As you can tell, by the increased amount of updates to this site, and as I can tell, by the filling pages in all of my once blank journals, I have been writing alot more due to all the free time I have here in Groningen. I enjoy very much to think about, and thus write about (as writing is in its own right a sense of thought) the concept of the "self". The following narrative is not to be taken to heavily by you, my loving reader, as my previous post on "The Dooms" was by many. It is simple food for thought. I cannot accept that you have forgotten what the doorman said so swiftly upon my departure. Remember, reader, that this is written in a voice of banter, of fire-side chattery, of words exchanged over coffee that is growing cool in a dark, dank, low-country night. Remember, if you will, that it is I, your friend and neighbor, merely trying to feed the heads of others, in an attempt to right the amount my head has eaten. Thank You.
There was once, in the ancient and knowledgable land of Greece, a scholar known as Galen. He lived in the years 130-200AD between Greece and Rome. Galen, like many men of history and science, was fascinated by the human body, and the human condition. He fathered an idea that the body is composed of four (4) liquids, that determine a persons general humor. These four (4) liquids are; Choler, Phlegm, Blood, and Black Bile. He also further stated that humidity and temperature were deciding factors of ones physical internal state. (Which makes sense, in a "Dont go out in the rain, you will catch a cold" kind of way- Cold+ Wet= Phelgm) See the chart for more on this.
Now drawing on these humors, I would like to take one, Melancholy, and expand upon it, for mere entertainment.
Melancholy was a temperment often found amoung the rich and powerful in the 1600's. Why you ask? Well, my plebeian friend, only a member of high brow society is able to feel and reflect upon matters of the soul, as they have the idle days to spend at such laborous tasks. In fact, Montaigne, the father of modern "Essays"(See Montaigne "The Complete Essays") was so bent on being percevied as "deep" that he invented what we would now refer to as the "powty face". I challenge any of you to find a portrait of him without his signature frown. This is why plays like Hamlet Prince on Denmark were so popular. People knew he was going to kill someone, it's like a character in a black suit with a black tie, white shirt, and slicked back black hair. You know that is a "bad mama-jama" so to speak. It has always been good to be bad, and at one not to distant part of literature's history, Melancholy was all the rage. But I digress from my real point, which is this-
To inspect ones self, ones soul, if I may, you must remove it from ones body. I can not inspect my heart, at least not tangiably, while it remains inside of my chest, and thus, why would the soul, the life force of the self, be any different? Here we are met with our problem. Is it possible to truely examine yourself? I mean, objectively? The answer is quite obviously NO. As you cannot remove the varible of the self doing the examining from the self being examined. It is simply an impossibility.
But say we could. Say we could draw out our soul, and give it the ol' once over. In this scenario, one must realize the only time that soul and body can be seperated is upon death. Thus we arrive at my question to you, dear reader-
Is self-awareness, in the sense of ones soul, ones energy of persona, any more than an apprentice to Death? Is meditation, idle thought, mental self discovery anymore than a hard hit upon the drum that plays the march of life? And if so, can the drum ware down? Can we, in a desperate effort to understand, to merely understand who ( /what/how/why) we are, be accelerating toward the sweet silence of Death?
Regardless, I've got burritos to make.
-Zac
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