Is it the greatest sorrow or the deepest pleasure of life that I can never know as much as I aspire to?

A man and a woman
embracing
underneath my clothes:
one naked,
the other absent.
one dressed in body,
the other all bare.

In a sunny and tranquil day like this, with a window all open, the air softly swaying a hard shutter, and the most consoling birdsongs coming in, I ask myself a question. My watch shows ten minutes past 11:30. Is that a lark? It was a long while ago when I was sitting behind my computer and the time was 11:30. I look at the white wide screen of my watch, the spring breeze freshening my eyelids, what if the time really did pass so slowly and lightly? I fantasize living in a different world with a different watch living on my wrist, one with day-long hours… the hardass skeptic in me buzzes, “there would be no difference you stupid!”, I turn her off and take my watch through the bits of sunshine playing on the carpet. The innocent voice of an engineer asked me yesterday why I chose to come here and study philosophy. I could not even remotely answer. I can lie beneath this window for ever. But how often do I watch such brilliant moments? How many untimely moments do I steal from my watch?

I have a concern about the volume of things I read or hear and then forget without knowing where to put them in the unorganized pile of data in my head. The input is just too much for me it seems. Things are worsened by the fact that the intellectual world I am exposed to is primarily a world written in English—a second language—which always maintains a gap between any input and my conception of it. This gap itself is a rich source of confusion, full of disturbing questions that have passed my mind for a glimpse of time and then disappeared without being resolved or removed. All this has led to an exhausting vertigo and is draining my thirst for knowledge. One might say that I shouldn’t dive in a bottomless ocean if I don’t know how to swim, i.e., perhaps I’d better start with a pool. But the thing is, first, I don’t find at all any pools isolated from oceans (if we don’t want to say the ocean). Things don’t mean anything in themselves if you don’t look at them in the bigger picture. So how big a picture is sufficient to give you a unit of knowledge? That’s the question. Second, I think this kind of futile splash in water is a helpless characteristic of me as a member of my generation. We are exposed to far more immense worlds of information than we have the natural ability to suitably conceive. Things only prove false, or at least uncertain. The pile of information before us is built on no principal foundations; it’s always up to you to raise a question about anything.

P.S. This has nothing to do with science, science wars or objectivity.

“That is cute!” I literally heard this sentence 30 times a day spending my time with a family featuring two girls about my age. The cute item could be anything. A baby, a face, a dog, a piece of cloth or furniture, a hair style, a man’s beard, an old woman’s smile, or any other object that had a visible aspect. I also learnt that depending on the situation this expression can mean a number of different things---from an enthusiastic expression of fondness to a totally indifferent comment on something that unluckily had to be commented. I have never had a mastery over any spoken language and I think here is why. I cannot let such words scatter on my voice without getting obsessive about them: Oh, good God*. Nothing seems to be beautiful or ugly anymore, but cute. Aesthetic judgment is reduced to comparing things with babies---naïve and innocent beings which are empty of philosophy and therefore not subject to any critical judgement. Why are we so interested in making a toy-land out of this world? Why do we like to keep playing with our dolls forever?

* I actually cannot use this phrase either. When I use it the stammer reigns over me.

I don’t understand one thing. Why do we ask “why”? To be more precise, how was it that we came to ask “why” in the first place? The evolutionary step from automatically acting in the world to consciously perceiving it is a big enough problem for me. But let’s say for some weird reason (I mean through some weird process) we humans or animals have just developed consciousness. Now we are able to consciously interact with the world besides our earlier ability to automatically respond to it. We can perceive, think, decide and act. It makes good sense then to ask “how” questions because they are absolutely useful. How does that work, how will I be able to use it, etc. But did we have to invent “why” at all? If there was any motivation for curiosity toward knowledge, didn’t it have to be mere know-how-ish? Where did “why” come into play? Oftentimes when we say “why” what we mean is no more than a disguised how. “Why didn’t you sleep?” “Because I had a headache.” The question could be a how one easily. On the other side, when a why doesn't mean a how, it hardly means anything at all. To me it seems an illusion, a misunderstanding, to assume that there is a final cause/telos behind everything which can provide an explanation that satisfies our ambitious “why”. That final cause itself would equally need an explanation in the same sense and this wouldn't go anywhere. So can we say that “how” is the only meaningful way of asking questions and “why” is not genuine in any sense? How did this word appear and pollute the language then? How on the earth did we buy the absurd idea of making teleological sense of our being?

