Jul 11

 I have changed. Am changing. The schism that has been so many months in slow progression has turned out to be not a passing thing. But a slow tectonic shift. Arguably. It is a shift 16 years in the making. A winding path that has inexorably returned to its original darker tread, the last few years of which have been a keening cry of grief that has settled into the quiet of desolation.

Perhaps such diversions are human life in a nutshell, where sometimes they stick, and genuinely a new direction takes hold, the compass wheel shifts, and a different vista falls on the horizon. But sometimes they don't. Sometimes it is swimming against the current. Certainly I have seen this pattern repeat many times in others. People pushing against their fate. Their nature. To something better. Or different. Only to peter out. Tired. And the current wash them back downstream again. I think this is life at the macro too. Cradle to grave. The absolute. Swimming against the inevitability of mortality. No escaping that one, not by quickness of mind, or perceived purity of spirit or deed. There are no clever turns to alter that direction.

It seamlessly creeps from the micro to the macro. The practical to the philosophical. Not there are such delineations in reality. But human perception being what it is finds it easier to deal with it. The practical of nursing biological needs everyday. To the philosophical of summing the output, the meaning within the greater wheel - the nihilism of you not mattering at all. One more tree growing towards the light. To live. To die. Fossilise. Become a pattern of atoms in a nigh on infinite universe. No one remembers the single tree from a million years ago. Ah yes. But it mattered at the time. That experience. That moment. Mattered.

The practical. Versus the philosophical. Local time. Versus deep time.

We were not meant to consider such things. They are way above our biological programming paygrade.

And therein are the dragons.

Walking is meant to get you from point A to point B. It was not meant to walk you over a cliff.

Both are however very possible. 

Unlike walking, where often you can just return the way you came. Metaphysics for want of a better term, contains many paths which only go in one direction. This is the built in property of knowledge in human terms. Innocence versus understanding. Once you know a thing. You cannot un-know a thing. Once you have experienced the death of something first hand. You cannot un-experience that. Time has the unfortunate habit of making many things a non reversible transaction.

And thus. Walking over cliffs. Is not only possible. But like a slippery slope towards the edge. Sometimes, inevitable. With little to no sign posting.

Whether or not Lovecraft realised it or not with his horrors beyond comprehension, the principle of the greater wider universe containing things that will devour humanity is true. Just perhaps not in the tentacular cultish intonations imagined. But like perhaps all stories and fairy tales, it is the mirror of reality. Often of mortality or death dressed up as the evil that cannot be defeated. But here. It is nihilism. The insignificance of the human ego against the backdrop of the unimaginable size of the universe itself. And the understanding of that enough to drive someone insane. For the record. I don't think Lovecraft was particularly aware of it. I think his writing was driven from much more mundane anxieties of xenophobia and a soupcon of the pushback against the assured arrogance of anthro supremacy of the late 19th and early 20th century that HG Wells neatly touched on.

In poetic terms, Cthuhlu is very real. And reading the wrong book will doom you.

If you have obtained such knowledge you must learn - if you can - to come to terms with the unnameable things in the void, or at the very least, keep them at bay, one step ahead of them. A fish. Swimming upstream. Against the inevitable. For anyone that perhaps wisely doesn't find themselves in such waters, and unable to imagine what is being talked about, the arcane, it is easier to paint a picture of a monster lurking just out of sight. Monsters. Are universally understood. Biological hardwiring. Fear the tiger lurking in the undergrowth. Millions of years of messaging has its benefits.

 All very big picture, small picture, neat in a box.

Personal angle.

I cut my teeth reading on of all things The Lord of the Rings. It is by any measure the most ridiculous thing for a small child to grapple reading with. No one in their right mind would do such a thing. Unless perhaps someone was a horrible boundary pushing unhealthy target parent.

Regardless. That's me. By accident. My brother bought me the book on a whim. Still a kid himself really. And gave it to me. Here. Read this.

Somewhere in my very early formative years then, I was doused in the language of an Oxford professor with a deep love of saga and archaic language. I absorbed all of the archetypes at some fundamental level. This is how a world *can* look. It was not built on films, or box office returns, or popular culture. It was built on a much more intimate level, which books do - straight from the pen of an author, to the mind of the reader. Of an age where marketing and inauthentic bullshit based around money had not yet entirely corrupted media.

It gave me a lot of things. A very long lingering desire to slip this world and go live with the elves. A never to be extinguished faint tingle in forgotten places where I look, without expectation, to find the gate to the lost worlds of the Seelie host. It left me open to reading and discovering all the other stories. Myths. Other worlds. Something very different from the increasingly materialistic modern world.

