experienced. I saw the filter burned twice when I was there on the porch, but not now! How?

The third time, when I was so careful and thoughtful, everything on the video looks opposite of what I recalled, like a comedy of errors, setting myself up to do the exact opposite of what I was trying to do. I was clearly hallucinating on the porch or who knows what I was doing. It’s like there is someone else on camera who looks like me play acting; or someone lying for the camera, using words to confound, pretending to see filter when they were clearly looking at the tobacco end. But the liar on camera was me, and I wasn’t lying when the recording was made!

Now I wonder are my eyes even working as I watch the video, because they surely were not working when I was lighting those cigarettes. That’s of course, only if the video is true and has not somehow recorded something that was not there. Maybe the camera is as fooled as my senses??

When I was on the porch, I saw, I knew, at least with the second and third failed attempts, I was lighting the right end of the cigarette and every ounce of my intention was clear about all that I knew; yet both times some opposite state of affairs turned out to be the case – foiled by my failure to taste properly when I lit the second cigarette correctly in the video, as I was foiled by what I saw in the third, both on the porch and now on the video. Something seems impossible about all of this.

Then it occurs to me, what was I expecting to see on the third-party, “objective” video anyway? If I saw that, as I thought, the filter end was in my mouth and I lit the tobacco any of the times, wouldn’t I have to see some miracle made the cigarette flip around at the last minute for the filter to burn? What explanation would that provide? How could the camera possibly prove what is really happening as opposed to what I was really experiencing in this situation? I had already experienced the impossible. I was my own third party – exasperated with myself. What third party perspective could explain anything and prove something to me, the one clearly having some other, singular, unique experience anyway?

What happened was, I intentionally lit cigarettes two and three on the tobacco end, but somehow I then found I had lit the filter. That’s the experience that I am trying to explain, not whatever the camera could show me.

Part 2.

At this point I am in my office sitting on my stool and just wondering, am I losing my mind or my senses, or both? Nothing seems to work as it previously did, as it always did. I think, I am a scientist, a philosopher, a rational being interested in things of the mind, so I need to keep testing this, investigating this extraordinary, confounding moment!

I develop an experiment, a control of sorts, and decide I’ll rip off the filter of a cigarette so that no matter which side I light they will both be tobacco and I can’t possibly get a drag of plastic filter. Thrilled with my genius plan I run out to the porch, rip off the filter, put the factory cut end of the cigarette in my mouth for spite, sit down in my chair and as I go to light it, and all of a sudden I find that I am back in my office sitting on my stool holding the pack of cigarettes. What?!! Somehow, I laugh. “Ha!”

Ok, fine, nothing works anymore! “I AM hallucinating” I say out loud for some sense of solidity and reality. I say it again, just to see if I sound like I am going insane (which was no help).

But then I think, whether I’m insane or the power of sensation and the laws of physics have all stopped working or maybe never existed, or I’m sick with fever, I can still wonder about this. What happened to me might be exactly what is real, not insane or fever-driven at all.

I’m still as rational and of enough character to realize what looks odd and what does not. It’s precisely because I am rational and full of knowledge and truth that I can say “something is messed up here.” Without reason as judge, what would tell me what was supposed to happen, or even what did happen?

So I say, ok, let’s plan for the absurd. If I try to go onto the porch I should end up somewhere else. I test the new theory and run down the stairs out onto the porch (wondering briefly if I might find myself already on the porch as I walk myself onto the porch, laughing again at the thought…) and just as I go to sit in my chair I find myself back on my stool.

Ah Ha!! So the theory works!

I predicted that if I left my stool and walked onto the porch to sit down I would find myself back on the stool in my office, and it worked! That’s just what happened! I’ve discovered some new science, I’ll call it my super power.

I decide to test it again and I go back downstairs onto the porch, I sit in my chair, but then, I stay there.

I purposely sat on the porch chair, expecting to land on my office stool, but this time it didn’t work. Or, rather, it worked like things used to work before this crazy evening. Now the absurdity that is in my head, that was my crazy experience, is confounded by the mundane. It didn’t work, and I now know this; I previously didn't know what laws of physics could explain sitting on the porch and landing in my office, but now I also don’t know why when I sat on my chair I remained in the chair.