I know that many scientists, confused about what they are doing, believe that their job has to do with why questions. However, what they actually do is asking and answering how-ness of the world. But what about philosophers? Don't they exactly ask “why”?

Is it possible for humans to become animals or plants (again)? Suppose I have all the money in the world and I don’t have any inner aspiration or goal or interest in anything. On the other side, for some reason I should not or cannot commit suicide. The only thing that remains is living like a plant until I die. I would wake up every morning and find no reason to get out of the bed. Would I need to go to the bathroom or kitchen? No, with all that money I would have people to take care of those for me, I can stay in bed. My body might become swollen and painful after a while, but I have doctors there to give me drugs and relieve the pain. So I will finally become a drug addict it seems! The question is whether I will still feel myself or not. Would I have thoughts anymore? Would I finally become a zombie?

I think what human lacks now is locality. The ability to communicate from long distance is just too much for us. I should shut down my laptop and turn off my cell-phone and start to go around for talking to people. They are not in walking distance? So be it. We would simply not be able to communicate. If I miss my brother I have to fly back home to see him. If I write something and want it to be read, I should walk around and show it to people I reach and try to find my audience among them. Yes, that is true. Even publication is too much for us. This is a total miss of spirit of life to assume that what human needs are speed, accessibility, comfort, and globalization. No, we just need warmth. A living human, being there with real feelings and passions which do guide her behavior in real time. We don’t need people calling us and telling us that they miss us or want us or love us. Oh, how diminished has the meaning of our feelings become! Having a passion means being driven to dial a number and say something. How easy. How light!

As an ignorant kid in politics, I have a naïve political wonder: what exactly is the use of international laws? Does it make sense at all to set international laws when there can never be a powerful just organization to make nations obey them? It seems to me that these laws at best only help the already powerful state to defend itself against the weak one. After a bloody unfair war, of course we like to get together and set some fair rules so that such disasters never happen to humanity again. But isn’t it only a means to redress our conscience and our pride and to conceive of the world as a more livable place? What is the actual consequence of this for the future wars and future injustice? One might say that these laws gradually help to awaken the public opinion and finally weaken the “criminal” powerful state in a democratic system. However, as long as more power equals more TV channels, more broadcast, more professional journalism and therefore more legitimation, the situation seems exactly reverse to me. International laws will only oil the wheels of power and boil the wills of humanity!

I wonder if anyone would care about morality and aesthetics when growing up in isolation or living anonymously among strangers. All the virtues seem to matter only when there are other people to judge you and perceive you as good or bad, ugly or beautiful. For me, this is another reason to think that moral and aesthetic virtues are neither absolute, nor personal. They are born when social living and the desire to expose the self stealthily start to produce offspring.

忠誠

I gave you the key
To my body
And you took it
With yourself

Imperfection

How many times in my childhood
In a hypothetico-competitive mood
I tried to bend my little finger
Without the slightest move in its neighbor
And how humiliated I felt
When I failed…

Watching the cattles browsing on grass from my window every day I sort of like to go back to Iran, get a rather easy programming job and live a usual life. Pasturing and staying idle from late morning to sundown. Sleeping the rest. Finally getting slaughtered someday without even bothering to know what’s going on. Isn’t it what we call an ideal life?

Animals as critics.- I fear that the animals consider man as a being like themselves that has lost in a most dangerous way its sound animal common sense; they consider him the insane animal, the laughing animal. the weeping animal. the miserable animal.
--Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 224

Isn’t it paradoxical that I think so low of other people whereas when I am with them it’s actually me who is disregarded and ignored? Pierce would say I am suffering from an illusion...

A stupid wretched person. Wretched because she is stupid? Or stupid because she is wretched? You never now.

Who is freer to think? A philosophy scholar who makes a living out of thinking, or a farmer who works on farm all day and watches the sunshine in his way back home?

“I love you”:
Something you should never tell a philosopher,
The analytic philosopher would have problems with each of the three words.
The continental philosopher would accuse you of reducing his existence to your own egoistic expedient!

Far apart
I stay with you in peace
As there is no need anymore
To run away
From your run-away

The beauty of your enthusiastic words, dear, is that they don’t Mean anything.

Preparing a page for writing. Decorating a room with ornaments. It’s just another cage. Another enclosure within the boundaries of language. And as always, that is just to extend the fluttering wings. Let it be.