Today i was concerned not by the memory of being robbed on the subway the night before but the way i sat in a class and listened to students offer that in fact it would have been (probably) fine to kill the old woman because it would be useful to redistribute her money. they had missed the whole point of the book, which is that it is definitely not okay to have killed the old woman, not even because murder is categorically bad or that there isn't merit to wealth re-distribution but because nobody has the right to play god. that any one human's sense of logic or utility is never enough to determine the constant breakdown of life. the book is a singular work of a singular mind and in that way a testament to it's own promise that each human being can work towards one striving thing that reaches out and tries to touch others -- all of us readers were supposed to be those permeable others -- but that each word and each action is a drop in a much larger bucket, so vast you are always, ultimately, led back to gave within your own droplet and only able to have power over it.
there is lots of philosophy I do not understand. I take the parsed out parts I find beautiful -- which is shallow, and egotistical, and easy, and try to apply them, or understand them. For instance, I like the Heidegger quote "Source means future." But I don't understand the full phrase it comes from: "Without this theological source, I would have never have taken the way of thought. Source means future" I know he does not mean the Bible is the future -- but can I choose a different source, and will the quote still stand? What is a good source? Who?
I know I love listening to Bob Dylan ramble about things throbbing and blowing, rambling and meeting beaten, I like big raw messy poetry and feeling no one thought about too much, laughing and moving with the world. I know I like being reminded of bullshit, even Bob Dylan's full of bullshit, when I hear Joan Baez sing in the background, sing his words somewhere close down to the earth. I know I miss the quiet, private, mystery of being a little girl, i miss poetry, and i miss feeling things with no sense of nostalgia, the tie when loving a moment had nothing to do with empathizing with some future you looking back and smiling. But then again little kids don't cry at the dinner table with their friends, and that's maybe the beauty in getting older.
All the people we envy -- even us prep-clad Ivy League students, are the ones who gave less fucks and had more authenticity, who were able to pull from some place deep within them and not look back. They moved based on what they feel, which comes from some deep unreachable unteachable place, unless you take the leap of faith to leave it all behind and go teach yourself.
I am willing to be the woman who gets robbed on the train as long as the train is going somewhere, and I'm deciding when OR where to get off, but ideally not knowing both, because then it gets boring.
I understand life is sitting in the police precinct until 4am with a friend who I don't know too well but was kind enough to stay. And you go home and sleep in and make a new start, except you don't, you go to the classroom of wood panel walls and they tell you, with the small academic chuckles that sound like an elderly man coughing on his milk, or adolescent giggles, that it would have been fine to kill the woman you were. That once you've robbed, you've basically killed; that once you back one transgression, you might as well forget God and country and split a head with an axe, because it's all relative.
And do they know they're laughing at you? Or should you be laughing at them? Or is that laughing at yourself? And is any of this actually funny at all?