you know what? part 2

I realised today while putting a fence that I don’t actually hate you. It was somewhere between drilling and cutting the pickets to make them even that I realised I was angry with you. I realised today that I am not going to feel neutral about you for a long time.

The reason I am angry with you is not entirely your fault and that I am to blame for some of it.

In conclusion, I don’t hate you, I’m angry and I’ll get over It, eventually.

nothing particularly clever.

Last night I sat down to post two quotes from Camus’ The Plague. The quotes dealt with love and the feeling of loss and sadness brought about by the forced, indefinite separation from a loved one.

In my final year of high school for English I studied the play Cosi. It is one of only three plays that I have read in its entirety (Happy Birthday Wanda June by Kurt Vonnegut and The Government Inspector by Nikolai Gogol are the others) and my least favourite play. I say this despite having forgotten most if not all of it and perhaps were I to read it now my opinion and feelings about it would be changed. I do not remember much past the general story, a mention of a Velvet Underground song, and a monologue one of the character had about hate.

The character is of the opinion that hate is a far better (perhaps even nobler) emotion than love because man puts time and effort into choosing who to hate and devotes actual effort to maintain it. Love is just something you fall into with no thought or effort of your own or the one you love. This is what I remember, ten years on. I am unsure if this is a serious idea put fourth by the author (playwright really) or not. On one hand the idea comes from a patient of an asylum but on the other hand it is one of those pseudo-profound statements that people like to latch onto.

The statement sets up love and hate as diametric opposites which is untrue, for it is possible to hate and love something equally. But even if it were true and they were in fact on opposite sides, it would still make no sense. By choosing to hate you are choosing not to love. Hate like love is irrational. Finally you can choose who you love, why you love them. This could be explained better but I have no desire or ability right now to do so.

What could be said, and maybe was said later, is that hate is what love can become, that the intensity which you hate someone is the reflection of intensity with which you loved them, but this gets us into crazy stalker territory.

It is something to think about further and maybe when I have some answers I will elaborate further.

What a difference 24 hours can make.

you know what?

I hate you.

I really truly believe that I hate you now.

Maybe this will get back to you or perhaps it won’t but that doesn’t matter does it? It is not like this news would be worthy or deserving of your comment, nothing else was.

timber

Standing holding the rope thinking about what it meant to be afraid. Watching the top of the tree, looking for a way to escape if things turned to shit, listening to the chainsaw cutting through the wood. Pulling the rope ever tighter until the inertia was overcome and the tree began to fall towards me, silent until it hit the bricks with a muffled loud thump.

Waiting for the tree to fall it became obvious to me that death still frightens me. The idea of being crushed under the weight of the trunk. The trunk crashing down onto my head, neck and shoulders, cracking ribs and bursting organs caused me to look around nervously for somewhere safer to stand, to work out where the trunk was was going to fall and convincing myself I was right.

As the tree fell I realised that dying this way wouldn’t be so bad. The dying process would be over fairly quickly, it wouldn’t that be that long or drawn out surely and for most of it I would be unconscious. What would be worse would be surviving. The readjustment to life that would be forced onto me through spinal injuries. The pain, rehabilitation and the financial cost both initial and ongoing…..then the tree fell where it was meant to and I stood there unharmed.

Maybe I would have felt differently if the tree had fallen on me.

why not?

In 2007 I bought a copy of Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ. On the same day I also bought Thus Spoke The Zarathustra and perhaps inspired by the books in my possession alcohol for under age teenagers who wanted to get drunk.

I read the book over the next week with a mixture of excitement and confusion. Excitement because for the first time I felt as if I understood what was being said, confused because my understanding did not match up with what was written in the blurb on the back of the books; I have since learnt that it is not often that I agree with Penguin’s blurbs.

Despite my understanding at the time and the copious notes I made while reading the books it is doubtful that I retained more than a quarter of the books, and what I did retain has no doubt been garbled by my memory to create some kind of bastard progeny of Nietzsche and I. Life is a battle between the strong and the weak, man is strong, society and religious rules make man weak and sick so that the weak and the sick can rule over the strong. A society’s God mirrors the society it rules over, and man is becoming progressively weaker and less fit for life due to living with others. Possibly also that the sick and weak should be put down and disposed of which I find rather ironic considering Nietzsche’s own health problems.

Somewhere towards the beginning of Twilight of the Idols (in fact on the first page) it is written:

12. If we posses our why of life we can put with almost any how. – Man does not strive after happiness; only the Englishman does that.

This I digested and translated into if you can understand the why behind something you can understand and accept any thing. The more I think about this, the more I wonder if Nietzsche actually influenced me here and I am wrongly assigning responsibility to him instead of someone else (or others) I can’t remember. Regardless as I grow older I am becoming more and more convinced at how true this is.

Right now all I want is a why which I don’t think I am ever going to get.