Essay Period Thoughts: Attempts to Keep Sane No.1

The first entry in a journal I am keeping to pull distracting thoughts from my head to let me focus on my essays for my course. I aim to type up each day's entry in a separate post, and collate them all into one place after I have finished.

2.5.2017

1. MANIFESTO TO SHIT IN THE WOODS.

            Why does no-one live in the woods? Our lives have abstracted away from them. We flush our waste away with fresh water & pulped, pressed and dried trees. Meanwhile, bears shit in the woods. We shit in the pipeline, through the U bend, blasted with chemicals, out into the sea, snaking up and around the surface tension of the ocean. Everyone I know, everyone in the city, is departed. They have left Earth for the pavement world; reliant on the store, petrol, bus. If we were to live in the woods, we’d be dead in days. But you can live in the woods, we used to! How strong is a generational shift, that so much humdrum, basic know-how is lost in the silence of death, or in the silence of complacency; why talk about how you might’ve had to dig your own latrine when you don’t even need to look at your faeces for longer than you’re in the room, and then- poof!- never again! You and your stool will never meet again. We may never live in the woods, and so when earth-Earth, Earth1, dies, we will be surprised to see the pavement disappear from under our feet.

2. SURPRISE WITH BEING

            Often, I will have a rising sensation; a mixture of dread, stress, fear, and utter wonderment. These moments arise in relation to many things, and is essentially the surprise of actuality, of realizing you are ‘being’. I feel it for small things; when I remember that I have compelted a degree, when I remember that I am responsible and care for the life of a cat. I think it is most powerful when it occurs in relation to an unavoidable and commonplace truth that no-one says or likes saying. Most recently, I felt the sensation arise while dully attending a lecture and thus looking at the lecture, the lecturer, and the room full of other lecture attendees. I realized that each and every one of them, including myself, were all hairless great apes, babbling, stinking, blinking, hungry, thirsty & in constant need to defecate. Me and everyone I’ve ever known is a monkey, the strangest one, the one most different to all other primates. One must push down the Surprise with Being if one wishes to go about as normal. What happens if you don’t push it down, but pull it out?

entry 2 here: http://miragesofleavesinspring.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/essay-period-thoughts-attempts-to-keep_4.html