Perhaps that's what this Clothes Horse is, collapsed on the ground. Too intriguing to fix. Or perhaps when I do, I'd have figured out how to piece my life together in a way that will allow me to piece more together than just an intriguing clothes-horse.
But what is it about intrigue...
intrigue
See definition in
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
Definition of intrigue in English:
verb
Pronunciation: /ɪnˈtriːɡ/
(intrigues, intriguing, intrigued)
2 [no object] Make secret plans to do something illicit or detrimental to someone: Henry and Louis intrigued with the local nobles
...A definition only a bureaucracy-wary Oxford academic would come up with...
Wikitionary has a different take:
Etymology:
Borrowing from French intrigue, from Italian intricare, from Latin intrīcō (“I entangle, perplex, embarrass”).
...And I guess the French are much more familiar with the art of being embarrassed...
But let's for a moment assume that not everything leads back to procreation and authority...
Every day, on the bus, I'm surrounded by the so many so very intriguing people. My thoughts are in a constant state of overflow with ideas and things I've seen and felt I'd like to share... mistakes I've overcome... solutions to everyday problems, staring me in the face, all day long...
...And yet, I can't get myself to utter a word. I sit, and stare... like everyone else. I'll share, perhaps, a polite look, or gesture... unless someone else stumbles to a first move, voluntarily or not.
So, I'll live, do stuff, meet people, feel things... work, work work, and perhaps if I'm lucky at some point settle into some zone of moderate comfort... If I'm lucky I'll do something of intrigue or meaning to some people in this life... If I'm less lucky, only some poor future souls will feel like they've been understood, should they happen upon what few of my thoughts I by chance noted down on some nook for them to stumble upon.
My life and mutterings (not these! Please, no!) will only be of intrigue to a community of soul-mates I may never meet... Hell, no, why even bother writing anything down, then? Why do them the disservice of making them feel.... well... that's the thing, isn't it? "Like they're not the first."
What's this splinter in our collective minds? The ego's yearning for validation by being at the front? By being the first? By leading? The splinter being, that, for some to lead, some must follow... and that there's a hierarchy with the leaders on top. Leaders are made by followers.
A leader can't stand up and lead a people who are not ready to follow. The people must first be ready, before the leader can lead.
There are no "self-made" men. Yes, there's a great many ants stuck in the molasses of the comfort they have found... whom each, in some small part, crave excitement, and drama, and a way to escape the everything-in-their-lives that has become mundane...
And there are those who are so enraged by the lack of intrigue and meaning in their lives... (could it be caused by an abundance of meaning? Too much choice? ... too much noise?) ...that they can no longer stand idly by, that their egos drive them to act on their instincts and override the woolly cotton numbness of understanding, and just do the things that everyone else wish they had the guts too, but are all to glad they don't... because deep down they know it's not an easy life, even though it may look it on the surface...
...And how deeply hidden is this "driver" sitting in the ego-seat... and why is "He" playing coy with me, so many places he thinks he can hide... so deep, so far, jou bliksem, jou splinter! Ek het jou uitgehaal en nou's ek weer in beheer.
Is the ego the archetype of the devil, and the superego our goggles through which we see- and yearn for God?
Is entropy the "cloud of unknowing"? Does "free will" travel towards or away from it? Or does it forever tread the boundaries...? Does it like wet toes... and is it only so it can remember where it came from? Does it regret what it can not remember? How can you regret what you can not remember...? Unless it's the fact that you can not remember which is why you want to do it again, and again, and again and again... but that's what the ego does, and the world it lives in, because it doesn't have memory, like the superego.... When I refer to the ego, I of course mean, the ego driven by the id.
... and what a detour... that in my mind took seconds, but sharing added another few detours of its own... what I would normally now do, is to delete all of this, and replace it by just a sentence or two.
And that even, I still have to build up to: if knowledge is all we're out to find here, and our greatest satisfaction is in sharing that sense of understanding something about the nature of the world we find ourselves in- and part of... whether this sharing is with those closest to us, academic peers, or people and civilizations that we can yet only dream about...
Aren't we all just beacons of light that we navigate by?
...Keeping each other in check, like the poles of my wooden clothes horse, against gravity. Gravity the entropy, the sink, that pulls us toward the future... the greedy monster of unlimited possibility; our knowledge about it, our way to fly... as far away from it as we can get. To push it back for as long as possible... to resist time collapsing around us. To resist everything from happening all at once... to find the serenity of nothing. Because in the end the only thing that is new, is nothing... and closest we can get to it, is here...
(You see what I did there?!) ...But who's fooling who?
...Possibility intrigues us. Knowledge, the cornerstone of which seems to be that we'll only ever see the tip of the iceberg, the more we see, the bigger the iceberg... like a mirage... now if that does not sound like a lie... well, it is. My brain is my jail... my brain IS the iceberg... and I've figured out how to grow it... but how big can it get, and will it be the same?
I can augment my senses, and my mind... I can fill the solar system with my mind, and use all the power from the sun... I can grow my mind unimaginably intricate, from the smallest bits, to fill the largest space... perhaps even figure out how to create space... and now space becomes the iceberg...
And even so... what will I gain, that is not within my reach, already... right now? Is the common sense I think I have, not perhaps pushing me away from the common sense I had... and you still have?
