Chris Kirk is a hypocrite who writes beautifully

I realise that nothing I say has any truth.  I realise that whenever I state a fact I am proving myself a hypocrite.  But this does not bother me, I never claimed to be objective or correct and I never claimed to have any morals.  Morality is for the weak.  Morality is for those who are not connected to the natural intelligence of their own body.  There is no need to believe in abstract linguistic constructs when there is a truth made of flesh that is the entirety of our experience in this strange universe.  My body is my beacon, I have everything I need.  It leads me to green pastures where there is food and rushing water and where the people are waiting for me with kind welcoming eyes.

Recently it has brought me to the city where I am forced to develop extra-sensory skills of a very strange nature.  The ability to wear a mask, to cover my body and my voice with shame and inhumanity.  The ability to not only write a CV, but to believe I am that CV and I am nothing more than the banal life-denying skills which I weakly have to offer for a job that does not utilise any of the natural and powerful talents that would really make this company come alive.  Because in the city we deny life like we deny death.  We cover the earth in concrete and we cover our flesh in clothes and make-up; we spray to kill insects and opportunistic plants; we cook our food to make sure it's dead and we criminalise any public displays of the loving act that brings life into the world.  We are indeed a strange species and if you haven't noticed then you're not looking, you must be looking down your own pants to make sure your genitals haven't been bitten off yet (by your boss or your girlfriend or your landlord or your prime minister).

Who's going to bail you out when you slavish parents finally grow old and die and leave you weak and unable to cope into the world they co-created while you were growing up and presented you with on your 18th birthday?  Is it too late to develop the skills that will provide you autonomy in a world that apparently will not protect you unless you can afford to pay for it?  Are you too old at the age of 19 to change your belief systems?  You know, the belief system that says that the world is dangerous and does not like me and I have to speak in the same language as the job descriptions I am sent in the mail every time I sleep in past 09.00.

So I stepped out into the world and I keep walking and so far I have not died though I assume I will one day.  I am told that everyone dies eventually but the amazing thing is I've been going for 26 years now and still no death.  I walk along the side of the road and I am told this is highly dangerous but no car has hit me yet, in fact sometimes they stop to offer me a ride.  I get in and turn to my right and there sits another human being, in the driving seat of their huge metallic machine.  They have invited me not only into their most expensive and precious toy, they have invited me into their lives and I do not underestimate the trust involved.

I stare straight ahead at where the road is taking us and they do the same, guiding our metal monster safely through this high-speed high-danger environment.  Through the exploration of the power of eyeless conversation we find our connection point in the world, we both there is one, for no other purpose than pleasure and curiosity.  We have no desire to own each other once a connection has been made because we both know that as soon as the most superficial division comes into our lives my new friend will stop the car and let me out and I will wave goodbye and thank their kindness and again I am exposed to the weather and the concrete and the dangers of being alone in a world that may or may not want to kill me.

If there was any truth in the warnings heaped onto my back by those evil people who think they are good because they have dry vaginas and circumcised penises I would be cowering in the corner of some room I knew I could afford to pay for and I would be low on some drug and wearing my winter clothes and hiding from the light in a cardboard box that will conveniently warp to the shape of the twitches in my anxiety-ridden body.  I must be unique in this response because everyone else seems to function relatively well under such pressure, merely developing one of myriad new cancers when it's really time to have a break from work longer than four weeks per annum.

I bathe under waterfalls sometimes and other times I am not even allowed to walk barefoot even if I am doing exactly what everybody else is doing and just watching without the sin of participation.  Sometimes I feel an opening in the social haze and I'm not the only one, my friends feel it too, and we can get naked and dance as if we are happy to be alive because we are happy to be alive, rather than in denial about being dead.  I would love to see you without clothes.  I would love to see you enjoying your body in the sun and the glistening rushing water of the stream.  I would love to look into your eyes and see joy shining out like a light and the skin of your entire body radiating divine solar light.  I would love for us to roll around on the earth as if we loved her and cover ourselves in her pure damp flesh, and smear it all over our bodies.  I would love to take a handful of her drippy brown mud-flesh and cover the area of your back that your arms can't reach and make sure, like me, you are covered for a little while in something that enriches your organism, rather than something which stops perspiration or strips your natural oils.

