damn you, sartre

This has not been a pleasant Wednesday.

I’ve spent most of the afternoon brooding over my past, and it’s all the fault of one man: Jean-Paul Sartre (pictured). See, I grabbed Being and Nothingness off my bookshelf this morning, thinking I might as well move in a philosophical direction after the minimalist, observational musings of Richard Brautigan, whom (who?—not quite sure) I finished reading yesterday.

To preface, I’ll readily admit that I understand exactly 18% of Jean-Paul Sartre’s writings. He speaks in densities so inpenetrable that I’m usually more prone to flip the page than annotate the margins. Ever’ now and then, though, I stumble across a passage or two that coaxes a few watts out of those dusted-over bulbs in the musty corridors of the brain. Today was one of those days.

I’m sardined on the 3 train, trying vainly to temper my hatred for the grossly overweight people occupying 1.5 seats to either side of me, when snapbam I encounter Sartre’s chapter on the nature/being of the conceptual past. Sartre muses about the relationship (if any) between our previous "lives" and this, the elusive "present" (consider: as I type in real time, the entirety of this entry becomes immediately relegated to my ever-bloating past, if we’re gonna get precise/anal about it...in fact, during the milliseconds spent trying to analyze the current, vaguely tangible moment, said moment slips away into the folds of history, rendering us temporally impotent). Sartre breaks down time in a very Hawking-esque sort of way, self-debating whether past events play a part in determining the nature of our current Being. Dumb question, you say...of course the past "you" was you, just in a different stage, when you were of a different mind. All those moments of your past have created and developed this current "being" that stands today. Well, sure.

However, I think the definition of Self, big S, leans on our assessment of a difficult either/or: “is” or “was?” Are we, at 25, the same people we were at 13? Again, you'd think such a question elicits an easy response, but I'm not so sure, because I'm not referring to flesh and bone. Did the Mike Elwood of present, typing away on this blog, walk to school on Sept. 17, 1996, all those years ago, or was that somebody else entirely, another figure (an idea, almost, and someone completely intangible) taking up that space in time? That guy—the guy who stumbled time and time again, thought of no one but himself, took most everything in his life for granted—was that really me? Was that me committing those embarrassing, regrettable acts? I hope not. I'd like to think it was the work of another. If we wish away painful memories, does that then render them harmless/irrelevant since the act has passed, never again to be repeated (Kundera might have something to say about that, but that's another post)? If there was a way to relieve myself of the ugly people I've "been," life would make more sense.

So I’m supping on Mr. Sartre’s grey matter like the wannabe intellectual I am, nearly forgetting that the two largest women in Crown Heights are threatening my rib cage/vital organs in very serious ways.

We’ve all got demons. I’ve got plenty. My inability to leave past lives—my past selves—behind me ranks as perhaps my most glaring flaw. Being a non-Christian, I know of no receptacle for all this guilt I shoulder. My question: fellow non-Christians, where do you stow your guilt? Where do you lock it all up? I’d really like to know.

Sorry to beat dead horses, but to finally address the question I raised in the is/are debate, I've concluded thusly: I don’t think that was me. That 13-yr-old couldn’t have been me. It's much too difficult for me to entertain thoughts to the contrary. Those choices at 13 (an arbitrary age, but you get the idea) don't align with my current cerebral anatomy in any way. You'll notice I'm employing desperate measures to mentally acquit myself, guilt-ridden chap that I am, but what's a guy to do? My struggle: I’ve got the fattest heart in the world, though somewhere on the timeline that heart got soldered to the poorest decision-making skills this side of, er—let’s just say they’re the worst.

Action and motive coexist in varying stages of perpetual divorce.

Those ten words pretty much sum up my life.


(ed. 9/23. Realized my first stab at it wasn't very clear, so I took a few mins. to clarify some things. I know that defeats the whole concept of "blog," but I'm too OCD to let it sit there in the original state.)

(ed. 4/14/09. Reading over this entry, I'm realizing that it makes no sense at all. Clearly, I'm no philosopher.)
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