Ennui

I interestingly enough first came across this word during the times my friends and I would play the roleplaying game (RPG) Vampire: The Masquerade.  It was a trait a vampire possessed that essentially portrayed one as phenomenally bored with the passing of centuries of unlife.  Ennui, in game term, essentially left the character as one with an almost inhuman point of view, an annoyance with the ephemerality of the world around them, and a sense that, when one looks at it all, immortality isn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Why do I bring this up?

In a certain sense, I’m terribly bored with the way things are.  As a student of history (my university major) one realizes humans essentially just end up committing some mistakes (war, for one) over and over again.  The adage those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, rings true even in this day.  And well, it’s just so frickin’ boring.  Worse part is, these things have happened (and will probably continue to happen) in my life too.  Is it human nature to be perpetually stupid in that regard.  Is this the price for the blistering pace of progress?  That although we can innovate at frightening speed, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over in other areas?

Such an existence is marked by a lack of… I don’t know… discernment?  consciousness? honesty?  Or maybe life just moves so fast that we fall back on old patterns of behaviour when confronted with new situations.

I think some time to take stock and really see how I’ve been living my life.

world views

i’ve been doing a lot of these little tests. mainly to decompress. there are a lot of little adversities going on right now and it’s becoming an almost monumental struggle to prevent things from blowing up into a full-on “emo fest”–which is never pretty.

Your World View

You are a happy, well-balanced person who likes people and is liked by others. You question whether many conventional views on morality are valid under all circumstances. You are essentially a content person. Sometimes, you consider yourself a little superior. You are moral by your own standards. You believe that morality is what best suits the occasion.

What Is Your World View?

world views are nice. they’re part of what allows you to deal with the many situations of life. if your life was an operating system… you can say that your identity is the kernel. you’ve got to have at least this for the OS to work properly. the thing is, a lot of us haven’t quite gotten to looking at their kernels yet. some people just get store-bought copy of windows and deal with that, crashes and all. this is what happens when you really don’t give life much thought and follow what the establishment, life’s Microsoft, prescribes.

the establishment are your parents, your religion, your school, society, the job market. depending on the circumstances of your life, you could either be running on bare-bones Windows 3.11 or are tooling on Vista, assisted by all the “resources” the “establishment” makes available to you. or you could still be stuck on Windows Me. (hahahah!) either way, you’re floating around with everyone else, happy an insulated in your little lives, as little cogs in the great machine, pieces of a overwhelming, but comfortable blanket of conformity. sounds nice, right? only if your running on XP SP2 or Vista. you can get by on 2000 SP4, NT, or even 98 SE, everything is stable… but it’s obvious your missing out. you’re still better off than the Windows Me people though… hahahah! you can upgrade your OS, after all the establishment wants you to… but that will cost you. and when you upgrade an installation, you’re often left with a lot of garbage from your previous OS… which eventually piles up and clogs things up, especially if you don’t have too much resources.

such is life when you don’t get involved in its details. and when things go wrong, you end up blaming the establishment for creating the circumstances of your life. the thing is, you had the OS installed.

i want my life to be like Linux. i want to be responsible for every module in it, even if it means i may have to recompile every so often.

i also want to define my own world view (yup, the entire piece is a bit circular but i was gonna get to this.), meaning i want a choice of which X server to implement. i want to see the world the way i want to.

i want to define my environment. the interface i have with the world and how the world interacts with me.

it’s a lot harder than getting your OS, your life, “installed” for you. but darn it, it’s worth all the effort.

the world shell

i watched the first episode of the series shoujo kakumei utena quite a while ago, and one bit of it still sticks out. the anime itself is interesting enough; swords and secret societies, arcane powers, rituals, but there was something more to it… anyway, on to that little bit. it is the oath of the Ohtori Academy Student Council, a group of remarkable kids in the school the anime is set in, and the main “secret society” in the series:

if the egg’s shell does not break, the chick will die without being born. we are the chick; the egg is the world. if the world’s shell does not break, we will die without being born. break the world’s shell! for the sake of revolutionizing the world!

this is a paraphrasing of a passage from the Herman Hesse novel Demian, which goes:

the bird struggles out of the egg. the egg is the world. whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. that God’s name is Abraxas.

life from death; creation from the ashes of destruction. rising… like a phoenix from its own carcass. but one must want to rise.

the world shell… it is the barrier that seperates you from yourself. i speak of seperation in terms of your unwillingness to accept the full majesty and greatness of who you really are. we all have our world shells. and they are our prejudices, our preconceptions. our defence mechanisms, our preferences, the way we speak, we act. the people we hang out with the way we look. all of this… materiality. this is our world shell.

when a chick is young, he needs the shell to survive; after all, there really is nothing wrong with sanity and conformity, is there? it is a safe path, and keeps us free from the “big bad world” out there.

the thing is, many people stay in their world shell. it’s not that they lack the strength to break free. it’s that they don’t want to. and they die, without ever being born.

fortunately life is intrinsically kind (although it’s very hard to feel that sometimes) and allows us to stay in the world shell as long as we want, how ever many lifetimes it takes us. time is meaningless to life, even though we may not see it as such.

then, something happens to the chick, the fledgling phoenix. it realizes that the world shell is not a cozy home, but a dark prison. and it attempts to tear out of this prison. how fast and how strongly it does so is wholly dependent on the chick, but every chick goes through this. the world shell is not home, it keeps us from it. so the young phoenix tears at the shell, clawing and fighting, exhausting great energy, struggling for a few lifetimes.

there are moments of great victory, where the young bird vigorously tears through the world shell and experiences that part of himself that is simultaneously him and not him, all and nothing… only to lose steam and crash… right back into the shell that envelops him in its layers of comfortable illusions. sometimes, in those singular moments when he doesn’t pay attention, he slides through the world shell and looks at the greatness of all that is… only to wake up, more confused than ever before.

and then, it realizes… that the shell, the struggle… don’t exist. not that it wasn’t totally real to the phoenix as it was going through it, but at the end of it all… but now that it has experienced struggle, now that it has traversed the heights and depths of the experience… it is over. and he looks at the world shell and it dissipates. he floats into the endless… and catches a glimpse of the self that is not the self. and flies away.

finally born.

truly alive.

The Rut

yup. i seem to be stuck in one. in fact, there seems to be quite a lot of my current behaviour that seems to just repeat itself, over and over, like a bad CD you’ve lost the heart to stop.

how does a rut get started? many ways i suppose. a chisel can slice a groove in a block of wood. a drop of water can wear away at limestone. but there had to be that initiating event, that first violence that tears through a formerly pristine surface, over and over. eventually, the depression that forms becomes part of the surface, smoothed by the endless repitition of the pattern, becoming indistinguishable from the surface it had once damaged… and yet the fact remains that this rut has scarred you, has taken a part of you, leaving you a little less than what you were.

what’s my rut? shiro has hopes about himself. he works, and hopes some more. he screws up… right around the time he sees other people succeed.. oftentimes at the very thing he has failed at doing. he curses at the inequity of the universe. and despairs at his inability (while staring at his corpulent form with sadness and loathing). he holds the other (whether or not they know or care) with extreme dislike and attributes all their successes to circumstance and inherited advantage. but mostly he indulges in self-flagellation. until something else catches his eye… and causes him to hope again…

i am honestly sick of this rut. and all of my other sources of stupid behaviour.

if anyone can tell me how to get out of this, i’d gladly listen.