I love to touch and be touched because I have been incarnated into a physical body in this lifetime and weather or not I am some sort of spiritual entity who will survive this life and go on to better things that I can believe in but not conceive of it makes no difference to the fact that I am here with my body and the feelings it produces and there is a beautiful intensity when we move close to one another and when we exist in love this intense proximity effect is empowering and when we exist in hate we have nothing but muscles and pain and that gets us nowhere and when we deny ourselves with drugs like alcohol and religion we feel nothing and like it (but hate ourselves).

I don't hate God enough to deny the reality he dropped me into for the sake of something which may indeed be as true as the authority-figure tells me it is.  It may indeed me true that abstraction is a better way to live than experience, but I choose to experience experience and merely take abstractions into consideration.  They have no physical reality I can place in relation to my body, so how can I live my life by these principles?

God told me once that it's okay to be gay, cos this was a concern of mine at the time.  I didn't hear his voice, I wasn't lead to some authoritative text or person, it was just obvious to my otherwise confused and horny teenage body.  I was just 17 years old when I realised that I couldn't conceive of God denying me, I couldn't conceive of a world without God's love and despite the paranoid anxiety of my mind and the instructive mind of the institutions I allowed to shape me, nothing could change the self-evident reality that I was okay.  It later became obvious that the world itself is also okay, despite all propaganda to the contrary.

I casually chose sixth-form classical studies as another one of the subjects that was supposed to brainwash me into being a productive and uncomplaining member of free-market capitalism but this subject and the beautiful teacher who shared it with me introduced us all to another society that was different from ours but one of the primary influences for what we now call Western Civilisation.  We were introduced, specifically, to Socrates, who not only loved and appreciated the beauty of young men, but questioned the society into which he was born.  He naively questioned the holiest man in Athens about what this holiness abstraction really is and they couldn't figure it out.  Some oracle said he was the wisest man around and he said, "Maybe because I realise I'm ignorant," and I said "Ah!"

I think maybe if I don't feel unsafe walking down the street then maybe I am not unsafe and so I can stick out my thumb.  And if I don't feel unsafe hitchhiking then maybe hitchhiking isn't dangerous.  And if I hitchhike for ten years and meet only wonderful people then maybe people aren't out to get me and maybe the world is not a dangerous place and maybe I can go anywhere and do anything I want, or at least try.  I have no desire now or any other time to live in a box so I don't get wet when it rains.  I don't need to save for my retirement because I am not planning to spend forty years working and building up a lifestyle in which I need to spend hundreds of dollars a week to maintain the status quo.  When I run I scare myself at how fast I can go and how far away I can find myself; it seems when you run you're just keeping yourself stocked with coffee and underwear.

Maybe I'm just a hypocrite, but at least I am free.  I don't want to judge you cos I know you're free too and it's okay if you don't want to travel with me, I'll just be a bit lonely without you.  I tried living with you in your concrete world and found it profoundly lonely.  Your presence was the only light in a dark and confusing world and I would merely bump into things uselessly waiting for you to get home from work at the end of the day.  I have no purpose in a place where my instinct is to take off my clothes and there is no context in which I can do this without causing banal conflict and police confrontation.  I tried searching the gutter for coins to buy me a ticket to some aspect of this society that I tried to belong to but all I found were half-empty plastic drink bottles and I wasn't sure whether anyone had spat in them before throwing them away or whether the sun had already fermented the fruit juice.

When I am older and my gifts are legitimised I will return and hold your hand for another little while and speak to the people you share your world with, but now I am here, on the beach, breathing in as much of a balance of salty sea-breeze and exhaust fumes I can handle.  I am a hypocrite, I don't believe any of this, but I will say it with as much conviction as my moment and my body can personify.  I will stand up in front of as many people as want to hear, three or a billion, and speak with all the utter truth I can muster.  I will change my mind the next day, but again I am willing to stand up and speak for those willing to listen.  I live the best of my abstractions and otherwise rely on the food, water, air and love the planet provide me with.  I don't know anything, but I write beautifully.

I don't see anything to believe in

Help me to understand what I am doing in this world.  Every day I find good people to meet and good things to do and I wonder, does it add up to anything?

There is always the possibility that I could begin to believe in something, though this seems to be a far-fetched prospect.  I don't know how this believing in things business is done; no one can give me a straight answer, as if they don't know or aren't willing to face the truth.  Perhaps the truth is that they practice what George Orwell called double-think and they actually don't believe what they believe at all, but they do believe in it simultaneously.  This idea makes more sense than the one that suggests the world is full of stupid believers rather than beautiful lovers.  My experience of the people in this world, once the veil of abnormality is removed, is that they really are beautiful lovers rather than stupid believers.  Try it for yourself, it's real, it's scientific, it's repeatable, meet another person face-to-face with openness and honesty and acceptance and love and you will discover that essentially they do not believe in anything, they are beautiful and they are present; they are your lover and you could even say they are you, though we don't want to be metaphorical because that is only one step away from metaphysical which is too many steps away from science, which is the truth.