But I know something real was going on with those cigarettes at least. I still taste the plastic. And I did sit on the porch chair and landed on my office chair twice before.

I look around, still on the porch, waiting. Waiting for things to randomly change again like the chair stool swap, and then, nothing changes.

At this point I realize that I can no longer move. As when I thought I would light the cigarette correctly but couldn’t because of some disconnect between my brain and the rest of the outside world, now, though I went to stand up, I couldn’t even move my legs.

Part 3.

I realize, again, I can still philosophize, still reflect on what is happening. I was still in my chair, having a somewhat existential, surreal, Kafkaesque, certainly inscrutable, experience; reality and appearance, me in the world, at odds as usual. What other materials do I need to philosophize?

I try to turn my eyes to look at the table where my book sat, but I couldn’t even do that. So I just closed my eyes and left everything black, to think.

Now I was alone, in my own head. I think “Hegel" and "Kant” for some reason, or even "Berkeley”. Memories start to lose color, like shadows of forgotten things (“Plato" pops up, "but Hume").

I recalled the experience of things, but now, only the memory of all those experinces, those physical experiences, made only of memory of the fading of things, like the sour taste in my mouth. I realized that none of those experiences or memories could explain “explanation” in the first place. I can’t experience explanation. Explanation and thing explained seem irreconcilable, necessarily disconnected. By definition, experience remains on the unexplained side of the equation when seeking explanation.. The explanation of experiences or separate things foreign to me was always and already the task in my head, but it was just as much a task for my head, as it was from my head. There has always been a chasm between me and anything else that I might experience (such as a head).

That was the whole point of seeking the truth in the first place; that was the whole occurrence of the questions. I am empty, not knowing anything, so I sought wisdom in philosophy. But if I did not have wisdom; I was empty, and so without wisdom. Therefore, I know that I must be empty if I am to be filled; I must set myself apart from everything, from anything at all, in order to not-know it, and instead seek it, seek anything else at all, such as wisdom. But now I seem only to be set apart. Was this always of my own making?

The motionless blackness that is all I can see right now with my “eyes”, unable to recall if I am on my porch or in my office - that is the phenomenon I now have to draw from to construct for me these questions. Simple, empty, me thinking, me being. ("Descartes" but "Parmenides".) And if this state of affairs, this utter isolation must be the starting point for someone seeking to know something new, anything at all, and if all my efforts at reconnecting this “being me” with “anything else” has only led me to abject darkness, I can only ask: is philosophy, that is, a knower knowing the known, is thinking itself even possible?

I stop and regather these thoughts of not-thinking.

I can admit that everything I experience now, alone with only darkness, everything I would make with my mind even before the darkness, had to be fabricated within me, by myself. At least partially. I do still believe I am on my porch. Or in my office. I am a body, somewhere, though I seem paralyzed to know not how or where. “Right?” I ask to myself. This somewhere is something that is just there with me, or just is me, even if it is because of me, or even if I am not a “me”; I still admit I am made to be whatever I am made to be, or that I make only that which can/must be made, and that these formulations might say the same thing as “whatever is, simply is” and that on both sides of these equations, there are the same beings becoming beings.

There still is this experience. Still.

I do not need to question this. It is, or I am, already there.

When I posit myself in this, I seem to immediately cut my “self” from it. Maybe I am the one who is not in all of this? Was Descartes wrong about himself? He thought he was, and therefore he was not.

I am cut-off and isolated even from myself, at least while I am wondering about the whole of experience itself as equated with the black, motionless emptiness that is currently me being myself.

