How do we respond to the ramblings of a fellow train traveler, noticing the tired lines that days, weeks
and years have etched into their weather beaten skins. The actual question being how to respond as a rebuttal to another's rambling on life. Our lives are interwoven with others, listening as I am to some old queen. Listening to best friend and other songs,emotions welling up inside I sit in front of an old table worn by others, worn by me as a child. I sit staring into space, caught in my own melancholy of the situation.
But it is life i have chosen above melancholy, not that i do not suffer from serious bouts. But there is so much to explore in the new lives we have created for ourselves and the old ones we live in. We had a choice to change our lives and our conditions and our general existence. We have to choose to see, to experience, to eat, cook, to walk with the wind blowing through my long beard, how strange it is that at a point the wind would have been blowing through my willowy hair, now all that remains are mere bristles
of the past. But in actual fact it is through the roots that we are biased and model our views and our experience of that which we see and and imbibe around us.
we have a choice, we have taken the choice and it is our responsibility to exercise it to the utmost.
The question of nihilism invokes more questions than it answers, is it an answer to a question that doesn't exist? What is the driving force behind the alternative? Is it a single alternative or is it a plethora of multidimensional options. How do we justify a choice other than Nihilism if we do not have a fundamental or philosophical directive. In those cases there must be more to the decision or the anti-decision. If Nihilism is nothing then the opposite is everything? On immortality I have little to say other than that would be a very long time ;-)
Interestingly one thing i did notice was that there was an inherent similarity in the way things digress, the blog it seems to bring out the worst digressions in all of us, we tend to loose the plot and point and ramble on as if in a discussion with someone ont he train while they are not listening. I must admit that I truly enjoyed the imagery of the dude in the white bath robe, but sorry I could not get past the scary mental image of Riet Willemse in his of white bath robe standing deep in the suburbs of Cape town.. on his early morning waddle to the front gate to pick his cape Argus. While the wind howls viciously around him,. dark green stokies muddied by the inability to see a puddle due to the previous nights vineyard fever. How a simple couple of words can drive us into a rabbit hole of thoughts.
I digress greatly on the topic at hand, but before i forget i have a couple of rather disturbing yet real and otherwise life titbits. Back to the Pink lady on the train, my weekly intervals of her pressence ont he train are mostly entertaining. She has taken to wearing christmas decorations on her earrings .. This is so cool on Monday she was wearing small (well not all that small) golden teddy bear earrings. Oh how fragile we are in our preconceptions and social adherence. Why is it we are bound to the social standards, why can we not all be wearing strange decorations:-) Well in some senses in between all they gray, yes we had summer it lasted for a couple of weeks, we are now back into the greyness .. it is a strange thing, I think Smilla spoke of her sense of snow, Maybe it shoudl be mark's sense of the gray and white, I am at a loss to describe or capture the colours, or lack of the colours on an electronic media. The grayness perpetuates everything inbetween the greens and browns and yellows. It is truely mystical at times. The weather is everythign and more here, i experienced last weekend to my amazement, that for once my forsight of extra clothes is an acceptable practice:-) I went rambling, such a nice word, to a valley about 40 km away from my house, I left int he morning and the weather was awesome, hot Sic!.. well hot for here .. warm and sunny and hardly a cloud int he sky, I then progressed over they heywoods, through the hut valley and past Petone.. where i could see the white blanket reminiscent of the table cloth runnign off the mountains into the see int he Wellington bay. Crossing over the hill into the next valley, where the closer I rode to the Cook straights the more incliment the weather became.. only to arrive at my desitnation to experience, cold, windy and mysty surrounds.. insane insane insane..
but back to the rabbit hole in reality and the expression of self and many other things. Today I saw my second Hedgehog here in NZ, btw they are a pest.. so no glamour... but that is not the current point at hand, and the first one was splatted on the road like a flat possum.. of which there are many .. but that is another story for later. But back to this one..
"picture this ...
I was cycling to work this morning.. it was rather cloudy and cold. and mystical as it is at that time of the morning, This in its own sense is rather mystical and eerie at best, to be alone on your bicycle this early int he morning in the Cold and the mist.. something that I have always loved, yet have found creepy and mystical. Must be something akin to a fear of the dark. But to get back to the Hedgehog, it was just sitting there on the side of the raod, and strangely it was much larger in real life than I had ever expected. but mroe than that the setting just scratched to clearly at a memory within me that was not my own. Lets not call it deja vu.. lets call it a feeling similar to somethig i would experience from a Lewis carrol story. and then it struck me.. it had nothing to do with going down the rabbit hole, albeit there is something down those lines.. But it is a story I read my daughters when they were much younger, I said small in my first incarnation of the sentence .. that would be far to lewis carrolish ..
The story is very sweet, and strangely the anthropomorphism of animals is in no way out of place, even in the story of Mrs Tiggy-winkle. But to get back to the story the dreamlike quality of this story is just amazing and would best capture my experience of seeing this quaint little weta killer. It draws us deep into a world which is literally down the rabbit hole. Somehow walking through the hills and dales and mountains around new zealand it feels like i am immersed in a book that was written,a ctually co-authored by lewis carrol, beatrix potter and Tolkien .. it is so weird. I have seen benjamen bunny, I saw Mr jeremy fisher, I saw the "sticklebacks, I saw the Trout" .. I could have been there in the pages of this book.
To return to rhetort :-) on the Filosophy , we are just mammals, here in New Zealand. It is such a diaspora of nations and individuals. But some of the strangest things i am experiencing are the impacts of people who have gone before, by experience of the history of my life, my country of origin, my parents country of origin and the way the original colonizers of this place have changed and tamed this environment. It makes me think so much about things I cannot comprehend nor understand that I stand in shame of my race the humans. IT relates me to the xkcd cartoon of the day.
But more on me seeing that this is my Blog, how do i feel, I feel angry I feel angry at all those that preceded me and many of the choice they made and the eventual route it has sent me and more importantly the whole of the human race on. You got to question it all
steriotypically i would like to end this exiting episode in the recesses of my mind with some piece of pink floyd lyrics that in some ways reflect some of things I have been thinking about recently
"
Heaven from Hell,
Blue skys from pain.
Can you tell a green field
From a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade
Your heros for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange
A walk on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
How near or how far.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
Pile on many more layers
And I'll be joining you there.
Shine on you crazy diamond.
And we'll bask in the shadow
Of yesterday's triumph,
And sail on the steel breeze.
Come on you boy child,
You winner and loser,
Come on you miner for truth and delusion, and shine!