No, I'm being ironic now, I don't believe in science any more than I don't believe in original sin.  They're both human concepts that neither exist nor don't exist.  Of course one concept is considerably more useful than the other, but who am I to judge really, I am merely a thinker and a poet.  I have no legitimate or official authority handed down to me via a higher authority.  All I have is the integrity of being a living being, given life by God herself, birthed from the Gaian womb for 99 years of life on this planet before I too will rot back into the earth like everything else.  My authority is neither perpetual or omnipotent.

Some people claim some sort of official omnipotence.  They know they are as powerless as their children though they would never admit it to themselves, let alone someone they trust or the world they fear.  These people believe in their omnipotence because they think that the dominant ideology that legitimises national givernments and their gun-wielding agents is a universal ideology and that anyone who doesn't agree is wrong or at least insane or at least criminal or at least unpopular.  Their omnipotence is reinforced with law, with involuntary taxes, with professional gangs trained in systematic violence and intimidation and with a globe divided via national borders.  Yes, the planet, the largest physical object we can be certain we control, is defined and divided by which national government owns what, and every piece of land is owned by some government.  Even Antarctica is claimed as national territory by a number of governments, though it is uninhabitable.  I can only assume these omnipotence-delusional control-freaks are simultaneously aware of their powerlessness; surely, because they understand the convoluted mechanisms of politics.

Perhaps the beautiful loved-filled human being who is reading this thinks they believe in something.  Maybe they casually believe in something useful or maybe they definitely believe in some religion they must guiltily defend.  Maybe the more aware they are of the mental mechanism of double-think the more forcefully they must make a display of the absolute nature of the linguistic construct they use to define them as a person.

What if they could be honest?  (What if you could be honest?)  What if they could acknowledge that their religion, whether it be Islam, Mormonism or Consumer Democracy, is not true or untrue, that it is a beautiful useful myth for them, that it is so powerful already that it doesn't need to be defended, that its integrity is such that it is actually strengthened by the proximity of alternative myths, that although this myth preceded and will survive humanity our understanding of it can be enriched and complexified by open-minded discourse and diversity and therefore the truth is not under threat.

Just quietly, who but a person practicing double-think would feel the need to defend their ideology?  It is the same as a person or society full of fear feeling the need to defend their territory, rather than someone supported by confidence and strength.

I don't know what I am trying to say.  I don't believe in anything, yet I feel the need to write every day.  If you have discovered something worthy of my belief, please let me know immediately.  Look at the corner we've painted ourselves into, I don't see anything to believe in.  I just hope to have enough boots to be able to change them.

A congruence of internal dictionaries

In his book The God Delusion Richard Dawkins uses some kind of logic to "prove" that some kind of "god" does not "exist".  As this sentence implies, there are tree problems inherent in my prejudiced summation of his book.  Some words are just too undefined for us to ever hope to share a common understanding of.

First we have the word "prove" and it seems to me the primary purpose of his book is to prove that some god does not exist, which implies a belief; the belief that some god does not exist, precisely the evil that the book is against.

The second word we find problematic is "god".  I don't understand, and the half of the book that I read does not clarify this point, how a concept could possibly exist or not exist.  God is not an object that we can point to like a desk or a banana, however we created the word "god" for the same reason we created the words "desk" and "banana", to explain an experience.  I am sure some clever idiot could write a book proving that "hope" does not exist or "evil" does not exist because there is no physical evidence of these abstract concepts in the dimension we seem to most agree on.  I must say that God may be a useful concept for some people to discuss and understand an experience they do not have a better word to explain.  The idea that their experience does not exist is a hysterical degree of intellectual fascism, the idea that the word they use to explain it does not exist is just silly.

Our third problematic word is "exist" and any simple glance at modern science shows that we don't actually anything about existence at all.  Our physics has developed so far within such a limited spectrum that we realise that we have no idea, in a world where there are so many possibilities, each with a different probability of existing, why any event performs the formality of actually occurring.  We also make the assumption that abstractions such as god and hope are less certain than objects such as desks and bananas but when we look at these objects on a quantum level we discover that their existence is not as solid as we assumed.  It turns out they are mostly space and the atoms that make up their form seem to be appearing and disappearing for no reason we can understand.  Now we must wonder what we could possibly mean when we use the word "exist" when a perceiving entity is required as a reference point for anything to be considered "in existence" from our commonly-held scientific perspective.

