I really don't know what to say. In classic Nero fashion, I see the date of this entry posted, the title, and the fact that it's the last entry I'll ever upload here, and the significance of all of that as a symbolic gesture is really the meat of this entry. All of the rest of this is just rambling. And I guess that, too, is in keeping with the tradition I see running throughout these entries. I came up with all these showy names, but when it came to the actual substance of the entries, it was virtually all trifling, childish nonsense. And that's okay. The time for voicing my thoughts here is long gone. And increasingly, I have been becoming less and less interested in voicing my thoughts to others in general, even in forums I can take seriously. My last entry was from over four years ago. But now that I've finally escaped a grim stretch of years, I've been reflecting on my life before that stretch of years and reconnecting with myself through memories, through examination of behavior patterns, long-held values, and so on. That took me to these old, often extraordinarily embarrassing journal entries-- mawkish, over-indulgent, and worst of all, when I acquired my horrendous conceitedness around age sixteen. Good thing that most of you don't actually have any clue who I am.
There is actually something extraordinarily important about having all of these written words about myself as I saw myself, my life as I understood it, all whether it was legitimate or not. Some of it couldn't help but be legitimate. And the words tilted by my warped perception even serve as a very valuable commentary on the history of my own mind. And, even something as simple as having a record of what I was doing, thinking, what I was inspired by, what I was preoccupied with at various stages in my life.
I used to do this weird little thing that I still don't quite understand. I would get little sayings, single sentences or phrases, or words stuck in my head, and they would take on a strange significance to me. Mostly, I'd hear them in songs. And I'd incorporate these phrases into my everyday speech sometimes. I just got a little jolt out of using language that way. And titles, in particular, felt very important and significant to me. My favorite part about writing these entries was bestowing a title above them in bold, that all the text underneath was encapsulated by. But, as a silly child and poor writer, I was unable to really unify the two in any meaningful way. So I'd name an entry something I thought sounded cool, and the entry itself would just be some kind of trifle that could not possibly genuinely interest anyone... uh oh. I'm running out of steam, here. I actually would like to come to some kind of a point here. But I'm not sure what, exactly. I don't want to address anyone specific, or anyone in general, because I don't go into this with the presumption that anyone will read this entry. And I don't care whether anyone does or doesn't. Like the most important behaviors of mine, I do them symbolically, in keeping with an inner logic and narrative peculiar to myself and my experience, that would mean very little to anyone else because they aren't even privy to all the details that are required to appreciate the gesture. And how could they be?
I'm surprised at how many words I can actually produce without effort, if I just sit down and write stream-of-consciousness. With a novel, or a serious writing, you can agonize over every word and cut yourself off at the legs. But in time, your inner landscape changes, and if you're inclined to investigate yourself, your behaviors, to examine yourself across years in pursuit of an understanding of who you are, it can be extraordinarily interesting to have an archive of some, sometimes surprisingly lengthy, stream-of-consciousness writings. Part of it is to see how much I have learned, how much stupidity I am no longer capable of (now, with the understanding that I still am and will always be capable of stupidity, but hopefully with less arrogance and more self-awareness, and less needless harm and ugliness). Part of it is to see how shockingly long certain themes, big and small, have run throughout my life. So long that I'd forgotten the origins of them, that I'd forgotten that they had run through the timeline of my life for so many years. And then, to see these threads running throughout these entries, some of them as old as six and seven years, and to be shocked and think "Yes, that's a piece of me that has existed so long that I stopped even noticing it." Like your nose in your field of vision. It's always there. So you never see it until something makes you particularly aware of it. Like these words, SUCKA! LOOK AT YOUR NOSE! > biggrin
There's a figure who I have a great admiration for, and who has served as an indirect, very important teacher to me. And, as I have done with all of the greats who I have learned from, I learn who they learned from, and pursue their works as well. I've read two of the books written by the indirect teacher of this indirect teacher of mine, and I was stricken by how personally important some of his knowledge is for me to understand. As if he made it his life's purpose to pursue a realm of understanding that I almost didn't know could be articulated. I didn't know those depths could be investigated. And as I grew older and more starved for understanding, I became distant from the inner depths, never knowing how to investigate them properly. It isn't purely the teacher and his teacher, who have saved me from departing from the inner understanding completely. I would have thrown away my misleading educations even if it felt wrong, and would have chosen my soul instead, even if it meant madness, even if it meant delusion. But regaining the path inward has saved me from mental obliteration into true blindness, meaninglessness. All of this is to say that the teacher of this teacher of mine mentioned some seriously bizarre practices, that I believe most people (suffering from the same pathologies of "development" as I was in the process of succumbing to) would be unable to take seriously long enough to put them to the test, to see what of value could be derived from them. One of these included returning, as a middle aged man, to activities that he engaged in as a tiny child. Stacking stones on one another, to make little buildings. As we grow, we begin to suffer discomfort, and lose the thrilled complacency of the child. We long for deeper understanding, for higher sophistication, and when we are unable to grasp these things properly, we suffer such pathologies as delusion, nihilism, or the "development" away from our truest selves, into lives that will never fulfill us. The child within us dies, and we drag around the body, with us. To retreat back into childishness will not work. That shell is no longer large enough to contain us. To try to cram ourselves back into it will not result in any kind of comfort, but will only breed new pathologies of its own. But to dispense with the dead child will not do, either. Because somehow, after he dies, if it is done right, the child can be synthesized into the adult. When we are children, we existing in a stage of life where the essence of our soul is quite bare and easily reachable. We know what we want. We know what makes us happy. We can please ourselves, simply and profoundly, with little forethought. We pursue all manner of activities that are precursors to grander activity as adults. The imaginary games that a child plays in his backyard as a child may be the precursor to a great artistic mind. A bright-eyed child poking at pollywogs in a river may be a budding passion for the logic of the world, which may blossom into a fruitful and sophisticated study of biology. We do not know these things as children, but if we hold a true love, whatever it is, and if we pursue that, and follow the unraveling of it, we find that long before we understood what we were doing, we were well on our way to somewhere truly worth going. I do believe that, with all its dead-ends and frantic runs down strange paths, I have always returned to a path that was leading somewhere truly worth going. And when I feel that familiar earth beneath my feet, I have looked back and seen landmarks that I sometimes had nearly forgotten. And I thought, my god... I've returned to my path. Even from that black and howling wilderness, I have emerged, again, back onto the path that will take me to a distant celestial stairway, that ascends to that grand and scintillating star that I have always followed, that I have held out longing hands toward, since the dawn of my consciousness. My own soul. To unify myself. To fulfill myself. In some ways, to reunite with myself. In some ways, to meet those parts of myself that have not yet come into being-- future self-expansion that I am, now, in pain for the lack of, but that I am on the path toward.