It also setup in me things like honour. Nobility. Tragedy. Insanity. And over much more time, when my adult brain could start to realise such things. The passage of time. The tragedy of mortality. The function of knowledge. Wisdom. There was a point where I suddenly properly understood the lament of the fading world. The Lord of the Rings is very much about the *fading* of wonder out of the world. Regardless of victor. It is a *tragedy* for all the things that are lost. The last of the dragons. The last of the elves. The Ents. The withdrawing of wizards. Magic. The last of legendary craftsmanship. Bloodlines. Wonder. The inexorable march of time. The whole of that mythos deals with that. Slow decay. Stoicism within it. The strain of living inside it.

For me at least. I got tragedy. But when I was young. I still had not connected it with reality. It was just. Stories. Only when I was older did it finally click. Oh. This is real. It is a mirror. One of many. All our stories are mirrors.

Anyway.

I always liked Gandalf. Who doesn't. By turns, grouchy, random, knowledgeable, kind. With an eye on doing the right thing. But fallible. The trope of the wise crotchety dude - and with other variations - a hermit in the tower. 

What a cool character. To be the person with the knowledge. The wits. A sense of stability. Where things wobble. All eyes turn to Gandalf. Not universally trusted. Fear of what he portends. What knowledge exposes.

Without realising it, I picked up some aspects of that. Formed perhaps by the nudges of that Oxford professor. Push for understanding. Help others. Assess. Act. Be calm.

But.

The thing that I really didn't realise at all. Was *the cost*.

When I was much older I realised that *everything* has a cost. Everything. There are no free lunches. And this is where you wander off the beaten path a little. Conventional wisdom is very *bad* at understanding cost. Things are often presented as a one way benefit. No cost. Or minimal. Recoverable. The underlying costs. Emotional. Physical. Mental. Temporal. Are often missed. Not to mention the cost of opportunity. Some opportunities curtailed, the expense of having something else.

The price of knowing things, past a certain everyday usable level is weighty. It will crush you flat should you keep going. Cthulhu.

What you see little of. Is the burden Gandalf carries. Or perhaps. How well he carries it. Able to function. To sit back and see the wisdom. 

Many that live deserve death, some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them ? Then do not be so eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. 

That is the wisdom of the meta. Beyond the push and pull of the moment. The local. The emotions. The bigger picture.

The meta to the meta. Is how much of a burden that is. What does that level of wisdom and knowledge cost.

Everything. Ultimately.

Each sip from that cup will reward you with knowledge. And erase one bit of you from existence.

Tricky.

Not often talked about.

But it is talked about in the corners of some philosophers.

Anyway.

A ramble.

On the edge of the galactic rim.

Related.

Hazel is babysitting an elderly dog for a month. His owners have had to travel to the other side of the world. She has sent me a couple of pictures. A very old man. Wobbly on his legs. Anxious in his temporary home.

It is good for Hazel. And it is a good thing.

But I struggle. Submerged under a sea of sadness. I can see the old mans last days. Athenas. Ares. Of us all. The tragedy of it. The unfairness of it. The decay. I know that the bit between the start and the end is hopefully filled with fun things. Interesting things. But I cannot feel it. Cannot. Feel it. All I see is the tragedy. Of a beautiful thing created, spun out for a fraction of a moment, only to wink out, leaving loss in its wake.

I feel sorry for the dog Hazel is babysitting. Sorry that an old man should feel anxious in his final days. Sorry that he has to experience it at all. Unfair.

I think of all the deaths I have seen. Or been close to. And those I haven't. Something very terrible.

Something is wrong with me.

This is one of my horrors of the void. One of the elder gods sitting grinning at me from the other side of the room. Wreathed in darkness and despair and nothingness. Come. It is too much. Just. End it. The pain will fade. Your vision will dim. There will be no more tragedy.

I don't so much resist it. As just endure it. Not even that really. It eats me alive. I just. Exist within it.

Something in me has fundamentally broken.

This is one cliff I have walked off of.

Falling, falling, forever falling.

The best I can do. Is turn it off.

Clear a space. Return to my biological basics. Breathe. Feel the breeze. No thoughts. I am a tiny monkey. With tiny monkey problems. Cold. Warm. Hungry. Sleepy. Keep it there.

In psych terms. Meditation terms. They would call this some variant of mindfulness.

The monsters are still outside the door.

Sometimes I can talk to them without them devouring me. Sometimes not.

It is part of the price you pay.

It also makes you. Weird. Non aligned with the conventional. A freak. A nutcase.

The crazy hermit living in the tower.

I get it. And why sometimes they are grumpy as fuck. 

I am not that sanguine. I hover right on the edge of life. Sometimes I flail out beyond the edge. Sometimes a little away from the edge. But it is always there. It is. At this point. Fundamental in me. My path sticks to this cliff edge. I know its wrinkles and inlets. I know the inky gloom of its hollows. I walk to the bottom of the abyss sometimes too. I am. Far. Far too familiar with it. It infects me. As Nietzsche correctly pointed out.

It is what it is.

There are no refunds.