Dare to Be a Fool

"The truth is out there," said Fox Mulder of the original X-Files series, who was rather passively insane. He was a man trying to find a mysterious truth, but right from the get-go you also knew if you paid attention that he had no attachment to reality. His partner Scully had a rather narrow mind, but she had a kind of reality-principle. She eventually began to lose her own wits as the series progressed. "Maybe she was just spending too much time around Mulder," one of our XLNC's at the time remarked.

The show started as a scenario show, where each week was an investigation into some strange event and ended with at least a partial solution to the event. That lasted the first season, and then it became a serial where one conspiracy introduced was not good enough unless followed by the introduction of two more. There was a group I used to watch the show with, and we had a packet that explained the basic characters and some back-story, and made jokes about the discordances and the overly packed information-dumping of the show.

We would watch this sort of "scientific-gothic," and laugh and eat popcorn and throw popcorn at each other. It was a great American television series. Then the movie came out and the following televison series were no longer worth watching. Ah well, all good things come to an end.

One of the consistent interests in my life has been mysteries. I am like Mulder in that I think a Scully-like orientation to the world - a narrow rational worldview - is about as ridiculous as believing - as some schizophrenics report - that flicking your bic in a bar is what makes everyone laugh at you. "They aren't all laughing at you unless they've noticed that you are acting like a maniac. Please submit a query to reality." That is called, "reactionary therapy," and it is mostly an abuse, and illegal in the states - but since I have no license to lose I recommend it as a suggestion to our local nut-brigades.

Think about this. We all mostly know the story of Oedipus Rex, and it is a wonderful tragic work of the classical age, and very intensely analyzed. Let us try a slightly different analysis. So after Oedipus the numbnut slays his own father, he shows up at the Sphinx. Her riddle goes, "What travels on all fours, then on two, and then on three?" Oedipus answers, "A man, because he crawls as an infant, and walks as an adult, and uses a cane as an old man." The Sphinx loses her PMA and howls off like a banshee.

You've missed the point Oedipus, for what are you? You are a man. You have been riddled - who you are. I've never seen anybody make this obvious point about the tale. That is the inspiration for the title of this third cross-blog. The riddle the Sphinx asks you is a mirror - it reflects - who you are. The Sphinx represents - in this case - a fundamental mystery - and the mystery is a mirror of yourself.

So Oedipus - who answered the riddle correctly - but failed to see that he is a man himself, from what we can see in the play, enters a world that is everything a man could want. The axis of the problem of this world is that Oedipus only retains his Paradise because he is blinded to what the reality of that Paradise is. He digs for the answer - and finds - I am an incest, a cast-off, a patricide and a despot - and like any vain numbnut blinds himself again - this time physically. So are we all - in many ways - the message of any true tragedy.

I don't want to make blog after blog, but I want to dare to be a fool here. I want to talk about speculations that are removed from most people's reality principle. The blog will be to ask questions about liminal gaps, riddles, gates and keys, mirrors and twins, ciphers and configurations, and other questions that we would either rather not ask because it doesn't narrow into the focus of the rational mind, or because we don't want to query reality about what might be awful kind to remain blinded to.

Finally, "there are no free lunches," and my speculations have cost me as a person. Lovecraft the H.P., not an admirable writer or character, was however right in remarking that if you'd like to be content, then knowledge is the wrong thing to seek. That isn't the same as saying, "ignorance is bliss." Ignorance is often quite painful for everybody. Please submit a query to reality. The problem is that we enter a Labyrinth of our own crenelations, and things get a bit whoozy. People can experience psychosis from reading intense writing or seeing intense art - normal psychologies - and the art need not be horrifying in character to produce such an effect.

The limits of our minds are our defenses against insanity, I would remark in character with Lovecraft the H.P., and though broadening the limits of our minds is valuable it is not a pleasantry, particularly past some invisible line. Think of the pain of a man who writes a play like Oedipus Rex, though he collected most of the material from older sources. (All writers respond to old "shtuff," there is no "new.") What happens as we broaden the limits of our very selves is that we transgress the cultural and psychological limits of the mind, and the result can be madness and death. That is actually real.

So at the base of a wonderful fruit tree coils a serpent with intentions for you that you had better watch out for, says our Western tradition. "Knowledge is good, and ignorance evil," - quite true in my mind - but snakes bite and constrict around even the most wonderful fruit trees, and have apparently been doing so since before we found out about genetic engineering or nuclear arms. So let us close with Paracelsus the physician, "the dosage makes the poison." That snakes bite comes with the knowledge, but snake venom may not only broaden and transgress inherent boundaries, in the right doses it may heal.

This ought to be said. None of my blogs are for young people. I may have made the wrong moves in life - I have at least made a collection of wrong moves - and yet - when you get to be 30 like me, even a Jeffersonian socialist begins to develop a sense of conservatism. People have kids. Kids need guidance. The resulting adults then make their own collection of crooked or correct moves.

I am constantly surprised at what they will put right on the bookshelf at the bookstore for anyone to buy - or at the library - just as an example. Just as we are all attracted to gothic and mature themes, so are your kids, and while learning Oedipus Rex at 17 in AP Literature is not wicked, but there needs to be a sense of support there in that teaching - and our culture provides little to none of such support. The theme of incest alone, which is central to the story - is a stunner to even an adult. The theme of incest is also a universal human theme.

People must have wailed with horror when this play was first performed. It is funny, but the gut-reaction of a 17-year-old to starting the Oedipus tragedy is - this guy is a numbnut! Quite true - no one but a madman or madwoman could admire the figure from the beginning of the play. Your kids are that smart! The problem is that the catharsis of the play shows our identity with this numbnut, and this is where your kids need help with such material.

We are mirrored - no matter how ethical our lives - in an incest, a cast-off, a patricide, and a despot, and we look away from our faces in the mirror. The reflection in the mirror betrays someone who isn't what we thought we were. Those are the Sphinx's riddles, and I suggest that when she howls off like a banshee - that you are warned - and not free of the Sphinx.

So - whether your religious tradition says that I am condemned utterly, or whether you are idiotically allured to mysteries with a passive disregard for reality, or whether you find some value in this blog - the blog and all of its cross-links - even a coming one about fundamental logical and philosophical principles - are meant for adults. I can do no more.

I made my own mistakes as a youth, not just as an adult. In the end, we all grow up with a great deal of abandonment on our hands - whether outright - or emotional. No one is perfect - I have never raised children - I could not because of mental and physical illness - and, "the best parent has no children."

I wish I could be a better model, but in the mirror is the man who exists, and not the man he thought he was. At least that man comes into view for me to some degree. I submit a query to reality. I shall return.