An atheistic inertia broken by Berman and black powder

I hang out on debateanatheist on reddit, trying to be satisfied, but something’s just missing y’know? i can’t tell when i lost the ability to be satisfied by logic. Now i need some crazy to feel like life has a meaning. I’m hooked on the mystery like a drug. Sure i love physics, but even better i like the mess of nature, of animal minds toying with evolution, playing games through eternity. The rogue atoms of decay. Can it all be captured by logic? And if it can be, is that logical? I’m not saying that there’s any better alternative, in particular. But it just isn’t enough.

Here’s what i believe nowdays—the human brain is so small, faulty and incapable of understanding the entire mystery of the universe that it’s mad hubris to attempt it, unless, we are destined to do so as part of the universe’s design—and to believe that is an even more grotesque hubris. So to believe neither of these things is to accept placidly a kind of dim twilight of understanding, a localised nonsense, ultimately wrong, yet it is something that can bring some kind of calm to a tired mind. So what is the value of right and wrong after all that. Any old well-worn bit of ‘truth’ will do.

Maybe i’m exhausted by certain answers. The weight of the solution, lying there nakedly between us. Because after the solution, what then? I am quite fond of the idea of predestination, that free will is an illusion, the whole solid block of reality is already set up and our confusions are the product of our limited views. The vedic position.  This is a solution that seems to set us up for inertia as working to change things is too much like hard work. Cimate change is too hard to fix, so we can adopt a fatalistic reality where it doesnt matter. We can erect this new reality right now on this earth, right here and today. Solved. But I do want us to be rational and free-will believers about climate change—even though I might be a fatalist I hope the illusion of free will affects enough people to make us do something about it.

I almost feel embarrassed when i think about the logic that was driving me to do things in my life before about 2020. Things like, oh write good poems and get recognised. Write songs. Learn languages, get degrees. As David Berman said, I see “the need to speed into the lead suddenly decline”. All those paths applied to a world that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. One thing that i haven’t heard said about the current kakistocracy but that i think is true and significant is that it’s apathy-inducing. The old rules of the game no longer apply (or perhaps they never did, it was just a sham, but it doesn’t matter). In order to get things now, outside of your own little local scene, it’s clear you just need to be the most obsequious, the most terrible, or the most richest person. And if that’s not who we are then we might as well do nothing. Unless we want to be a matyr. And I do flirt with the idea of martyrdom, not for the promise of a reward in some hereafter, but simply to honour the depth of profound truths that are essential to freedom and humanity. But then the atheist in me couldn’t justify that could he.

Hence my current fascinations – i got to fire a black powder revolver for the first time the other week, a sort of birthday present to myself. Boooom! That felt like something.  And yes I’m listening to David Berman, and his kind of tired hopeless aesthetic is like a balm over my hurt mind. I did also go north to Byron Bay a few weeks ago and just about got caught up in the cyclone going on up there and i saw Buck Meek who is in fact also a balm to my hurt mind though in a different way, and he was playing with his wife Germain Dunes, who also sounded great. I gave him a copy of my release ‘Rainsong’.

So you see, i am still pushing my barrow quietly up my own hill in Tartaros despite what i might just have said about the apathy of life I seem to be stuck in.