When I look back, it always depended what level of understanding, what level of wisdom and tranquility I was capable of, that determined how I would feel about my old actions, my old words, my own emotions, my own preoccupations. For some time, I looked back and shuddered. But why shudder anymore? That child is dead. And I still drag his body around with me, because he is dear to me, but besides-- his veins and mine are connected. Vital arteries, never to be severed. To back away at these bonds between us would lead to the death of the whole. The child is not to be discarded, no matter how his body rots. He is never to stop being cherished, for his lack of wisdom, for his pettiness, for his weakness, because also contained in the child, was the brightest light of life, the warmest love, the most wondrous happiness. "Yet, children, you know, are the image of Christ: 'theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.'" No, no, do not treat him now, like some unsanitary piece of refuse. Don't you know that you slay your own love, when you hurt yourself in this way? By my love, by my hope, by my lifelong pursuit of that star of my own, I tell you: You must not treat the Child as though it is trash, now that it was necessary for him to die and give rise to you. Because the rebirth of the Child anew, stripped of the pathologies that he previously succumbed to, but still bearing the pure treasures that he did possess, will be synthesized with the new knowledge and sophistication of your adult self. This is the ideal.
I started this entry by writing, without knowing or caring very much if I ever found a point to come to, but having a desire just to produce some words to serve as my "last entry". I ended up writing a strange and hardly coherent cacophony of things. First, I wrote as if I were addressing strangers who wouldn't be particularly interested in anything they read, and who didn't know me. Then, I suppose I decided to make a dissertation into a subject that actually interests me, and may be in some way related to my reflection on my old journal entries, but who on Earth are these words for? I only write like this to myself. These words, about the "Child", and extracting the treasures from his dead body, synthesizing them with the new self, I write like this in my personal writings, that I do not share with anyone. I think I'm flirting with the low likelihood of anyone of importance actually reading this entry, by actually putting something that's important to me in it. If I said nothing that was important to me, it wouldn't matter who ever read it. There were a few people, through Gaia, that I actually came to know personally. There were actually some cool paths that were opened in my life, from connections with other people through this game. In that way, I have a sort of fond memory for the platform. There were some important people who I lost all touch with. Somehow, it feels like I'm writing to a strange amalgamation to the memory of all those few people. Of the hundreds of people that I interacted with through this game as a lonely kid, I think ten of them are "important". Other than those people, if anyone else read this entry, it would mean as little as if no one read it at all. And, of those ten people, I think it's unlikely that any one of them will read it. And that's sort of the fun of writing it. It's for no one. But is it for... someone out there? Probably not. And I'm fine with either of those. With my many new realizations and deeper understandings of myself over the past four years, I have come to understand better why I write. And the purpose of my writing does not require a reader. It is a necessity of mine to write. It is not necessary that others read it. Because the process of writing, itself, is how I come to understand myself more deeply. It's also how I process outer information, inwardly, and reach understandings of life itself.
Titles, for me, were always this mysterious and profound thing. I remember finding songs with strange titles, particularly songs that never mentioned the title in the lyrics. And when I would realize why the song was named that, it would send chills up my spine. I developed an interest in titles as a profound encapsulation of the entirety of the thing it stood as a title for-- a song, a book, what have you. The mystery of it, and the realization of its meaning, are the attraction. Maybe I should have named this entry "Intro", because I named my very first entry here "Outro". And, I named that one "Outro" because I was sad that the previous online game I played to appease my loneliness, had shut down, and I was forced to find another.
Anyway... I think that's all I care to write. But I'm sure later I'll think of something that it would have been appropriate to have said. Something that little Nero would have wanted me to say, here in my final entry. The little Nero who cared about these entries enough to write them, as more than just a little symbolic nod to his earlier self.
I guess I'll go home now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbtsZJXnzFY
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