In Wittgenstein’s journal during World War I so one can find some entries of the typical despair, but not because of the front line. He was sent more toward the back, upon the Vistula river – the Goplana so the ship was called.
War is a fit way to go if one equips the delusions bundled. The alternative is breaking wine bottles in the suburban coffin, lest a spirit hollows until a wively automaton. Soon forgotten in Alzheimer’s as families scatter through loving market forces; not as though there’s salvation in being the shaman elder though.
Anyway, his despair came from his crew mates and alienation. He found trouble in regarding them as human:
When we hear a Chinese talk we tend to take his speech for inarticulate gurgling. Someone who understands Chinese will recognize language in what he hears. Similarly I often cannot discern the humanity in a man.
Maybe it’s a two way street. If you’re a fidgety fuck-up you’re not going to have the best time in the bar amongst the smiling and beer breath. But you’re the one in the wrong place, with the wrong conventions, and so some teasing follows, if not outright jeering.
A fun quote to come across, happened upon the topic of arguments, so as follows: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”
Such a quote provokes the fun schizophrenic doppelganger Christian sensibility sickness: that, on one hand, one could certainly act as though a member of God’s chosen, but one also may accept everyone – even the seemingly vile – are but a gnat to the heavens above, and thus flattened in equality. This tension between being less than a crushed bug but also acting as the aspiring apostle does, cardinal robes to reach for – it’s this tension that makes me want to flatten my skull. Whether out of spite, or because there’s no reasoning and both sides are entirely right but wrong too.
Every line of royalty – whether of a hidden history or in plain view – all starts from a commoner, if not a gung-ho hunter. Or a prior civilization. What causes the separation? And within these contradictory waters, how should one fare, how can one even begin to discern the pig when you are the pig?
And the fact still persists, it still persists, and to be thrown on the Goplana will be it wrong to recognize what seems to be the reality, with a broken mind?
If there is one thing I have found out it is this:
in the whole crew there is not one decent person.
Well, drowning in that Sensibility, probably not. Even in private journals. That it’s a death sentence to observe such things. That it’s always better to flagellate until you’ve obliterated any sense of humiliation left. Because you can’t win if you’re thinking and “observing” these things, but you can smile while the pie is smothered and pushed up your nose.
And I think that’s what the royalty does: to draw distinctions without casting judgement. Seek virtue while ignoring the bloodbath below.
There’s no pride in being the fidget, but there’s not necessarily a pride in being the drunkard either. There’s no pride in neither, but we can recognize oil does not mix with water; each with their own use, each with their place in the symphony.
The Christian sensibility tends to cast a blind eye to this recognition – let’s transform it all to wine instead so they insist. Maybe they’re right, as everything is possible under heaven’s gaze, and yet under this gaze I feel a searing on the shoulder and a sickness, and an insistence that you are Alone, and you will feel Alienated, and you’ll either Figure It Out or drive yourself Insane.
Do you think the aristocrats feel some lonesome roaming the manor? Maybe, but probably not: because at a young age they had to acknowledge oil can’t mix with water. And when you acknowledge oil can’t mix with water, you’ll be alright.
A variety of mixtures bumping around and to avoid; and that however much you hope to dissolve in the other there’s still parts – however impure to pure – rejected. It’s not a coincidence that’s where some crystals form, along the edge. Maybe you could follow them drop into a warm abyss.
Maybe then you’ll coagulate as the aristocrat, even if we’re all gnats on the water.