Tales and Journeys

Try, fail and try again. Trial and error is the basis of evolution. But is the concept limited to biological workings? I want to divulge my own perspective on evolution and its siblings, who as a family relentlessly brings the world into states of greater complexity.

To do this, I reuse the term evolution and let this new evolution have two characteristics

1. For each version of evolution, there is a group of subjects that manifest and disappear (live and die).
2. Transcending those lives, is a concept which is made more complex by this process.

The eternal evolution

Take stars, for instance. Brown dwarves live long lives, blue giants short lives. They all explode eventually and spread dense matter that ends up in other solar systems. That is their interaction. The concept that evolves, is the distribution of elements. Our solar system is of the third generation, which means the elements we are made out of, have been involved with two stars before. Otherwise, there’d only be hydrogen and helium. This evolution of matter made life possible.

On our own planet, then, you eventually got the biological evolution, the prime example. It started out as evolution of structures: inevitably, only the stable ones remained. Then, when life was truly starting to form, producing bodies and movement, competition took over. The changes that evolution made on its subjects, varied greatly as the complexity rose. At first, you would see genes multiplying, forming two body parts where there used to be one. In time, the genetic “programming language” was extended, and changes could happen in more ways. More interestingly, they could surface as preferences, desires, feelings, things that were previously unknown and irrelevant for early evolution. Read the rest of this entry »

What does the world really feel like, and what is the most true way to feel? In the next paragraphs, I conclude that this difference in feeling, this paradox of the human soul, disappears when we realize what is really going on.

Not so rarely, I find myself engulfed in some specific emotional landscape. It can be the set of emotions found in a specific book, the strings pulled by a certain album, or even the emotions brought forth by the nature around me. While in this landscape, the similar emotions within me stand out more clearly and are easier to access. I all but settle down in the surroundings and become a part of the experience.

Like all works of art, emotional landscapes have an array of emotions, some more present than others, and put together in a unique way. So while no landscape relates to one single emotion, different landscapes can take up wholly different sections of the great continent of emotions. Also, just as a musical piece can be complete in and of itself, so can a landscape feel complete and un-lacking. In effect, two completely seperate landscapes can both feel like the “most real” one.

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The modern opinion is cynical towards the world, expecting to recieve no compassion or meaning — because after all, the universe is a faceless machine, its gears the cold logic of physics and probability. I battle this opinion under its own terms, showing that emotions like love cannot merely be explained by their apparent purposes, but must have been present since the conception of this world.

Humanity. We live and we persist because it is inevitable. In this world of change and peril, only that which persists, lives.

Our highly developed consciousness, our imagination, made us persist. Our hope in better days, in great wonder, made us persist. Because of them, we still exist to this day.

And because they made us persist, these parts have persisted in us. That is the only reason we have them. If the world had challenged us in different ways, we would have developed different abilities. In another world, we might be unable to learn to swim, climb trees… or feel happy.

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Artists make the world into something it’s not, giving people false hope and wrong impressions of what the world is. At least, that is what some might say. How do you defend such an argument, if even possible? I try to locate the true meaning behind art, finding that it is not to illustrate places and events, but to explore the human soul.

Photographers find the exact angle and composition where the beauty is the clearest, and then they doll up the scene in Photoshop afterwards, making it into something that can’t even be found. Writers also give us prime examples and leave out the mundanity that truly fills our lives. And musicians hog the well-used beats and harmonies of the rare moments in life. Art, in effect, makes us disappointed in the world.

The world has no beauty. Read the rest of this entry »

The leashes, the leashes! Sometimes, and only sometimes, I can feel the tar around me, submerging me. Seperating me from myself. Sometimes, I feel I could break free of these restraints, these phony traits. The human shell.

And I would stop all I do wrong: all I am expected to do, but that I deep down know I shouldn’t. All for the sake of comfort, I risk resignation, I risk forgetting, I risk dying in life. I would stop it, and I would travel. To rediscover the forsaken, remember the forgotten. I would travel to visit my soul.

Not to find a path. Just to walk.

We are sometimes afraid of ourselves, conforming to what feels safe just to lessen our anxieties, our fears of the unknown, however good.

Why do we all hinder ourselves? Why do we hold back, in favor of being gray? Is is because we are afraid of loss?

Even when we know what can be, how life can be, why oh why do we still do nothing? Why do I do nothing?

Humans can be so special. Relationships can be so special. But we.. no, I. I am so afraid. I cannot hide behind mankind on this one. It’s childish, it’s introverted, it’s straight-out stupid, but I am afraid of letting anyone close. All my life, I have kept more distance from others than I can honestly say I’m happy with.

Why doesn’t matter. Whys are not just excuses, they are shields; shields of lies that you can hide behind and believe it’s okay that you’re doing something wrong. Psychology is an elaborate shield that lets us be gray with a clean conscience. I will not ponder on why I am afraid and distant, and then be happy with the reason I find most likely. I will not be happy with being like this for the rest of my life, with not being as I think people ought to be.

Difference starts somewhere. And then it spreads. We would all do best not to resist the kind of change that this movie inspires in us.

Why ever do we care, when all the castles we build, fall down eventually? Perhaps the point isn’t a happy ending, but a memorable adventure.

Life isn’t fair. Life hurts, stings, cripples. Life is a bitch and you can’t deny it. All our fights will be in vain, all effort will be erased, all will fall back to mercilessness. Cold logic is the way of it all, and cynicism is the way to accept it. There is no other option.

So goes the words of a dead man.

So what if resistance is futile? So what if there can never be a paradise on earth? So what if good things don’t last? At least they’re good while they do. It’s not the end result that matters, but what happened underway.

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Looking beyond the world of information, I discover that there rules a relativism in the world of feelings. This post sees the art in our unique perspectives on all that happens around us.

Look at an object close to you. Pick it up, examine it. What do you see?

And what more do you see?

What does the object mean to you, beyond its mere shape and surface? Our heads don’t know the world when we are born. We gradually learn how to understand it, how to chop it into pieces our psyche can comprehend. So how is it you really interpret the object; what tools are used, and what is the object decoded into, in your head? And your heart?

Okay, so it’s not always that easy to know. But you do have a special decoding process. It’s unique to you, and it’s been fine-tuned throughout your whole life. And it’s in no way limited to individual objects. We all live in the same physical world, but to each of us, everything means something else than to everyone else. So when we think of what the world is, the decoded version is all we know, and that’s what we think the world is. That is not a correct image of what the physical world truly is, but it’s not fiction either, so what is it exactly?

It’s your world.

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We’re living in a world where information is power, where art is commercial and everything is analyzed based on its usefulness to our mundane purposes. Here, a weary mind remembers the falseness of this and tries to look for more.

What is grass to you? What about your room? Christmas? A bottle of water?

If all your answers are equally logic and explainable, if you were able to define them all, you might want to hear me out.

Sometimes I wonder.. what if the things I treasure — fantasy and its beauty — will some day mean nothing to me? What if I will one day picture a dark, enigmatic castle in front of a magnificent stormy sky full of roaring dragons and fire.. and feel nothing? It could happen, such things do happen to many people. They lose the magic, the touch, for a while at least. Fact is, even the most wonderful image you can ever imagine, is nothing at all without the feeling that comes with it, a feeling that is not part of the image but of your mind. The magic of the image. But what the heck is the magic, and why can’t we keep it?

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