Is understanding all this anything but a theme park I've built for you to explore? A castle to run through, while you exclaim "I finally know all the rooms... and it's all mine... all mine..." I can go anywhere I like, be and do everything.... until I get bored and start melting away the iceberg of space, the iceberg of my mind... the iceberg of the mind in which my life is a living figment of the imagination of a mind I set on fire when I got too close to the beacon of someone else's sun...
Wikitionary has a different take:
Etymology:
Borrowing from French intrigue, from Italian intricare, from Latin intrīcō (“I entangle, perplex, embarrass”).
...And I guess the French are much more familiar with the art of being embarrassed...
But let's for a moment assume that not everything leads back to procreation and authority...
Every day, on the bus, I'm surrounded by the so many so very intriguing people. My thoughts are in a constant state of overflow with ideas and things I've seen and felt I'd like to share... mistakes I've overcome... solutions to everyday problems, staring me in the face, all day long...
...And yet, I can't get myself to utter a word. I sit, and stare... like everyone else. I'll share, perhaps, a polite look, or gesture... unless someone else stumbles to a first move, voluntarily or not.
So, I'll live, do stuff, meet people, feel things... work, work work, and perhaps if I'm lucky at some point settle into some zone of moderate comfort... If I'm lucky I'll do something of intrigue or meaning to some people in this life... If I'm less lucky, only some poor future souls will feel like they've been understood, should they happen upon what few of my thoughts I by chance noted down on some nook for them to stumble upon.
My life and mutterings (not these! Please, no!) will only be of intrigue to a community of soul-mates I may never meet... Hell, no, why even bother writing anything down, then? Why do them the disservice of making them feel.... well... that's the thing, isn't it? "Like they're not the first."
What's this splinter in our collective minds? The ego's yearning for validation by being at the front? By being the first? By leading? The splinter being, that, for some to lead, some must follow... and that there's a hierarchy with the leaders on top. Leaders are made by followers.
A leader can't stand up and lead a people who are not ready to follow. The people must first be ready, before the leader can lead.
There are no "self-made" men. Yes, there's a great many ants stuck in the molasses of the comfort they have found... whom each, in some small part, crave excitement, and drama, and a way to escape the everything-in-their-lives that has become mundane...
And there are those who are so enraged by the lack of intrigue and meaning in their lives... (could it be caused by an abundance of meaning? Too much choice? ... too much noise?) ...that they can no longer stand idly by, that their egos drive them to act on their instincts and override the woolly cotton numbness of understanding, and just do the things that everyone else wish they had the guts too, but are all to glad they don't... because deep down they know it's not an easy life, even though it may look it on the surface...
...And how deeply hidden is this "driver" sitting in the ego-seat... and why is "He" playing coy with me, so many places he thinks he can hide... so deep, so far, jou bliksem, jou splinter! Ek het jou uitgehaal en nou's ek weer in beheer.
Is the ego the archetype of the devil, and the superego our goggles through which we see- and yearn for God?
Is entropy the "cloud of unknowing"? Does "free will" travel towards or away from it? Or does it forever tread the boundaries...? Does it like wet toes... and is it only so it can remember where it came from? Does it regret what it can not remember? How can you regret what you can not remember...? Unless it's the fact that you can not remember which is why you want to do it again, and again, and again and again... but that's what the ego does, and the world it lives in, because it doesn't have memory, like the superego.... When I refer to the ego, I of course mean, the ego driven by the id.
... and what a detour... that in my mind took seconds, but sharing added another few detours of its own... what I would normally now do, is to delete all of this, and replace it by just a sentence or two.
And that even, I still have to build up to: if knowledge is all we're out to find here, and our greatest satisfaction is in sharing that sense of understanding something about the nature of the world we find ourselves in- and part of... whether this sharing is with those closest to us, academic peers, or people and civilizations that we can yet only dream about...
Aren't we all just beacons of light that we navigate by?
...Keeping each other in check, like the poles of my wooden clothes horse, against gravity. Gravity the entropy, the sink, that pulls us toward the future... the greedy monster of unlimited possibility; our knowledge about it, our way to fly... as far away from it as we can get. To push it back for as long as possible... to resist time collapsing around us. To resist everything from happening all at once... to find the serenity of nothing. Because in the end the only thing that is new, is nothing... and closest we can get to it, is here...
(You see what I did there?!) ...But who's fooling who?
...Possibility intrigues us. Knowledge, the cornerstone of which seems to be that we'll only ever see the tip of the iceberg, the more we see, the bigger the iceberg... like a mirage... now if that does not sound like a lie... well, it is. My brain is my jail... my brain IS the iceberg... and I've figured out how to grow it... but how big can it get, and will it be the same?
I can augment my senses, and my mind... I can fill the solar system with my mind, and use all the power from the sun... I can grow my mind unimaginably intricate, from the smallest bits, to fill the largest space... perhaps even figure out how to create space... and now space becomes the iceberg...
And even so... what will I gain, that is not within my reach, already... right now? Is the common sense I think I have, not perhaps pushing me away from the common sense I had... and you still have?
Is understanding all this anything but a theme park I've built for you to explore? A castle to run through, while you exclaim "I finally know all the rooms... and it's all mine... all mine..." I can go anywhere I like, be and do everything.... until I get bored and start melting away the iceberg of space, the iceberg of my mind... the iceberg of the mind in which my life is a living figment of the imagination of a mind I set on fire when I got too close to the beacon of someone else's sun...