Now I remember Kant, but like an empiricist, and the drawer in my office, and the stairs – those things could only appear to me as a book, or my third step, or my chair on the porch, because of the way my eyes and conscious mind constructs them in me. They can only be part of a logical sequence of events because I am like logic itself, the presence and insertion of cause and effect in the experience, like a hand lights with a lighter in hand; and only a mind can take the constructions of sense and experience and name them “in sequence, before me and after me, from cause to effect.” My experience is just that, simply my experience, unexplainable, uncaused until I exert the influence of my own mind on that experience. And the separation is my mind making of that experience something for minds alone. What is in my mind cannot be made by those other things for my mind, if what is made is only for minds, and never for those other things I presumed I now knew about in my mind. And in the making, my mind could have little, or maybe nothing to do with those things besides the blackness in the first place. Yet if a mind is incapable of interacting with other things at all, it’s as if there never really were any differences anywhere, like right now, as I continue to be unable to move.

With this realization, I realize that there may not even be an objective reality. I was always making up at least half of my story, so the story of a reality out there never actually found its way from out there into my head, never stood before my head. It was me always fixing the shapes according to the shape of my eyeball, and of those shapes, fixing ideas to the shape of my mind, so, never knowing the shape of anything else out there apart from me but only restating a shape of my own mind.

I was thinking the cigarette would taste good, so I lit it three times, and now I realize tasting good itself may have nothing to do with the cigarette, or my mouth, or with “good,” so really nothing to do with anything, other than a singular experience in a single experiencer. The epistemological chasm that was now personified in the coma of my present isolated state, reflected a metaphysical façade that I must have built to shroud an empty abyss.

Now, I finally start to panic. Have I no place in the universe? Has the universe no place in me? Or am I the whole universe? Or is there a universe? Or am I dying?

How am I still here, where here is my head and I’m nowhere to be found? Did I ever have a head?

Is my own mind merely a fabricator of illusion, a fabricator of itself to me, at me, without me? Me, I, me.

Stop saying “me!!!”

I’ve been relegated to utter isolation, motionless, somewhere in space (hopefully on my porch), with no light or even things to be lit, or the ability to open my eyes. I think of "fear" and "anger", but don't feel them anymore. And then I think the feeling of no feeling, feels like relief, which makes no sense to me as it appears perfectly clear to me - no questions; nothing to answer, as there is nothing to question; and I now know there was never an answer - at once knowing and not knowing, as known and unknowable.

And like that, it's gone, and I think "anxiety" again, while feeling nothing.

I still cannot shake these thoughts now as I continue to wonder, how can all of this be the case – what is this experience now?

Now! I think, “time”. “That’s something I know about all of this.” But then I think “you have no idea how long its all been this way.” Unable to find anything to latch onto, I start to lose sight of my very own mind, I lose the very thing anything else in the objective world, or any world, would be latched to in the first place. I cannot even sit still in my own thoughts, as thinking itself is like lighting the wrong end of some cigarette.

I start to forget language, forget thinking, forget forgetting. “Am I even thinking words anymore?”

I decide to scream and imagine the loud sound in my head as I am knowing there is no sound at all because my voice isn’t working. I decide to stop screaming, but the sound that never existed won’t go away now.

I try to yell over the noise “Stop it!”, but I have no idea if those are the right words anymore.

Words become like birds, floating in and out of my mind, never landing long enough to permit some semblance of meaning. Seeming meaning.. are birds words? Irds…erds...w..ords. “Words!”…irds... and the noise won't stop!!

Part 1 again.

Just then, I wake up. There I was on the porch the whole time, having fallen asleep reading Nietzsche. I hadn’t even lit the first cigarette (or did I, I thought and laughed). So happy, feeling relief, to be back in the comforts of my own skin, on my own porch, all was right again…or….wasn’t this the same reality I knew nothing about and was seeking to explain in the first place? Looking to Nietzsche or Heraclitus, or Kant, or Aristotle, for clues to the simple question: “what is”, as I lit my first cigarette and thought, why haven’t I quit these damn things?

My wife came to the door of my porch and said “Where were you? Put yourself to sleep again with your philosophy eh?” I just said “thank God, I am here.” She looked at me perplexed, and said “might want to try a different book,” as she turned back inside chuckling.

I went back to my office to find some Augustine, to read his thoughts on time, and language formation. He probably smoked in his youth too, and we call him “saint” now, so how bad could smoking be. Now I knew, at least I was thinking clearly again, making sound arguments, and walking too, happy to try to explain this experience once again.