Personally, I accept science as interesting and intellectually provocative.  I do not understand why it is necessary or how it is possible to "believe" in science as if it is "true".  These seem to me to be very unscientific, unexamined words.  For science to be interesting or provocative enough to retain my attention I first require an effective science communicator, someone who is able to straddle both the understanding of the theory, mathematics and implications of the science as well as the language we use to contain and share the science.  There are some scientists whose prose style I enjoy, just as there are some novelists whose prose style I enjoy.  In this way I can take science in the same way I take any other form of writing.

Belief is a trick of language.  Language does not create any truth.  Any feeling of truth obtained from language is simply that the language explicated something you already understood.  Language cannot present any new information when it obviously requires an existing understanding of each individual word and the listener's ability to reconstruct those words in a way they deem to be meaningful and of course they can only reconstruct these words in a meaningful way that is within their existing realm of understanding.  They cannot accept a meaning for a word that is beyond their present understanding of that word.

As a writer perhaps my primary break-through was the idea that words cannot convey meaning.  I cannot tell you anything you do not already know, or you wouldn't believe me.  Words do not contain information.  One might think this would end my career as a writer, realising that I could not possibly tell anybody anything worth knowing.  If this is true it makes sense simply to find some strand of pleasing illusion I can call my own and try to make a living from my skill and my specific strand of illusion.

However I also realised that despite being fundamentally meaningless, words are also extremely powerful.  Swear words are the most obvious example of this; meaningless words whose utility is merely offense.  I know from experience that I can stand up in front of a group of people and have a tremendous effect on them.  I can simply say some words and people will become quiet, the atmosphere in the room will change and some sort of physically awkward, intellectually quietening feeling will come across the listener.  Afterward somebody might tell me that I have "spoken the truth" and their feelings for me are genuine but their meaning is false.  A more honest person might tell me that it was "amazing" but they didn't quite get it all.  Superficially this second person might appear less intelligent but really they have a more accurate understanding of the fundamentals of what has just gone on here.  Consciously they might be thinking that if they heard the text one or two more times they would "understand" it but subconsciously they know that it is beyond understanding and that they have simply been affected by the vibrations of the sounds shaped by my voice and that connections have been made in their brain that have had psychic and physiological effects on themselves and others.  Perhaps, like a shared meditation, many of these psychic and physiological effects are similar from person to person and there is a communion possible in the sharing of words.  And of course it is all in the vibrations of the words, rather than the perception of their meaning.

I know I am a brilliant writer, but sometimes I bore myself with the blahblah contradiction of what I am writing about.  At my best I do not think, I simply slam the ends of my fingers down on the keyboard and beautiful combinations occur easily.  Sometimes I will sit and think and construct intellectually and bend my mind around concepts that are complicated and difficult to communicate and will most likely end up being limited and possibly contradictory and even maybe completely meaningless if I choose the wrong tone.  How can the tone of my writing render something meaningless when surely it is either true or untrue?  Perhaps there is no such thing as a shared truth that can somehow pass from me to you via this collection of symbols on some glowing screen.

Perhaps if you understand English well enough and we have read some of the same books and grown up in a similar cultural environment we will use these letters in a way that allows us to create vibrations that gives us a feeling of communion, of commonality that we might call understanding, of spiritual union and a feeling that we are the same being because we have the same experience of reality, if only for a moment.

Some days coffee and the sunrise morning allow me to clear and focus my mind and use my skill with language to shine  light onto the darkness of the internet that not only I find pleasing, but potentially many people around the world.  Some mornings I am not entirely sure I have been effective in this process.  To reassure me today I will post a series of three references all of which will be interesting and to the point and will perhaps communicate my intention if I haven't already.

An excerpt from the 2001 film Waking Life in which our hero hears a passionate explanation of the limits and power of our attempts to communicate through words.

The 1991 Robert Anton Wilson talking about how nothing has been explained so far and our experience of the universe is constantly changing.

An hour-long excerpt from a 1992 discussion with Terence McKenna in which he talks about, amongst other strange and fascinating topics, how reality is created with language.

Let me know how your explanation of reality fits into this paradigm.  Perhaps we can use this page as the beginning of a conversation because certainly in this area I am incapable of presenting a conclusive story.