Friday, December 16, 2005
Oh God
- Why don’t you wash George?
- Because it is not required by my god and in any case I am too busy at my work.
- Your work?
- Yes the work that I do for my god.
- Who is this god of yours that is so important that you do not see to your daily needs and slave away for night and day?
- In my religion we believe that every day should be taken individually and we shall not look into the future but keep closer to the present, not wandering very far from the work at hand.
The work we should do should have no singular practical aim but should open up the mind to endless possibilities and potential interpretations. Inevitably this type of work will require the utmost concentration and will allow no other type of occupation, to prevent the work from being corrupted or lead astray into practical or commercial considerations.
- Your clothes, your clutter, the floating hairs onto the beaten up sofa, you believe in a god that lets you live like you’re in the gutter?
- These things are the sacrifices that the god says that you must make in order to cleanse yourself of the world and its distractions.
- What is so important about this work that you do anyway? All you do is sit down at that computer all day, like a monk tapping away at his tablet. Is this god such a sadist that it has his subjects forfeit themselves to repetitive strain syndrome? What about life, the world outside, air brushing through the trees and the smell of -------- in Spring time.
- That’s all well and good but what meaning is there in all that. We are but flesh and bone, our senses of trivial enjoyments have no meaning besides the flow of history and time. One day we will be dead and gone and then there will be nothing. We must seize the moment and not let trivial distractions get in our way.
- Who is to say what is trivial and what is not. Meaning can only be established in the context of society and people. How can you hide away and at the same time say that what you do has meaning and authority, god or no god.
- I believe in a secular society where individuals can choose their own path and construct their own sense of meaning in the world and seek out those with similar interests. We have to be strong and independent to forge new meaning in the world. Our sense of existence in the world is only truly realised through continuous recreation of meaning, of reinterpretation of the world around us. In order to do this one needs quiet and solitude and of course it helps my concentration.
- So in order to truly exist you have to retreat further and further from the world. It doesn’t seem very appealing to me.
- Well nobody asked you to join me, did they? In fact I didn’t invite you over here really did I.
- Hey, but didn’t you phone me last night. Said you hadn’t talked to anybody in weeks.
- Ah, yes, so I did.
- Said the lady at the supermarket had trouble interpreting your speech when you asked how to get a trolley as you had no money for the slot.
- Yes, yes. Well, I couldn’t understand a word she was saying either. I had to climb over the barrier to grab a loose one.
- Well, you know, I think you’ll have to practise your social skills a bit more.
- I try to get out regularly and integrate with people. It's good for my work, for stories and that. It’s just that sometimes I feel like a fox that has to duck from the farmers gun all the time, it becomes a bit stressful after a while having to keep up the appearances. I just want to do my own thing without having to feel as though I am being watched all the time.
- I did wonder why you had all the curtains closed. You can't hide from the world you know.
- People are always watching and having opinions and bumping about on the ceiling, you can never fully escape. I don't think that I'd be able to survive all this without my god to give life meaning.
- But there is meaning out there, natural meaning, just as many rich layers of complexity out there than in anything you could create by yourself in this room.
You could live it and breathe it, be a part of it.
- I am being a part of it, just in a non participating kind of way. The world is about psychology and interpretation. What do you think about the world out there, how do you communicate what you feel? I'm just as much a part of the world in here as you are out there. I am building a language that can communicate how I feel. A person can travel to all the countries in the world and still essentially know nothing more than they did when they started out. I look into my cauldron filled with the bubbling froth of techniques and tools and ideas swirling around and if I look hard enough and concentrate, sometimes, out pops a bit of magic, which energises me much more than any 'socialising' could possibly do.
